Arsenal’s interest in Vinicius Junior does not appear to be fading, and if the Brazilian winger does join, he would rank among the biggest signings in the club’s history.

The Gunners do not have a particularly long record of signing players from Real Madrid, but their results from those deals have been mixed.

Here is our ranking of every player Arsenal have signed directly from the Spanish giants.

In pure footballing terms, Davor Suker probably ought to be at least a couple of places higher on this list. What a footballer he was.

But this is a ranking of Arsenal signings, and unfortunately at Highbury he looked nothing like the player who collected trophies at Real Madrid and lit up the 1998 World Cup.

A fee of £3.5million was not enormous, but in 1999 it was still a significant amount. He was not a complete disaster — eight goals in 22 Premier League appearances was a respectable enough return — but neither was he a major success.

Suker could not fill the gap left by Nicolas Anelka, who moved in the opposite direction that summer. Fortunately for Arsenal, Thierry Henry, who arrived the very next day, proved more than capable of doing exactly that.

Dani Ceballos was very much representative of the early years of Mikel Arteta’s tenure.

Useful, with plenty of promise, but in the end not quite good enough. He was the football equivalent of an airport sandwich: perfectly serviceable at the time, but instantly forgettable.

It was only once genuine top-class quality was added, and once Arteta moved on from fairly ordinary footballers like Ceballos, that his project truly began to take off.

He felt like a classic Spanish midfielder in the sense that he was technically sound and capable of keeping possession moving, but he lacked the class of Premier League imports who truly thrilled supporters. The likes of Santi Cazorla, Thiago Alcantara, David Silva and Juan Mata.

Ceballos does deserve credit for a solid display in Arsenal’s 2020 FA Cup final win over Chelsea, but the fact that two loan spells never became a permanent transfer says plenty. Five full seasons back at Madrid as an unremarkable squad player sums him up fairly well.

Julio Baptista, known as ‘La Bestia’, was one of those gloriously baffling footballers who could look like an elite world-beater one moment and like your mate from a five-a-side game who cannot control a ball the next — often in the very same passage of play.

That made him great fun for neutral viewers, but enough to leave Arsenal fans tearing their hair out.

It may feel almost sacrilegious to place such an obviously limited player above two accomplished Champions League winners, but football is ultimately about moments and memories. And there was something undeniably captivating about Baptista. Suker and Ceballos did not score four goals away at Anfield, did they?

Baptista would have been rooted to the bottom of this list if Arsenal had spent £20million to sign him. But in the end it was a low-risk loan move that came with very little downside.

Mesut Ozil was the man who made Arsenal fans dream and older traditionalists complain in equal measure.

For a period, Ozil looked every bit the transformative signing Arsenal had been desperate for. The excitement around his arrival from Real Madrid was unlike anything seen at the Emirates for years, and initially he genuinely looked capable of matching the hype.

Arsenal pulled off a real coup to bring him in, and for several years he repaid that belief with a stream of assists, flashes of brilliance and two FA Cup winners’ medals during a time when trophies were otherwise hard to come by.

The relationship eventually deteriorated under Arteta as the modern game moved away from the classic No.10, but for a while there were very few more enjoyable players to watch in the Premier League.

Nicolas Anelka captained Arsenal to their first league title in 22 years.

We do not really need any further justification than that, do we?