Robinio Vaz is 18 years old and has only played a few minutes as a professional, yet he has already scored 4 goals and 2 assists in Ligue 1. He averages a goal every 95 minutes and a conversion rate of 50% – that is: every two shots scores a goal. He is tall and wiry; it moves with predatory speed near the area. He kicks with violence and determination. It is called this in honor of Robinho, with whom his father was obsessed. It is perceived as a phenomenon. He arrived at Olympique Marseille in the summer of 2024 and after six games with the reserve team, in National 3, he had scored four goals. The coach said he had found a good player, who would grow after a year with them, but Vaz was immediately brought into the first team: he was off the charts.
With these credentials he is certainly not a player from whom a transfer to Serie A is expected. Robinio Vaz, on the other hand, will be a new player for Roma, who are taking him on loan with an obligation to buy for 25 million, including bonuses (OM also retains 10% on future resale). The club took advantage of his contractual situation. Vaz today earns one hundred thousand euros and the OM had offered him a renewal of 600,000. At Roma he will earn more, and OM will obtain a significant capital gain. Olympique Marseille bought him from Sochaux a year and a half ago for a refund of 400 thousand euros, taking advantage of the fact that Vaz had not yet signed a professional contract. A great intuition from Ali Zarraki, assistant to Mehdi Benatia, sporting director of the club.
In his second game Vaz earned a penalty against Strasbourg on one of his first touches. Then he missed a not very difficult goal, with a volley into the area. Despite the error, he was awarded man of the match on his debut. If, as some say, footballers should be judged by how they move their legs, look at Robinio Vaz’s legs. Watch them when they can unleash their speed in the open field.
In the last months, those in which his aura consolidated, the Velodrome trembled when he entered the field. The volume of the stadium rose with every touch of the ball. It is his style of play that produces this excitement. With his legs Robinio Vaz feels he can do everything, and so when he enters he tries to set the last meters on fire. He takes the ball, turns, aims for the goal, tries to overcome his direct opponent, tries complicated shots. He is not afraid to make mistakes and follow his instincts. The public adores him, even if the more prudent among OM fans today are happy with such a resounding capital gain for a player who, after all, had still demonstrated little.
Although having strong and fast legs should be the prerogative of any top-level player, for Robinio Vaz it looks a little different. His legs are spoken of as a paranormal phenomenon. José Alcocer, who coached him in the French youth national teams, said that Vaz “has incredible power in his legs and is capable of making a huge difference”. His Under 12 coach, Saidou Dia, says that for him it was like pressing a button and “it started on its own”. For De Zerbi, Vaz “burns the grass”.
Because of these legs, this ability to eat up the pitch, Robinio Vaz loves playing wing. He often asked his coaches to deploy him there. However, at 13 he was placed at center forward for the first time in Sochaux and, upon arriving at Olympique Marseille, it was Jean-Pierre Papin, the club’s technical consultant, who wanted him as center forward: «I already have the players on the side. What I’m missing is a profile that can take depth like this. He does it well, he creates gaps, he’s fast.” When he comes on during the match, and his legs are fresh, he creates panic. He is an accelerator of situations, someone who makes things happen. Even exaggerating, making mistakes, going out of proportion.
Vaz is an intense player, who runs fast, is strong in the tackle and is often quicker than the others. Through this crazy intensity he manages to play even within his limits: a first control that isn’t always clean, a somewhat poor sensitivity of the foot, a use of the body that isn’t exactly like a striker. He would like to play more as a winger, perhaps also to hide these defects, but his coaches are insisting on making him play forward to get him out of his comfort zone, and also because his tension towards goal must be exploited in positions where he doesn’t have to think so much about associating with his teammates and building the game.
Thrown deep into the sometimes generous spaces of Ligue 1, Vaz is a fury. He is one of that kind of attackers who when they pick up speed the defenders have to cross themselves.
He has been compared to Osimhen but still has neither his physical power nor his presence in the penalty area. But if there is something in which he resembles Osimhen it is the ferocity with which he goes into duels, the desire to always create problems for defenders, creating a context of chaos, with shoulder strikes that are truly tiring to manage.
For Serie A’s man scorers, Vaz promises to become a problem. His former teammate, Kassim Abdallah, said this was his most impressive quality: “He pressed high, he lunged forward with his head, he won every ball… A hunger that is rarely seen, especially among young players.”
In Ligue 1, which sometimes features more physical defenders than those in Serie A, he has shown that he can handle duels even with the best players.
In his first minutes as a professional his charisma was impressive, which allowed him not to suffer in a rough environment like that of Marseille. According to Saidou Dia, he plays at the Velodrome like in tournaments in the suburbs.
However, his defensive application also stands out, the way he presses the opponent’s build-up but also makes generous recoveries backwards, even when winning the ball back is impossible. Just for the extra ride.
Like real centre-forwards, Vaz has few frills. He always looks for the fastest way to get to shooting, and when he shoots he does it with the instep, seeking the maximum possible power. He has the kind of natural kicking power that makes his legs even scarier.
In these first minutes played among professionals, however, something stands out that goes beyond what we can physically see, a powerful, threatening, incisive way of moving around the penalty area. One of his first coaches said of Vaz that “he has maximum instinctive skills in front of goal”. He is an instinctive player, capable of turning the field over in a second.
Robinio Vaz scored a goal that makes you dream at the end of October against Angers, in a match in which he scored two goals. He receives a pass on the edge of the area and appears to go towards it. The defender falls for it, while Vaz slides the ball to his right to bring it forward. Then he has another defender in front of him and moves the ball to the right. At that point he seems to have lost the moment. The preparation for the shot seems imprecise, the mirror narrows, but Vaz fires a right-footed shot to the near post through pure willpower.
José Alcocer, who coached him in the Under 17s, criticized him a bit. Probably to keep him from going to his head. He said he got a little distracted last season, on and off the field. On the pitch, maybe he makes a couple of good plays and loses sight of the team structure; outside he thought too much about haircuts (it’s not clear what he means, given that Robinio Vaz styles them rather simply. Maybe he doesn’t like the dances he does after goals?).
He is still very attached to his banlieue, Mantes-la-Jolie, a suburb north of Paris. After signing the contract with Olympique Marseille he took the usual photo with the shirt with the contract expiring, only that he had all his friends lined up behind him like in a trap video. He didn’t like school and his coaches at a certain point, when he was a kid, made him miss the last games of the season: “It wasn’t something I did lightly, but we have to do it to make him understand, to put him back on the right path.”
In the Italian championship his freshness, his athleticism, risk having an immediate impact, especially coming off the bench. At 18, however, Vaz is a raw player and in Gasperini’s Roma some of his defects could come out more glaring.
In a championship that never offers depth Robinio Vaz will have to make do with less. Within a team that often attacks on a small pitch, they will have to improve in the shrewdness with which they take positions on defenders, in their precision in playing with their backs to goal even in small spaces. It’s not his best quality, but he also has promising margins in the way he sews the game together.
It’s not a given that Gasperini won’t end up using him as a left winger, placing another striker next to him. Maybe it would make it easier for him to settle into Serie A, without asking too much of him for goals and playing with his back to goal. Vaz will bring energy to Roma above all. Neither Ferguson nor Dovbyk have his speed, his athleticism in wide spaces, his ability to beat the defender. Above all, they don’t have his intensity: a quality that Gasperini has demanded with ever greater frustration from the two center forwards available today. Winning a duel, taking a position, helping the team, making yourself heard in the penalty area. Vaz will bring an immediate rush of all these qualities. However, it is difficult to bet today that an 18-year-old center forward with few minutes among the professionals could become a starter for Roma in Serie A.
What a strange operation for Roma. For weeks the club seemed incapable of closing deals, searching for very intricate transfer formulas. Then, suddenly, he closed a deal worth 25 million, some say anticipating an investment that he wanted to make in the summer. As a result, we can also gain the confidence that Roma has towards its potential (and one can imagine that Gasperini also approved the operation).
This Roma operation contains two sides. The first is exciting: no one in Italy has the courage to make such a huge investment in a striker of this type. An eighteen year old with great potential, who has already shown his talent in an important team like OM. They are not players who move to Serie A, which buys champions at the end of their cycle and not at the beginning.
However, there is a more prudent lens with which to look at this operation. Roma arrived at the January transfer market with the absolute need to buy two starting strikers, one on the left and one in the centre, given that the players in the squad did not satisfy Gasperini. The team’s poor offensive production was interpreted as a squad problem and not a tactical one. Robinio Vaz can have an immediate impact, given his personality, but it seems like a coup especially for the future, a strange thing to do in January. Roma took an opportunity but it is difficult for Vaz alone to solve the problems. After all, until a few days ago the plan was to buy Joshua Zirkzee, a center forward with other characteristics and at a different stage in his career, who was truly capable of changing the face of the attack.
Vaz seems to have great potential, but the meaning of his purchase with respect to this season will have to be read above all through the next operations: how many and which other attackers will Roma take? Did Vaz arrive to try to be a starter or to break through the opposing defenses with bursts during the match?
However, a broader discussion needs to be made. If we complain about the posture of our championship, chronically lacking in ideas and the ability to look to the future, Vaz is an exception that we felt we needed.
