Newcastle United chief executive David Hopkinson has acknowledged that the club ended up satisfied with the scale of the agreement as Bruno Guimar\u00e3es moved closer to Arsenal.<\/p>\n
Hopkinson made clear that Newcastle never set out to part with their captain. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to sell Bruno,\u201d Hopkinson confessed. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t in the plan to sell Bruno. None of us, or ownership, wanted to sell Bruno.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s our captain, he was very, very important to us and the debate over his price … it\u2019s a world-record fee for a player of his age.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we had to weigh up was, very respectfully from Bruno with his behavior towards us, very emotionally as well, effectively told us he wanted to leave and move on.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean he can go but it certainly plays a part in what our thinking is when we hit a certain range of number. But there\u2019s no point in saying it was part of our strategy and was in our thinking this summer\u2014it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we have got to be flexible and react to things that happen. It might have been in our plan to sign one player but we didn\u2019t get him so we move on to another. We can only be honest about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The negotiation was said to have developed after a period of discussions through intermediaries, alongside uncertainty over his value. Early reports suggested Arsenal believed he could be signed for less than $81 million (\u00a360 million), while Newcastle set an asking price of $135 million (\u00a3100 million). The eventual deal landed between those figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not the fee that I think Arsenal had hoped to pay and of course we would have liked an even higher number,\u201d Hopkinson explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think you\u2019re dealing with sophisticated actors on both sides and that\u2019s what negotiation looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hopkinson explains Newcastle\u2019s stance as Arsenal edge closer to a deal for Bruno Guimar\u00e3es.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18319,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,1843],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-arsenal-transfer-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}