Vitor Roque at Barcelona: What’s gone wrong with €30m striker they rushed to sign?

This had to be Vitor Roque’s summer at Barcelona.

Half a year on from his arrival at the club, the 19-year-old was set to face this pre-season as a fresh start. It was a chance to put last season’s struggles behind him, to reset and benefit from preparation time under new management. With Robert Lewandowski joining the team later after featuring at the European Championship, there would also be new opportunities to impress up front.

Former Barca manager Xavi had doubts over Roque’s quality, but he is now out of the picture. Just a month into the Hansi Flick project, however, not much has improved for Brazilian teenager — a player signed in a deal that will cost at least €30million (£25.5m, $32.5m), with potential add-ons worth up to a further €31m.

Barca are just one game into their pre-season tour of the United States — a 2-2 draw against Manchester City that ended with the Spanish side winning a penalty shootout. Roque played 45 minutes in that game, touching the ball 17 times, completing zero passes from three attempts and losing possession nine times — the most by any Barcelona player.

A week earlier, Roque started as a central striker in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Spanish fourth-tier side UE Olot. Sources present at the game — who, like all those cited here preferred to speak anonymously to protect their position — told The Athletic Roque struggled to make an impact there, too.

Against City, Flick used Roque on the left of the attack before substituting him at half-time. Instead, 22-year-old former reserve team striker Pau Victor was given an extended chance to lead the line, and he starred by scoring one goal and playing a big role in the creation of another.

Victor was permanently signed for €3million earlier this summer from Girona after scoring 20 goals and providing six assists on loan last season with Barcelona Atletic (the club’s second team that plays in Spain’s third tier). According to well-placed sources at Barca, he is currently ahead of Roque in Flick’s pecking order.

Barca fans might well be asking: what has happened to the wonderkid Roque was tipped to be when his signing was secured a year ago? We’ll try to provide an answer here.

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Let’s look back for a start. In July 2023, Barcelona announced an agreement to sign then-18-year-old Athletico Paranaense striker. The Catalans were paying a €30million fixed fee, plus €31m more in potential add-ons, while deciding to leave him on loan in Brazil for the remainder of the season. The initial plan was for him to join Barca this summer, but that was accelerated via an option they retained to bring him over in January 2024.

The signing was agreed with former sporting director Mateu Alemany still in that role, but Deco can’t be dissociated from the deal at all. When Barcelona started monitoring Roque, Deco was their main advisor in the Brazilian market and he informed their decision to buy him.

From a stats perspective, every scout in the world had reasons to be impressed with Roque back then. Over 2023 in Brazil, he scored 21 goals and provided eight assists in 45 games for Athletico Paranaense. The previous year, aged 17, he scored 14 times and made five assists — which included some games with second-tier Cruzeiro.

Barcelona have a recent history of missing out on Brazilian wonderkids. The list includes Vinicius Junior and Rodrygo, but the latest example was Endrick, who signed a deal to join his compatriots at Real Madrid in December 2022, when he was 16 (he has just arrived at the Bernabeu club, having turned 18 in July, and has featured on tour in the United States).

Roque’s signing was seen by some at Barca as a great chance to make amends. He and Endrick were seen as potential future rivals for the Brazil No 9 shirt, so they decided to go for him, even with their financial struggles.

That plan for Roque to join in summer 2024 didn’t take long to change, though. Barcelona reached the halfway point of last season with a concerning lack of options. Pedri, Frenkie de Jong and Gavi had suffered injuries. Oriol Romeu was performing below expectations and the team’s attackers were struggling to find goals.

Xavi met with Deco to find out whether there was any chance of bringing in reinforcements in the January transfer window. Ideally, the manager would have liked a new midfielder, but Barcelona were not in a position to make new signings. Then Deco told Xavi about the possibility of bringing forward Roque’s arrival.

Xavi had not been fully involved in Roque’s signing, but he had started to lose faith with the team’s main striker Robert Lewandowski. The idea of having a new option, somebody who could also bring some pressure on the Poland striker, was not seen with a bad pair of eyes. Xavi sanctioned the move.

This was also seen as a positive step that might help ease Roque’s adaptation to a new life, a new language, and a new level of football. Roque was very excited by the prospect. He landed in Barcelona in December 2023, receiving the full star treatment from the club’s social media channels, and being clearly labelled as Barcelona’s No 9 for the upcoming generation.

Among all the smiles and fireworks, though, this is where problems started.

What happened on the pitch contrasted significantly with the image that had been sold to fans. In the second half of last season, Roque played 353 minutes for Barcelona across 14 games. He scored two goals in La Liga off the bench, but Xavi could not find reasons to trust Roque, who seriously struggled on the ball and with his link-up play.

Sources from the coaching staff admitted back then that the teenager was having a difficult time understanding the dynamics of Barca’s game. This view was shared by a broad range of dressing-room sources who had witnessed him in training. They said he struggled to keep up with the team’s rhythm and with the technical side especially, a crucial feature of Barcelona’s style.

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This, in part, was far from Roque’s fault. That was the striker he had always been; a physical player who managed to make his way to the top through resilience and goalscoring instinct. A forward who had his best moments in the opposition’s box, but one you would never highlight for his all-round game or combinations with team-mates.

Xavi’s backroom staff thought the best outcome for Roque was for him to leave on loan to gain some experience. This came like a dagger to the Brazilian’s confidence. Those close to the player did not understand what they considered to be a ruthless judgment given the few opportunities Roque had been given.

The reality is that, at a critical time for the club, Barcelona had invested over €30million on a player which some senior figures at the club clearly did not know enough about — and then agreed to advance his arrival in Barcelona with a level of expectations that the player clearly could not cope with.

“We can’t understand why Vitor (Roque) has not been given more minutes,” said the player’s agent Andre Cury, speaking to Catalan media in May. “It’s a detrimental situation for all sides. The kid needs to work hard and wait, but there have been many games where he could have had those minutes and the manager decided not to (play him).

“In Barcelona, the press has such an influence and they say lies. In two months, they create a problem and suddenly people want to kill Vitor Roque and not help him out. We chose to play for Barca because he wanted to, and I think he still can be a great player.”

Tellingly, Cury also added this, seemingly ruling out any possibility of a loan spell: “If Barcelona do not let him develop… we will need to find a solution. (But) if Vitor Roque has to leave Barcelona, he will have to be sold.”

Three months on, Roque’s situation has only changed for the worse. Roque is currently unregistered with La Liga — he was only registered last term as a replacement for the injured Gavi. To be able to register him for this season, Barca need to bring themselves in line with the competition body’s salary spending rules, and their current financial situation means they may struggle to do that.

There are still two more games left in Barca’s U.S. preseason. On Saturday evening in New Jersey (7pm ET), they will be playing Real Madrid. Then they face AC Milan.

But the arrival of Flick and a new start for everyone at Barcelona has so far not produced the turning point Roque needs, and there are fewer people now who believe he will find it in the near future.

(Top photo: Mateo Villalba/Getty Images)