Gabriel Martinelli: Brazil’s half-open door between brilliance and bewilderment

There are footballers who answer questions. Gabriel Martinelli, with the air of a man being chased by both destiny and his own first touch, prefers to multiply them.

For Arsenal supporters, he has become less a winger than a weekly philosophical exercise. Is he finished? Is he misunderstood? Is he a left winger, a right winger, a striker, an impact substitute, a confidence player, a chaos merchant, a victim of systems, or simply one of those footballing riddles that refuses to sit still long enough to be solved?

Then, just as the jury begins sharpening its knives, he appears from the fog.

Against Japan at the World Cup, Brazil were wobbling like a chandelier in an earthquake. Japan had led, Brazil had huffed, Carlo Ancelotti had shuffled the deck, and the game seemed to be drifting toward the kind of national post-mortem that comes with dramatic music and angry studio panels. Then Bruno Guimaraes slipped the ball through, Martinelli arrived off the bench, and in the 95th minute he poked Brazil into the next round. It was the decisive act in Brazil’s comeback, after Casemiro had cancelled out Kaishu Sano’s opener.

There it was again: the Martinelli paradox, glowing in stoppage time.

At Arsenal, the case for the prosecution is not flimsy. In the Premier League last season, Martinelli scored just once and assisted four times in 30 games, numbers that look less like the output of a title-winning winger and more like the receipt from a disappointing restaurant. Yet in the Champions League, he was a different animal: six goals and two assists in 14 matches, before his influence faded in the deepest rounds.

That is the trouble with Martinelli. Every conclusion comes with an asterisk. He can look blunt for weeks, running into cul-de-sacs like a tourist ignoring Google Maps, then suddenly produce the sort of vertical, hungry, slightly feral movement that reminds you why Arsenal once saw him as raw electricity in human form.

The left wing was supposed to be his kingdom. Instead, it has become a court case. Leandro Trossard, older, calmer and more efficient, keeps wandering into the debate with the smugness of a man who knows where the spare key is hidden. Trossard’s overall numbers are stronger – eight goals and 11 assists in 50 matches. Still, the Belgian has his own doubters and he could be on the move away from Arsenal.

And yet Martinelli is 25, not 31. He is not an old problem; he is an unfinished sentence.

Perhaps he is better as a substitute. That is the seductive theory after Brazil-Japan. Some players are chefs; others are fire alarms. Martinelli, unleashed against tired legs, can turn a defensive line into a row of frightened curtains. When the match has lost its shape, when midfielders are breathing through their ears, when full-backs begin negotiating with their hamstrings, Martinelli’s straight-line violence becomes less predictable and more fatal.

But reduce him to a bench weapon and you risk mistaking the spark for the engine. At his best, he does not merely finish games; he stretches them from the start. He pins full-backs, opens lanes, presses like a wasp trapped in a jar, and gives Arsenal a kind of north-south thrust they can otherwise lack when their possession becomes too decorative. The question is whether that best version can still be summoned regularly, or whether he now needs the emotional theatre of rescue missions to feel fully alive.

Injuries and rhythm have not helped. Martinelli is a player of repetition. He needs combinations, trust, the little invisible agreements between winger, left-back and midfielder. Take those away and he looks lost. Arsenal’s evolving left side has not always given him the same stable ecosystem that Bukayo Saka has enjoyed on the right. That does not absolve him; elite players must adapt. But it explains why he frequently splutters.

And this is why the transfer rumours refuse to die. Bayern Munich have been linked with him, PSG have been mentioned, and Transfermarkt lists his Arsenal contract as running to June 2027, with a market value of €45m as of June 2026. In pure business terms, he is the kind of player who tempts both buyer and seller: young enough to excite, inconsistent enough to question, valuable enough to fund the next idea.

That World Cup goal, then, was not a final answer. It was a flare fired into a dark forest.

Maybe it reminded Arsenal that potential still lives in Martinelli, hiding somewhere between the shoulder of the last defender and the panic of the 95th minute. Maybe it merely improved his price. Maybe he is the player you keep because selling him would feel like throwing away a lottery ticket before the numbers are read. Maybe he is the player you sell because Arsenal can no longer build title ambitions around “maybe”.

Martinelli remains football’s half-open door. Through it, you can see both a future star and a cautionary tale.

And just when you decide which one he is, he sprints through the gap and changes the story again.