A former Arsenal player has revealed how much he wanted to join Newcastle instead of the Gunners, in a pretty intriguing interview.
Newcastle and Arsenal intertwined in transfer rumours
The connection between Arsenal and Newcastle in the current summer transfer window is an irony that the two clubs are well acquainted with.
Mikel Arteta has reportedly identified St James’ Park as a hunting ground for exactly the profile of player he wants.
Anthony Gordon is a primary target, as per Football Transfers this week, with a formal bid being readied as Arsenal pursue a left-winger to replace the potentially departing Gabriel Martinelli.
Tino Livramento at right-back is a separate but related interest, with the 23-year-old long admired at the Emirates.
Both players could feasibly be heading in the same direction — south and into red and white — while other media sources claim that Sandro Tonali is another Magpies star that Arsenal are big fans of.
Related
Newcastle make striker ‘top priority’ signing after ‘firm’ Howe demand with Wilson on board
The Magpies boss has made his summer plans crystal clear.
It is a traffic of talent that one former player understands from the opposite angle entirely.
For Luís Boa Morte, it was Arsenal who got the player and Newcastle who missed out — and almost three decades on, the Portuguese winger has reflected on that twist of fate with a candor that makes for fascinating reading.
Luis Boa Morte says he really wanted to join Newcastle instead of Arsenal
Speaking to Portuguese newspaper A BOLA this week, the now-48-year-old Boa Morte opened up on the circumstances that took him to Arsenal in the summer of 1997 at the age of 19, when he left Sporting CP’s academy for Highbury.
Luis Boa Morte for Fulham.
The move, he makes clear, was never what he truly wanted.
“I didn’t want to go to Arsenal,” he said.
“What I would’ve liked most was to stay at Sporting, but with a better contract.”
But when pressed on whether he harboured ambitions of playing for one of Portugal’s big three clubs later in his career, his answer veered in an entirely unexpected direction.
“Yes, of course,” he said, before delivering the line that will resonate on Tyneside.
“But what I would have liked most was to have gone to Newcastle United, but that didn’t happen either.”
His reasoning illuminates exactly why the Magpies held such an allure for a young winger raised on the idea that football should be played at pace, with ambition and without apology.
“English football back then was pure spectacle,” he recalled.
“It was the foreign coaches who somewhat spoiled English football with things like clean sheets. English fans like to see their team playing attacking football. The 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Newcastle is still on television today.”
The match he references — that extraordinary April 1996 collision at Anfield, when Stan Collymore’s injury-time winner condemned Kevin Keegan’s rampaging side to one of the most devastating defeats in title-race history — remains perhaps the defining image of a Premier League era built on chaos and goals and sheer uninhibited will to attack.
For a winger like Boa Morte, tuning in from Portugal as a teenager, that was the dream.
As it turned out, Arsenal got him instead.
He spent two years at Highbury making limited impact — he arrived, he later admitted, from the third division in Portugal, and the gulf was steep.
He eventually found his home at Fulham, where he made over 200 Premier League appearances and became a club captain beloved by supporters at Craven Cottage.
He built a fine career, but simply never got to start building it at the club he actually wanted.
Related
Fabrizio Romano shares “big” Newcastle transfer update with £44m Real Madrid target open to move
The Magpies are fighting some of Europe’s biggest clubs for a rising star.