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Enzo Fernández and Sandro Tonali had big-money summer moves, but can they hold a candle to past greats?
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Football — Jonathan Liew
Perhaps the only thing you really need to know about the modern midfield role is that Enzo Maresca reckons that Marc Guéhi can play it better than Mateo Kovacic. Guéhi, in reality a centre-back, started the season in midfield for Manchester City, ahead of Kovacic, the now-departed Nico González, and Matheus Nunes. In this context City’s purchase of Enzo Fernández for a club record £125m can be seen in one of two ways: either an enormous statement of intent, or a hell of a lot of money to pay for Guéhi’s understudy.
We jest, of course. Fernández is in fact a very different kind of midfielder to Guéhi, largely on the basis that he actually is a midfielder. Versatile, able to receive deep from the goalkeeper or the centre-halves; capable of recycling or progressing the ball in tight spots, driving into final-third positions as a No 8, ghosting into the penalty area and offering an advanced goal threat. Like Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for £116m but so long ago that in transfer window time it no longer counts, Fernández is one of the new breed of Premier League central midfielders who seems to offer everything; albeit in modest qualities, and whose primary attribute appears to be the absence of exposed risk he represents.
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This is the only real way of explaining the vastly inflated fee City have paid Chelsea in a race where they were the only realistic bidder. Angelo Stiller at Stuttgart – to pluck one name out of the ether – is a similar profile of midfielder of the same age who would probably have been available at half the price, and with exactly one fewer video in which he was filmed making racist and homophobic slurs. But unlike Stiller, Fernández is battle-hardened, Premier League-proven, a known known. Whatever flaws he possesses – from his slow recovery speed to occasional fits of petulance to his intolerance – have been priced in.
And if there is any coherent theme to the 2026 summer window, the Premier League’s surge-pricing era, this is probably it: the Barclays tax, the overwhelming premium applied to players who are adjusted to the league, who have been there, done that and taken the tactical yellow card. Manchester United have added Andrey Santos, Carlos Baleba and Youri Tielemans in an otherwise quiet summer. Tottenham have maxed out the credit card to bring in Sandro Tonali (£92.5m,) and Mateus Fernandes (£85m). In which context Arsenal’s purchase of Bruno Guimarães for £75m feels like a kind of weird bargain, the £4.50 pack of special offer supermarket butter.
Nevertheless, these are sums that in almost any other Premier League summer would have drawn audible gasps, that would at the very least have been attached to proven superstars, unicorn players, missing pieces of the jigsaw. With the greatest of respect, do any of the midfielders signed by Premier League clubs this summer strike you as that level of player? Anybody who might realistically hold a candle to your Vieiras and Keanes, your Lampard and Gerrards, your De Bruynes and Kantés? Perhaps the underpinning irony of this summer is that the most expensive generation of central midfielders in Premier League history is also – in relative terms – one of its most mediocre.
By way of proof, compile your own list of the best central midfielders operating in world football and count up how many of them are playing in this country. With a few exceptions, the best are elsewhere: Vitinha and João Neves at Paris Saint-Germain, Jude Bellingham at Real Madrid, Pedri and Rodri at Barcelona, Joshua Kimmich at Bayern Munich. Equally you may chuck in Frenkie de Jong, Fabián Ruiz, Fede Valverde, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Warren Zaïre-Emery.
In Premier League terms you have Declan Rice, Moisés Caicedo, Bruno Fernandes and maybe a couple of others. Enzo is handy, Mateus has promise, Baleba has played very well for very short periods of time. But for a league that is by far the world’s richest and most alluring, the absence of generational midfield talents – and particularly creative talents – is not simply an anomaly but a bug that may be progressing into a sickness.
Maresca’s deployment of Guéhi, while also a kind of unsubtle message to the City board, encapsulates this. “This is a country, a league, where you need strong midfielders,” he said, and by strong he meant physical , tenacious, good in duels, good with the shoulders and elbows. Great athletes. Capable of covering every blade of grass. The kind of thing Rodri, Bernardo Silva and Kevin De Bruyne, all in their 30s and pensioned off to slower leagues, can no longer do. A league in which running and duelling has become more important than passing, in which Dominik Szoboszlai has become Liverpool’s most important player more on his ability to get places than his ability to do anything once he gets there.
But while overt physicality is one element of the equation, it is by no means the only one. For football executives answerable to capricious owners and sensitive to public opinion, familiar players offer a kind of cherished security. Signing a known player for big money carries less reputational risk. When Arsenal blow £72m on Nicolas Pépé and it doesn’t work out, that’s Arsenal’s fault. When City blow £100m on Jack Grealish and it doesn’t work out, somehow that’s Grealish’s fault. So it will be with Anderson or Fernández or Morgan Rogers, none of whom are remotely proven , but who are at least responsible for their own failure, which in boardroom terms may as well be the same thing.
This is how you end up with a league as a kind of feedback loop, an arms race in which the aim is not simply to sign the most suitable player for an appropriate sum of money but to ride the waves of the market, a place where inefficiency and overspending are treasured as signs of ambition. And in practice the market will reward you for this: Chelsea sign Alejandro Garnacho, he does nothing, and you potentially sell him on to Aston Villa at a small profit. What possible disincentive is there to keep doing this for as long as you can?
At times it feels as if the Premier League has been reimagined as a kind of player trading vehicle, a transfer show with 380 football games inconveniently attached. But of course sport does often find a way. World Cup fatigue is yet to set in. Playing a high-energy pressing game in four or five competitions will quickly become an impossibility. According to New York Times data the Premier League still features more intensive sprinting than other “big five” leagues, but here the trend is down while elsewhere it is up. Perhaps this is the season where cohesion, craft, coaching and creativity make their long-awaited comeback?
I once interviewed a youth coach with a longstanding record of producing Premier League players, who lamented to me that academies had begun to neglect technical skill in favour of producing “800-metre runners”. And increasingly this feels like a kind of pivotal season for English football, a test of identities and values, a measure of what it ultimately wants to be. The fastest and the most furious, or the best and most beautiful? If Marc Guéhi ends up going for £150m when the window opens again, we’ll have our answer.
We jest, of course. Fernández is in fact a very different kind of midfielder to Guéhi, largely on the basis that he actually is a midfielder. Versatile, able to receive deep from the goalkeeper or the centre-halves; capable of recycling or progressing the ball in tight spots, driving into final-third positions as a No 8, ghosting into the penalty area and offering an advanced goal threat. Like Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for £116m but so long ago that in transfer window time it no longer counts, Fernández is one of the new breed of Premier League central midfielders who seems to offer everything; albeit in modest qualities, and whose primary attribute appears to be the absence of exposed risk he represents.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Jonathan Liew. Published 3 Sept 2026, 07:00 am.
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