Coritiba sold Matheus Cunha to Sion in 2017 for R$ 700 mil, letting go of a teenager who would later become Brazil's number 9 and a Manchester United signing worth 62.5 million pounds. The move looks even starker because Cunha never played a senior match at Couto Pereira, leaving the club with only the memory of a player who had already gone before the first team could use him.
The name is drawing attention now because Cunha is back in the spotlight with Brazil's 2026 World Cup opener against Marrocos on Saturday, June 13, 2026, at 19h, where he is described as a probable starter. He is the kind of player Coritiba once had in its youth system after he left João Pessoa at 14 to live in Curitiba and chase a professional career, only to move on before anyone at the club saw him in a senior shirt.
At 18, Cunha was negotiated by Rogério Bacellar to Sion, and the transfer was built on a share of his economic rights that Coritiba had acquired for about R$ 150 mil. Later, in 2018, the club sold the remaining 15% of those rights for 1.2 million euros, adding a second payment to a deal that had already sent him out of Brazil. Coritiba then used the money from the first sale to help pay for Matheus Galdezani from Mirassol for R$ 3.5 milhões, a reminder of how a club can turn one prospect into another squad need.
What makes the story harder to ignore is the scale of what followed. After Sion, Cunha moved through RB Leipzig and Hertha Berlin in Germany, then Atlético de Madrid in Spain and Wolverhampton in England, before signing with Manchester United in the current season. The gap between R$ 700 mil and 62.5 million pounds is not a small-market rounding error; it is the cost of missing a player before his senior debut, and Coritiba paid that price in public.
Now Cunha arrives at the World Cup as the Brazil shirt No. 9, and he has even joked about the heat by saying, “Sou da Paraíba.” That line fits the arc as neatly as the transfer fee does: a player who left João Pessoa at 14, passed through Curitiba without a first-team appearance, and ended up as one of Brazil's most watched names while the club that developed him can only look back at the sale.
