The current edition of France Football magazine has a photo of Viktor Gyökeres on the cover. Not that I’ve looked at it much, or pored over its details searching for meaning, but the photo shows Gyökeres half in shade, half in sun, displaying his famously shredded physique, not so much the standard male musculature, more a selection of lines and bulges, like he’s made entirely from giant walnuts, like a perfect human challah loaf designed by a robot.
In the photo Gyökeres is smiling with a kind of fervour, as though he’s about to sell you a miracle muscle powder. And I for one would buy this powder. Make me into a cyborg, Viktor. Maximise my hidden hyper-potential. Basically, I want Viktor Gyökeres to hold me brusquely in his arms while he talks about good proteins and explains the blockchain, in a way that isn’t sexual. Not for me anyway, but that definitely is for him.
There is also, and you’ve probably seen this – I for one have barely noticed it – a breathlessly excited Viktor Gyökeres profile in the June/July issue of Vogue Scandinavia, which has him posing by his pool in biscuit-coloured linens looking like an incredibly handsome psychopath. And yes, the profile talks about “piercing eyes” and “muscles stretching away at his white T-shirt”, but it’s not salacious or cheap because Gyökeres is also “a complex and multifaceted individual”, whose PlayStation-pad football house is in fact alluring, soulful and “a byproduct of transience”. Yes Viktor Gyökeres. Let me rescue you. I will make you a home. I will bake for you.
To what extent does a thing still have to happen for it to be classed as real? This feels like a key question right now, not just in football, where everything is simultaneously happening and has already happened, but in life generally, the final battle between the fake and the real, a question that must be broken down into ever more granular questions. What is “real”? What is “happening”? What is “Viktor Gyökeres”?
Despite the evidence above of rigorous journalistic research, I don’t really know much about Gyökeres beyond the stuff everyone knows. I have no great interest in whether he signs for Arsenal or not until he actually does, at which point he will become just another guy in an ever-shifting cast of guys, something real that now has to actually happen. Reality can wait, though. We aren’t there yet. We are instead still drifting along in the endless summer of Gyökeres, witnesses to a yearning that feels like art, and that is in many ways better than actual football.
We know this process now. It is necessary to fight it every summer. Don’t get sucked in. Look away from the churn. This one, however, feels like a step up. It has been two months of hive-mind longing over on GyökeresHereWeGoX, a place where details, comments, images bubble up and surge, overwhelm the senses, then disappear like summer storms.
This seemed to have peaked on Thursday with EXCLUSIVE news that there would that same day be an EXCLUSIVE prefiguring the actual EXCLUSIVE, a here we go for the here we go for the here we actually go. Footage appeared of a house (is it a house?) that allegedly shows Gyökeres (is it him?) moving out his furniture (is it furniture?). Later, there was talk of a plane leaving Stockholm bound for Biggin Hill airport, complete with detailed flightpath screenshots, which was then rubbished by a secondary cohort of Biggin Hill truthers. Wait! His brother has followed Arsenal on Instagram! A medical is booked for Friday, even if there is no evidence of this, just talk about talk of a presumed medical on a hypothetical Friday.
This has become a little over-ripe by now, a descent into 450-word long posts about the stock exchange, financial gaming and announcement-delay. Gyökeres himself has long since become more meme than man. Is it a joke? Is this all post-irony? If a plane takes off and nobody knows if Victor Gyökeres is on it, but excitement at the idea Victor Gyökeres may be on it feels real, is Victor Gyökeres actually inside the plane?.
It would be easy here to dismiss this phenomenon, to see evidence of the idiot-trajectory of the human race, of content addiction, of the fact big Euro-football must never not be happening. But this is also a supremely well‑curated media industry now, fed by the great transfluencers of our time, Fab, Orny, the other ones.
It is also a kind of mass social experiment. Psychologists like to talk about the Anticipation Effect, the principle that anticipation of an event can release more dopamine to the brain than the actual experience. Having Gyökeres in your team is good. Talking about Gyökeres, visualising this, war-gaming it, making it real in the digital mind: this is a life choice, something to make your blood move, like jabbing a fork into your kneecap just so you get to feel something.
The emotions here are nuanced. Studies show anticipation also generates anxiety, to the extent it can overshadow the event itself, or make it feel like it has already happened. There are people out there who seem genuinely convinced Gyökeres is already not just a failure but a proven fraud.
I can recite by heart the ratio of Portuguese league goals against teams in the bottom four (43.6%). Never mind the fact this always happens because those teams are worse, or that Erling Haaland, for example, has built a career around stamping on ants. Or that I am being sucked in here in real time, arguing over things that haven’t happened but still kind of have, like the whole thing is a super-smart Andy Warhol installation called Goal Abs or Nothing Is True.
There are reasons why this one feels more significant. There are good human subplots. Can you make the leap up? Can a career that turned on a 17-goal season in the Championship become elite at this late stage? Gyökeres has been wrapped in a convincing origins story. There are Proustian elements, some talk in France Football of a sensory reconnection with the childhood lust for goals, the clank of the stanchion, the need to “start playing again like I did when I was a child”.
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Gyökeres is also perfect for the internet. He’s not into feelings. He’s into the body. We know about his magic super-breakfast, the ginger shot, the strawberries, blueberries and pomegranates, plus three – not two, not four – eggs. He seems to be pitching himself as real, analogue, anti-academy. Gyökeres says he stayed at IFK Aspudden-Tellus so long because “it built me differently from others”, and I for one can already hear him saying this on a seven-hour Joe Rogan podcast.
The spell at Brighton is dismissed as not “a good environment”. A return to the Premier League would be a chance for “revenge”. Arsenal host Graham Potter’s West Ham in October. We’re talking about revenge. We’re self third-personing (“You haven’t seen the best of Gyökeres yet”). Is he as good as Kane, Lewandowski, Haaland? “It’s difficult to rank me, but yes, I’m at the same table as them.” How could you not want to see this?
There are also two football things that make it interesting. First, this is the perfect what-if transfer. It’s beautifully linear. It’s 2+2. Saying Arsenal need a striker has gone on for so long it has become a kind of mass lament, a bardic cycle. The current candidates are Gabriel Jesus, an almost guy, and Kai Havertz who is good but also looks like the foppish minor cousin a Jane Austen heroine is required to fall in love with before the arrival of handsome, brooding Mr Lordly of Lord Hall.
Well, now you get to sign a 27-year-old goal-maniac whose nicknames are The Machine, The Cyborg, The Viking, The Cannibal and The Tractor. This is simply the thing you asked for, on a tray, ready to go. Here is a very good No 9 with zero reasons not to succeed, who will probably do so because a stage has been built, and because of the evidence of hard numbers, which are all that really matter in this dynamic. The other thing here is closure. If Gyökeres does sign for Arsenal this will inevitably become a referendum on the Mikel Arteta era, which has become mired in a very annoying discussion about actual success. Is second good? Is this progress?
Whatever you think of Arteta’s cinematic passion, the Lego figure on the heath pointing at the skies dynamic, it is undeniably real, undeniably a quest for victory. There will be a crunch point here. There have already been rumblings. The Thomas Partey saga was weird, unsavoury and remains a potential timebomb. Now you have your Martín Zubimendi. You have the muscle-goal athlete, the finisher. Addition and success. Or limitations pinned and wriggling on the wall.
For now we have the longest day, a here-we-go waiting to happen. Do I dare to scroll? Or can we linger a little longer, remain in that dream state, half in sun, half in shade, muscles perfectly sculpted, all promise, all what-next, before being dragged out into the light?