Arsenal have had a sub-£60M bid for Bruno Guimarães rejected by Newcastle, reports The Athletic. The 28-year old Brazilian has intermittently been linked to the Gunners for a couple of seasons running and is one of the best box-to-box midfielders in the Premier League. Newcastle “insist” Guimarães is not for sale, but I’d be willing to bet the Arsenal brass test their resolve at least one more time.
Newcastle are in a tough spot overall. They were reportedly up against PSR constraints last summer
and perhaps even before that. They don’t have European football next season. The combination of Nick Woltemade, Anthony Elanga, and Yoanne Wissa, who spent much of the season injured, weren’t able to replace the on-field contributions of Alexander Isak, who forced a move to Liverpool. They’ve sold Anthony Gordon to Barcelona for nearly £70M. Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City are circling around Sandro Tonali, who was mentioned as a possible Arsenal target in the spring.
The Magpies are also in a tough spot with Guimarães in particular, with several factors likely to hold down his sale price. He’s 28-years old (until he’s 29), so they won’t get the young player premium. Buyers will be wary of overspending on a player who is going to give them one contract-worth of value. He only has two years remaining on his current deal, which is the point where clubs either extend or sell to avoid losing the player for free.
It doesn’t seem particularly likely to me that Guimarães will want to stay at Newcastle, either. He’s a Champions League-level player on a club that isn’t in Europe, and he’s watching all his CL-level teammates leave the club.
Wages are a potential equalizing factor. We know the PIF has near-infinite resources. But they’re limited in spending that money by PSR. Clearly, they should have gone the Manchester City route — gotten into the game earlier and spent like it was going out of style to goose their numbers and create headroom before the more closely monitored, stricter controls were in place.
I’m not a Newcastle expert but it feels like losing Bruno would be a different, deeper wound than selling Isak or Gordon. He’s the club captain and a fan favorite. His high workrate and aggressive, physical play mirrors the club identity and the overall ethos and culture of the Industrial revolution-built, working-class city that is Newcastle.
It’ll come down to what Guimarães wants, as it did with Alexander Isak. How much does he value Champions League football versus, theoretically, becoming the highest-earner at Newcastle? Given their reported PSR struggles, can they even offer him a number to make that tradeoff worth it? After what happened with Alexander Isak, the whole “promises made, not kept” stuff, it’s fair to wonder if there might be something similar happening behind-the-scenes with Guimarães, too.
It also comes down to what Arsenal wants and how much they want it. As I said, they’ll probably come back with another offer, but if that gets knocked back, will they make a third? Is Andrea Berta using this as a smokescreen and market-setting exercise for another target?
Arsenal need another quality player at the base of the midfield. That’s in addition to whatever role Myles Lewis-Skelly plays next season. Martin Zubimendi was so exhausted that he lost his starting spot for the last month of the season. Declan Rice carried and managed a back / hamstring injury for several weeks down the stretch and into the World Cup. Christian Norgaard wasn’t trusted enough to play anything close to meaningful minutes.
It’s a bit odd to say because the Gunners were a Champions League penalty shootout away from winning the double, but if they want to win the double, it feels like they need to get their key players more rest. The Premier League got close at the end in large part because of the toll that injury and fatigue took on the squad at a couple pain points of the campaign.
Just look at PSG. Some of their best players had more minutes played in the Champions League than in Ligue Un. Arsenal won’t ever get to that point. It’s not feasible. The Premier League is too tough. But it would be nice if Mikel Arteta could get his workhorses a bit more rest. Adding another quality player, Bruno or someone else, to the central midfield stable would help accomplish that.
There are plenty of minutes to go around. I don’t think Bruno would have an issue with how much playing time he gets nor would he cut into Myles Lewis-Skelly’s “developmental” minutes in a meaningful way, either. You can frame it in a pretty positive way, actually. Spreading minutes around between 27-year olds Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi and 28-year old Bruno Guimarães helps to keep all of them fresher and healthier and having three top-class, established players to rotate in the center of the park takes pressure off MLS. Not that he necessarily needs it – he held his own as a starter in a CL final just a few weeks after moving back into midfield.
I don’t want to belabor the question of price because it’s the one we’re least-equipped to address from the outside. There is a range where you do the deal if you fall in that band. There is a number at which it stops making sense. My gut is telling me that the inflection point is somewhere around £65M.
The Arsenal win-now window is wide open. The squad is set up to be a potentially dominant team for the next two or three seasons. From a roster standpoint, you want to maximize the prime years of players like Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, William Saliba, and so on by winning as much silverware as possible with them as the key pieces of the team. We’re not playing Football Manager. It’s not all about building for the future all the time. At some point, you’ve done enough building and you go for it. That’s where Arsenal find themselves right now.
A 28, 29, and 30-year old Bruno Guimarães absolutely helps with that. He is one of the best midfielders in the Premier League and arguably the world right now and will continue to be that level of player for a couple more seasons. I think his on-ball skill, and he’s got plenty of it, can get lost in the focus on his industry and physical play. He’s a really talented player.
That he’s 28-years old right now gives some pause. If Arsenal buy him, he likely gets a 4+1 year contract, which would take him into his early 30s. By that time, he will probably have started to slow down. Does that mean he’ll be a completely useless player in four years? Definitely not. Look at Jorginho’s time at Arsenal or Casemiro’s resurgent season this past year. For what it’s worth, I think the market has swung so far towards young players that there is value to be found with guys in their late 20s if you can get them for the right price.
It’s all about finding the right balance of youth and experience, of pushing in some chips at the right time while also keeping an eye on the future. If the club were to bring in Bruno and / or another established, veteran player to have a go at more silverware in the immediate future, you’d expect them to make a few longer-range moves, too. In those couple of years that Bruno is patrolling the midfield, you develop someone like Myles Lewis-Skelly and sign another player to go along with him to ease the transition into the next iteration of the team.
Outside of whether you can make the money work and pry him away from Newcastle, his age is the likeliest reason not to do the deal. I’m also mildly concerned about the way he plays and whether he’d be able to get away with Newcastle-type stuff in an Arsenal shirt. He toes the line and can step over it (the blow to the back of Jorginho’s head stands out in my memory), but every team needs a bit of steel and bite (that isn’t blasting guys up high). Although I felt strongly he should have been sent off for that bit of violence, he’s never actually gotten a straight red card in the Premier League.
As for the physical play and the winding guys up stuff, I can’t stand it when he does it to Arsenal, but he strikes me as the kind of guy you’d love to have doing it for you rather than to you. I’m also fairly confident in the strong leadership of the team, from Mikel Arteta through the players, and their ability to turn excessive aggression into controlled aggression should he prove a bit to exuberant.
And I’ll be honest, I think his brand of football would fit right in at Arsenal right now. This is a hard-working, resolute, stubborn, physically imposing side that, when they’re at their best, overwhelm opponents. Heck, if everybody wants to paint Arsenal as the villains, they might as well commit a bit of villainy, right? Call us a soft touch now, punks.
The prospect of Arsenal buying Bruno Guimarães doesn’t thrill me in the way that buying a 22-year old attacking prodigy (or Ayyoub Bouaddi) would. It’s just not that type of transfer, but I wouldn’t have any complaints about it, either. It’s pragmatic. It improves the team in an area of substantial need. It would be an excellent move towards winning more silverware in the next few years with this core group of players.
