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.
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 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.
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