Gabriel Jesus is delighted to be pulling on a Barcelona shirt after sealing a move from Arsenal in the final hours of the summer transfer window.
The São Paulo-born striker arrives at 29, at the peak of his career. He brings almost a decade of Premier League experience, having played under Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta.
Two World Cups with Brazil have shaped him too. He knows the enormous social weight of belonging to one of the most successful national teams on the planet, a side capable of bringing a vast country to a standstill and stopping its heartbeat during every match it plays at the tournament.
According to "Sport", the striker has already felt Barcelona's global pull. He has played only a handful of minutes across two matches, scoring his first goal, and has yet to move into his official residence while his family stay in London to finalise the relocation. Yet the media impact is immediate.
Since completing the transfer, he has picked up one million Instagram followers in just fifteen days, taking him to 22.4 million. That figure tells you how warmly the Barcelona fans have welcomed him.
The newspaper calls it the "Barcelona effect", and the numbers back it up. Few clubs command such interest among the global public, and Barcelona have grown enormously on social media in recent years, adding 52 million new followers in 2025 across all their official accounts.
That reach spreads across the entire digital landscape. Data from "Flashscore", the world's leading app for live scores and sports content, shows Barcelona topped the global ranking for page visits during August.
The metric tracks how often users visit a team's page to check matches, results, standings, squad lists and statistics. Barcelona racked up 10.96 million visits, seeing off Real Madrid (10.75 million) and Paris Saint-Germain (6.17 million).
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