Bruno Guimaraes’ £75million move from Newcastle United to Arsenal gives more supporting evidence to several recent themes.
At 28 years old, the sizeable outlay on the Brazilian midfielder continues Arsenal’s ploy of spending big money on players who can immediately improve their first team. A year ago, their roughly £185million in fees on players aged over 24 was the most ever spent on that cohort by an English club in a single season. A first Premier League title in 22 years comprised proof of concept.
Meanwhile, Guimaraes leaving Tyneside, where he was the club’s talisman, adds him to the list of recent high-profile departures and more grounds for Newcastle’s transformation into an impressive seller. Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali (and head coach Eddie Howe) have all vacated St James’ Park since last September.
In the 12 years to the end of June 2025, Newcastle generated £352million from player sales. A reasonable estimate, even after sell-on clauses and solidarity payments to former clubs, has them matching that figure inside the past 12 months.
Such statistics say lots about where Arsenal and Newcastle are as clubs, but the Guimaraes deal also underscores what is fast becoming a Premier League motif: the richest teams are ever more frequently plucking the best players from the rest of the division.
Guimaraes’ transfer is the 10th instance this summer of one of the ‘Big Six’ — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur — acquiring players (often the best ones) from the other 14 clubs in the top tier.
He follows where Morgan Rogers, Elliot Anderson, Tonali, Maxence Lacroix, Jan Paul van Hecke, Youri Tielemans, Danny Welbeck, Marcos Senesi and Jordan Henderson have already trodden (backup goalkeepers Illan Meslier and Karl Darlow have made similar moves as free agents).
Initially, that might not seem worthy of much note.
The Welbeck and Henderson deals are not of the same ilk as the rest and, in any case, there has long been a pecking order in football, mirrored on and off the pitch. The richest clubs can buy the most talented players, making their teams better and them more attractive than previously, thereby enticing more players to follow suit; a virtuous cycle of dominance. Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson routinely signed the best from the rest.
Yet research carried out by The Athletic shows the trend is rapidly intensifying.
Using a methodology that takes the six highest-earning clubs in a given Premier League season (which has been those same ‘Big Six’ teams since 2009) and counting the combined number of signings from the rest of the division, excluding no-fee, backup goalkeepers, like those Meslier and Darlow deals, and intra-‘Big Six’ moves like the one which recently took Andrey Santos from Chelsea to Manchester United, we find that particular flow of transfers is at an all-time high, even as middling to lower-end Premier League teams enjoy greater wealth than ever.
Last summer, 11 players moved from a non-‘Big Six’ club to a ‘Big Six’ one, with all six of the latter getting in on the act. In January, Manchester City’s signings of Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi, the best players at Bournemouth and Crystal Palace respectively, took the 2025-26 tally to 13.
That was a new record and only once before has the number of moves hit double figures. That came in 2014-15, in a year where the richest opportunistically pilfered a couple of less wealthy clubs who had shown themselves highly adept at scouting and youth development. Of that season’s 10 Other 14-to-‘Big-Six’ moves, five were departures from Southampton and three involved players leaving Swansea City.
Over the past 14 months, 23 of these deals have taken place, in what amounts to a mass transfer of the best talent from the less-well-offs to the richest. Unlike 12 years ago, predation isn’t centred on a minority; 11 different Premier League clubs have lost players to the ‘Big Six’ since the beginning of last summer.
Naturally, that has conferred significant financial benefit to the selling clubs. Those 23 transfers have come at a combined cost of almost £1.2billion, which can hardly be sniffed at. Those sums allow, to an extent, sellers to reinvest in talent from elsewhere, improving as a result. Combined with more money than ever from domestic prize-money distributions, the Premier League’s middle has probably never been stronger. Repeated English wins in the finals of the Europa League and UEFA Conference League speak volumes.
Yet there’s also a growing inevitability to those clubs losing their stars to domestic rivals, an event occurring far more frequently than before and which further solidifies the hierarchical structure of English football.
Under Ferguson, it was taken as written that United would, sooner or later, obtain the brightest stars from clubs lower down the table. Between 1994 and 2006, the likes of Teddy Sheringham, Dwight Yorke, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney all moved from less-minted teams to Old Trafford. In 12 seasons, nine of those transfers occurred.
Today, United’s Mancunian rivals City have completed five of them in just over 12 months. Chelsea have done six, albeit Welbeck and Henderson aren’t the same as procuring key players around their peak years. Spurs are on four, Arsenal and Manchester United have three apiece while Liverpool bring up the rear on two but, of course, one of those was the British-record signing of Isak from Newcastle.
Chelsea have now gobbled up 17 non-‘Big Six’ players in the past decade, something which speaks to both their rampant transfer activity and a seeming preference for young players already proven in England’s top division.
Most pilfered of anyone in recent seasons are Brighton & Hove Albion, where, since the summer of 2021, 10 players have departed for a ‘Big Six’ club. Five of these — Moises Caicedo, Marc Cucurella, Joao Pedro, Robert Sanchez and now Welbeck — went to Chelsea.
Why the intensification?
One reason is obvious: the rich clubs are richer than ever.
In 2024-25, the average turnover of a ‘Big Six’ club was £635million — and this in a year where three of them didn’t play in the Champions League. The average turnover at the remaining 14 Premier League teams that season was £214m, a gap of £421m.
That gap has never been larger and, save for the two seasons hit by the pandemic, has grown every year since 2011. Since Covid-19, average revenues among the ‘Big Six’ have increased by £189million, more than three times the increase at other Premier League clubs. The elite can now offer far more, both in wages and trophy-hunting opportunities.
Compounding the issue are football’s financial rules.
Those have long allowed the richest teams to spend more, being predicated on at least some pretence of sustainability, but the shift to a squad cost ratio rule tethered to club revenues has not strengthened the bargaining position of the less wealthy.
Even as the Premier League has allowed its members to spend a higher proportion of income than the 70 per cent rule which applies to those competing in Europe, a distinction nosed on ‘protecting the competitive balance of the Premier League’, the revenue gulf is so vast that the division’s richest are still able to spend far more than anyone else. And those successful clubs from below are soon whacked with the stricter UEFA rules when they perform well and finish higher up the table.
What’s more, the averaging-out, under the Premier League’s squad cost ratio, of player profits over three years, while worthwhile from a sustainability point of view, as it discourages one-off sales to dig clubs out of a hole, means spending limits are further restrained unless teams can consistently sell players for big profits.
Where the largest earners can afford to spend heavily year-on-year, the rest are beholden to peaks and troughs. The need to sell, allied with the allure inherent at clubs who regularly compete for honours and pay their players in accordance with those aims, results in the increased flow of talent up the chain that we’re now seeing. That’s true even of those teams, heavily backed by their owners, trying to push their way into the elite; it is no coincidence that, at the time of writing, the three largest net sellers this summer are Newcastle, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest.
The activity now seen actually serves as a further threat to competitive balance in a division where scarcely anyone stands a chance of winning the title in the first place.
The Premier League is routinely held up as world football’s best domestic league, though competition, certainly in terms of variability of champions, is scarce. La Liga is a two-horse race, with occasional Atletico Madrid interruptions; Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga are Parisian and Bavarian cakewalks with rare exceptions. Only Serie A, with four winners in seven seasons, among Europe’s top five domestic leagues can lay claim to high levels of both quality and competitiveness, and many would argue it lags some way behind the Premier League on the quality front.
What were football transfers like before the transfer window?
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And with each new transfer like the Guimaraes deal, competitive balance is impacted in England. Selling clubs have more money in their pockets than ever, but consistently replacing your best players is no easy feat, not least when everyone now knows you’re flush with cash. Behind Brighton, the other two most devoured by the ‘Big Six’ in the past decade are Leicester City and Wolverhampton Wanderers. They have lost six players each to the division’s richest since 2017 and, tellingly, both have been relegated in recent years and now play outside the Premier League.
An optimist may see this as a cycle, whereby there’s rotation at the top and the status quo will shift. Indeed, the team most vulnerable to the vultures now were once the ones doing most of the preying. Across six Premier League seasons in the 1990s, Newcastle pried 12 different players from poorer sides, more than anyone else in that period.
Yet there’s scant suggestion of any dislodging. The six highest-earning clubs in England have remained the same for almost two decades and continue to enjoy far greater matchday and commercial revenues than the rest. European football as a whole has been subject to significant stratification and, while the English game may have convinced itself otherwise, it is far from immune.
There’s the point, too, that the richest are so rich they can simply allow others to do the hard work, then stroll in and buy the players who have already proven they can cut it in the world’s highest quality league.
In a fair sporting world, clubs with inefficient recruitment operations would be overtaken by smarter efforts, like those showcased at Brighton. In the world we actually live in, the richer teams take their best players off them year after year, reinforcing a glass ceiling which dictates that, for most clubs, finishing sixth or seventh is about as good as it will now get. Finishing fourth is a borderline miracle. Actually winning the title is a fantasy.
All of it means the Premier League has a problem. One that is unlikely to be widely acknowledged.
