Brazil is famous for its traditional youth football tournament, the São Paulo Junior Cup, which is broadcast annually by Universal Television, Brazil's largest television agency, and the stadium has a great atmosphere and a lot of people.
This is the big stage for Brazil's future football talents to show their talents. It was in this cup that 15-year-old Neymar made his debut for Santos.
In January 2019, Francis Caggigao arrived from Europe, and the arsenal club's chief international scout at the time had a clear goal: he was going to observe a teenager named Gabriel Martinelli on the spot.
And he has to move quickly.
As an Arsenal scout, Kajigaard worked for the club for 23 years, until the beginning of the epidemic, when arsenal clubs were heavily laid off, and Kajigao was forced to leave. He received a copy from the club's Brazilian scout Everton Berger in 2018. The scouting report from Gushiken was not too much praise for the teenager Martinelli, but the content was sufficiently detailed. And Everton reported that from 2015 to 2017, Martinelli had trained at Manchester United four times.
Kargie's interest rises sharply, demanding that Everton deepen his observation. Later Everton found that 16-year-old Martinelli, in terms of affiliation, belonged to Club Ituano in Brazil's fourth division.
Martinelli first played in the prestigious Corinthian Academy, scoring 73 goals in 139 youth games. The reason for joining Ituiano was because his father, who worked as a molder in a steel factory, retired and the family moved to Itu, a small town not far from São Paulo Airport. Martinelli's talent, especially his ability to play in the three positions in the front, has long been discovered by a pair of agent brothers John Turmin and Rafa Turmin, which is why he has a trial at Manchester United.
Caggigao asked Everton to try it out and see if he could arrange for Martinelli to come to Arsenal for a trial, but in the world of Brazilian agents, news spread too quickly. Arsenal's side has not yet been arranged, Barca started first, through the Ituano club, arranged martinelli to barca for 10 days of trial training.
As a result of this trial, Barça's assessment score is not high, "ordinary".
Fast forward to early 2019, martinelli has already made his debut at the Paulista State Championship, and Kaggigao understands that time is pressing and he must rush to the scene to see for himself how the junior striker is doing. So in the Junior Cup in São Paulo, he witnessed Martinelli's full offensive performance in the group stage: goals straight behind the defender, headers, close-range shots and so on. As soon as the match ended, on January 21, 2019, Martinelli made his debut in the Brazilian league and also performed well.
Kajigao's vigilance has risen dramatically.
He came to Brazil again, watched Martinelli's live match again, and then asked Everton and another scout, Jonathan Vidal, to be on the scene to watch every Ituano game. At the same time, Cagigao quickly contacted Arsenal's football director Raul Sanrey, begging Sanrey to make sure to book an exclusive contract. Such contracts are difficult to sign because the identities of Brazilian players are often complex, like Martinelli's 50% ownership at the time, which belonged to a marketing company called Trappic, in addition to various agents, brokers and club managers, entangled in Martinelli's ownership.
Although Sanrey's performance at Arsenal was mixed, the acquisition of Martinelli fully demonstrated his ability to dance with long sleeves and be good at complex contract operations.
Through mediation, Sanrey won a month of "exclusive buffer period", a month after Martinelli's 18th birthday on 18 June 2019, arsenal will exclusively have the exclusive option of signing him for £5 million.
The subsequent work involved a lot of due diligence within the club, the repeated communication between Arsenal's British scout Clark, scouting director Mike Delmote, and the head of youth talent recruitment at the time, Morrow, etc., constantly comparing Martinelli and Arsenal's own youth training system related talents, and relevant talents locked in the UK and Europe. The department of video technical analysis also gave a report on all-round analysis of data.
The result of all communication points very clearly: talent is rare and opportunities cannot be missed. So Kaggigh came to São Paulo for the third time in two and a half months for Martinelli, watched Martinelli play two games, and then entered the final step: face-to-face communication, to finally understand and grasp the character of this young player.
The time of this meeting with Martinelli and his son was preset to be one hour, and eventually lasted two hours. Karggio greatly appreciated Martin Jr.'s humble character, as well as his working-class family background.
This was followed by the sanrei operation to complete the workflow of the transfer acquisition.
When Martinelli scored a long run against Chelsea in January 2020, becoming the first U20 Arsenal player since Anelka to score 10 goals in a single season, Fabregas tweeted: "Francis Caggigo scored again, legend!" ”
Fabregas and Bellerin were both young talents recruited by Caggiao from Barca's youth system. Finding Martinelli is more difficult than finding talent from La Masia, relying on the traditional scouting system, requiring naked eye observation, and manual notes, because Brazil's fourth division cannot have sufficient data to provide objective evidence. In large part, Martinelli was able to become an Arsenal player, not a Manchester United or Barca player, thanks to a global scouting system built by Wenger, Dick Lowe and former Arsenal scouting director Steve Laurie – in 2001, Wenger and Laurie had already begun to deploy in South America, and Gilberto Silva and Edu were the earliest results of this system.
In 2020, Caggiao left Arsenal, he served the club for 23 years, and it was also the club he played for as a player as a teenager, and his work was related to such a long list of names: Lauren, Fabregas, Van Persie, Reyes, Cazorla, Monrier, Arteta, Martinez, Sanchez, Bella, Bellerin, Sarriba, Martinelli...
Today's Kagigo, the director of football of the Chilean Football Association, in the past two years, the national team's main force is seriously aging, Chile, from the Championship Blackburn to dig out a striker named Ben Breriton, born in 1999. Breriton quickly changed his full name to Benjamin Antoni Breriton Díaz, who was already the new favorite of Chilean football.