Just before the Ousmane Dembélé file, the FC Barcelona transfer window was also agitated. Looking in all directions for a sentry capable of replacing Sergio Busquets, the culé club finally got their hands on Oriol Romeu. Before that, the Catalans got their hands on Ilkay Gundogan and finally managed to land Vitor Roque after weeks of negotiations with the player’s relatives and Athletico Paranaense. Announced nugget of Brazilian football, the 18-year-old striker will only join the Catalan club at the start of the 2024-2025 season when the Barcelona leaders broke their piggy bank to recruit him despite the financial setbacks of the Catalan institution.
André Cury promises a great future for Vitor Roque and knocks out Endrick
In the meantime, Barça will be able to observe the exploits of his prodigy on the other side of the Atlantic in the Furacao jersey while since the start of the season in 2023, he already has 22 goals and 6 assists in all competitions. In the meantime, the Spanish press, and more particularly AS, decided to delve behind the scenes of this transfer. And the man behind this arrival is none other than André Cury. His name surely means nothing to you, but the Brazilian businessman is behind the arrivals of Ronaldinho, Neymar, Vinicius or even Rodrygo at the two top names in La Liga: FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Questioned by the Iberian media, the 52-year-old man sees big for the one who is nicknamed El Tigrinho: “I’ve worked with him since he was six or seven years old. He was still working at Barcelona, he was talking to the club. (…) I was sure it was going to happen because he is a different player. He’s a go-getter, wherever he is. You put him there, in any club, with a contract and he will do things. It is spectacular. A great player, a great player. He is very reminiscent of Ronaldo Nazario in terms of power. He is having a very good season. He stayed 40 days with the Sudamericano. If you count the goals for the South American U-20s with everyone else, I think he scored 22 goals, provided 10 assists, got five penalties and participated in the goals for the club in all matches. The team he plays in is not Palmeiras or Flamengo, who are more attacking. It’s a mid-table team. I think Brazil’s “9” will be Vitor Roque. There is no other, because it is of a very high standard. I didn’t understand how, in the last call-up, he didn’t make it, especially here, when they played in Barcelona and Lisbon. (…) Economically, the operation is very similar to that of Endrick. His is something like 35 fixed + 25 variable and Vitor’s is 30 or 40 fixed plus 31 variable. The sale of Vitor is the best sale in the history of Brazilian football.»
Very complimentary to the future Barcelona, Cury is much less so when it comes to evoking Endrick. For the intermediary based in Sao Paulo, the prodigy recruited by Real Madrid will never go as far as Vitor Roque, more “resourceful” in his opinion: “Endrick is a great player, but he had many installations because he played in Palmeiras, which is a very great team. (…) It’s a comparison. I think if Vitor played at Palmeiras he could score twice as many goals because there the ball goes to the striker all the time. If you look at Endrick’s goals, I don’t know at the moment, but of the eight or nine goals he’s scored in his career, seven have come from inside the small box and from a rebound. »
The incredible revelations about the arrivals of Vinicius and Rodrygo in Madrid
A few years ago, in 2018, Cury was also involved in Vinicius’ arrival at Real Madrid. Asked by AS about this arrival, Cury does not hesitate to affirm that Real Madrid did not even know the left winger when recruiting him. They : “Real Madrid didn’t know Vinicius when they signed him. They didn’t even know who he was. He signed him up because they knew the family was in Barcelona and they called him from Friday to Sunday. An Atlético de Madrid were playing against Real Madrid on Saturday and they invited him there. The agents were like my brothers. Madrid didn’t even know the player!»
Worse, he evokes a betrayal by one of his relatives who thwarted the transfer of Vinicius to Barça to finally sign him on the side of the Iberian capital: “The one who spoke for Madrid that Vinicius was here and he could reach Barcelona was Wagner Ribeiro. He called and notified Madrid. That’s why they also signed Rodrygo. Wagner and Vinicius came to change the market. They arrived by paying 45 million euros for a player who has never played in the first team, giving him more than three million net wages, three million bonuses, it’s crazy. Later, when I was working in Barcelona, we went to get Rodrygo when no one knew him, but he knew he was great. I said to my boss at the time, Pepe Segura: “Pepe, don’t worry. I have a better player than this (Vinicius)”. My boss was very attached to Vinicius because we had been following him for three and a half years at the time, since 2014.»
Obviously a fan of Rodrygo, the 52-year-old players’ agent thinks that the latter is better than Vinicius and that he could do much better than his attacking partner if the Merengues gave him the means: “However, Rodrygo is much better than Vinicius. If you give Rodrygo the minutes and lead role of Vinicius, he’ll give you a lot more, that’s for sure. Above, Rodrygo is not playing. He plays a little here, a little there, and how many goals did he score last year? Some and very important too. I think there were 19 goals for him and 23 for Vinicius. Vinicius has a lot more peace of mind to play, he knows it will be him plus ten. Rodrygo no, he comes in, he goes out, he doesn’t come in…»
Cury also spoke about the situations of Mbappé and Neymar at PSG
Apart from Ronaldinho in 2003, André Cury also landed Neymar in Catalonia ten years later. In love with the player, he was also questioned about the moods of “Ney” at PSG and thinks he knows that the player has only one desire: to leave the capital club. An operation that remains complicated given the salary claims of the former Santos: “If he regrets having joined PSG? Yes. I can’t speak for him right now, but yeah. Look at the current turmoil. There is not a day of peace or joy. Yes, he can leave. If there is an offer, yes. The problem today, economically, is that all the clubs still have problems because of the pandemic. Neymar earns a lot of money and I don’t know if there will be a club that can pay him. To leave, he must lower his salary. Today, I don’t see anyone who can pay him what he earns, only clubs in Saudi Arabia. Today, the Barcelona option is unfeasible because they can’t afford it. He asks for 50 kilos net, how does he manage to pay? It’s as if I offered you a plane, but you couldn’t pay the pilot, the crew, the fuel… It’s a bit like that.
While Neymar is no longer the headliner of PSG for a long time, it was Kylian Mbappé who had taken up the torch in recent years. However, for the past few weeks, the towel has been burning between the club from the capital and the Bondynois, suspected of having already negotiated his arrival in Madrid in 2024. While he has been invited to leave the club since the beginning of the month and following his refusal to extend for an additional year, Mbappé will leave this summer or next year. While this is an open secret for everyone, Cury takes the side of KM7 in this dispute and believes that he must find a club with a bigger profile:He’s a great player. He will leave the team. He will leave because this year, when PSG were eliminated from the Champions League in the round of 16, Mbappé had an incredible World Cup with four goals in the final. Three months after the World Cup, we no longer talked about Mbappé because French football is not good enough for a player of this stature. Players like Neymar, Mbappé or Messi cannot play there. This is where the player disappears. One person talked about Vincius more around the world than Mbappé and he scored many more goals and had a spectacular World Cup. When you leave the Champions League, you are no longer in the media. He understood it and he is not going to stay in Paris.»
