Vinicius Jr has confirmed frequent contact with Dominik Szoboszlai at a moment when speculation about the Hungarian midfielder and Real Madrid has intensified. The Real Madrid forward mischievously revealed he speaks \u201ca lot\u201d with Szoboszlai and joked that the midfielder was among players who had messaged him in the hope of wearing his personal line of Nike boots.<\/p>\n
Szoboszlai has publicly engaged with Vinicius on social media, praising his stance against discrimination in La Liga and, earlier this season, mimicking Vinicius Jr\u2019s signature goal celebration. Those gestures have taken on extra weight given transfer talk surrounding the 25-year-old.<\/p>\n
Links to Real Madrid have followed Szoboszlai throughout the season, helped by an unresolved Liverpool contract. On the same weekend Vinicius\u2019s interview ran, Szoboszlai\u2019s international coach, Marco Rossi, said the midfielder\u2019s \u201cone dream\u201d in football has always been to play for Real Madrid.<\/p>\n
Vinicius also described his history of nudging players toward Madrid, revealing he reached out to Jude Bellingham and Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 before the pair signed and joking that he has \u201cacted as [their] agent.\u201d He underlined the breadth of his contacts in the game: \u201cPaquet\u00e1 is my best friend in football,\u201d Vinicius Jr revealed. \u201cRaphinha in Barcelona, Savinho, and Reinier in Brazil, who\u2019s played here too. We Brazilians are almost always together off the field, but from other teams who aren\u2019t Brazilian, Reece James\u2014I\u2019m very good friends with him. Rafael Le\u00e3o, I have quite a few friends outside.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the intrigue, the financial reality makes a move appear unlikely. The 25-year-old remains under contract until 2028 and has been lauded by his manager and teammates as one of the best in the world.<\/p>\n
Tactically, Szoboszlai would offer a different profile to recent No. 8s at Real Madrid. He would not supply the composure in possession that the team lost with Toni Kroos\u2019s retirement yet could represent an upgrade on the current No. 8. Federico Valverde, when at his best, can match Szoboszlai\u2019s physicality, but Valverde\u2019s form this season has been inconsistent. Saturday\u2019s 4\u20131 win over Real Sociedad produced his strongest display of the campaign amid a generally testing individual season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vinicius says he speaks a lot with Szoboszlai as transfer links to Real Madrid intensify this weekend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[987,1163],"tags":[983,1471,1033],"class_list":["post-6914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-real-madrid","category-transfers","tag-agents","tag-all-red-all-equal","tag-brazilian-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}