Newcastle are reportedly set to splash out on England defender Marc Guéhi, whose stock is high after an impressive showing at Euro 2024. But is he really worth so much?
As transfer deadline day draws closer, people start to get desperate.
Players who need a move will consider clubs they might not have before; teams who need to offload players will be open to lower offers; and anyone in need of a certain type of player will be willing to pay more than they would have a few weeks ago.
For Newcastle, Friday’s approaching deadline means time is running out for them to bring in a centre-back, where they badly need reinforcement.
Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish knows as much.
Newcastle have reportedly been interested in Palace and England defender Marc Guéhi all summer, and Parish knows there is no reason to even consider letting him go on the cheap.
“We would like to keep hold of him, [but] there is a price and a situation where we might consider it,” Parish told BBC Sport earlier this month. “Somebody [in another interview] said he is a superstar, so somebody has got to pay superstar money.
“Realistically, he is homegrown, 24 years old and a sensational talent – so somebody has to make it difficult for us. At the moment, it isn’t.”
Whether Guéhi really is a “superstar” is up for debate, but coming into the season off the back of a very successful summer at Euro 2024, where he was one of England’s best players, his stock has never been higher. The talk is that Newcastle have tried and failed with more than one bid of over £60 million, but are now more likely to strike a deal having agreed to pay closer to £70m.
Guéhi being English and doing so well at Euro 2024 will both have driven his price up, but just as big a factor – and one that gives Palace and Parish even more bargaining power – is the fact the 24-year-old is comfortable playing on the left side of central defence.
The balance that a good left-sided centre-back brings to a team cannot be understated. Arguably more than any other position on the pitch, the ‘left-sidedness’ of a player is most important in the current game at the heart of defence, and really good ones are scarce, too. That all means there is a premium on high-quality left-sided centre-backs at the moment.
Which all begs the question: is Guéhi really worth a club-record fee to Newcastle?
When you look at how transformative some centre-back signings have been in recent years, there is of course potential for Guéhi to be worth every penny.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that signing Virgil van Dijk from Southampton for £75m in 2018 has altered the course of Liverpool’s history. They have won just about everything there is to win since he joined, and the fee they paid for him has been completely forgotten. Had they paid double the amount, he would still be considered a massive success at Anfield.
Rúben Dias (Manchester City), William Saliba (Arsenal), Micky van de Ven (Tottenham) and Pau Torres (Aston Villa) are four more examples of top-end Premier League centre-backs who have made their transfers look cheap after big-money moves because they’ve improved their team so much.
But there are also plenty of centre-backs who haven’t fit in quite so well, and haven’t paid back their transfer fees. At the price reported, Guéhi would of course come with a significant risk to Newcastle, who have apparently had to tread the financial line pretty carefully this summer.
Harry Maguire, the most expensive defender of all time, stands out as an obvious example of a centre-back who has been rather less successful than those mentioned above, and talk of his time at Old Trafford is almost always accompanied by a mention of the £80m he cost back in 2019.
However, Maguire was arguably never going to be able to transform Manchester United’s fortunes in such a turbulent time for the club, and five years of decent service certainly doesn’t make him a complete failure.
At the same time, Guéhi will need to markedly improve Newcastle’s defence – more than Maguire did United’s – to be deemed a success. So, how exactly will he be of use?
The problem with using event data to analyse defenders is that lots of actions and high numbers don’t necessarily mean they are doing a good job. A centre-back who makes lots of tackles might be diving in too much, and another who doesn’t make any at all might just play for a team whose centre-backs aren’t exposed to situations when tackles are needed. There is always a limit to how much can be gleaned from a defender’s metrics as a result.
What we can say about Guéhi, however, is that he is a very capable player when it comes to defensive actions. He passes the eye test on that front, clearly possessing a good reading of the game while also being physically dominant when it comes to individual battles.
His duel success rate of 61.8% in Premier League games since the start of last season is the second-best among players with at least 2,000 minutes played for Palace, only marginally behind Joachim Andersen (62.5%). Among the 240 players across the entire Premier League to compete in 150+ duels in that time, meanwhile, Guéhi ranks 20th for duel success.
He isn’t particularly known for his aerial ability, but at Euro 2024, he won more aerial duels than any other England player (13 – ninth overall), while he also blocked the most shots, too (six).
He can do that side of the game well, but what he does on the ball is going to be just as important at Newcastle.
Having come through the ranks at Chelsea, Guéhi will have learned his game with the ball on the floor, and that shows in his football these days. He is very comfortable in possession, and more than happy to step out of defence and progress play either with a pass or by carrying play into midfield. Crucially, he can use either foot and, despite – like Van Dijk – being predominantly right-footed, is at his best playing on the left side of defence.
His passing accuracy in Premier League games in 2023-24 (87.1%) was the sixth-highest among all players (min. 2,000 minutes played) at clubs that finished outside the top nine, behind four Brighton players and Burnley’s Sander Berge.
He is ambitious with his passing, too, with 13.5% of his passes sent long, and 48.0% of those long passes finding their target. Of players to attempt at least 150 long balls, only four had a better success rate than Guéhi. He also successfully completed 15 of his 18 attempted switches of play.
He is clearly a very good footballer as well as an adept defender, so the big question for Newcastle is how much he can improve the team.
There’s no doubt that Newcastle could do with more players in that part of the pitch. With Sven Botman and Jamaal Lascelles both out long-term and Fabian Schär suspended at the weekend, Dan Burn and Emil Krafth started at centre-back in this weekend’s draw at Bournemouth.
Both have played most of their football for Newcastle at full-back (Krafth is a right-back while Burn has been converted into a left-back at Newcastle), and so it spoke volumes about manager Eddie Howe’s thoughts on Lloyd Kelly – a left-sided centre-back who signed on a free this summer – that he played him at full-back despite so many problems in the centre of defence.
Part of what makes a central defender a success – at least in terms of how they are viewed by fans – is how many mistakes they make. Certainly, that has been a dominant feature of Maguire’s error-strewn United career.
Guéhi, though, is rather more reliable. In Premier League games last season, he made only one error leading to an opposition shot, a slip at St. James’ Park that Sean Longstaff pounced on to score in Newcastle’s 4-0 win over Palace last October. It isn’t too generous to suggest that was an uncharacteristic and unfortunate moment in Guéhi’s Premier League career.
He hasn’t yet played consistently for a possession-dominant team at club level, and there may be more opportunities to make mistakes when playing out from the back should he move to Newcastle – as Maguire found to be the case at United.
For that reason it would be a big step up if he were to swap Selhurst Park for St. James’, but Guéhi showed with a string of strong and assured performances for England this summer that he is at home playing in a side that controls games, too.
There would be plenty of pounds to repay should he make the move to Newcastle, but there’s also a big gap that needs filling, and it’s a great opportunity for Guéhi to make that jump. He probably won’t end up being Newcstle’s answer to Van Dijk, but he should be closer to that than Maguire at United.
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