Arsenal are considering a summer move for Newcastle United‘s Anthony Gordon, while Manchester United are eyeing RB Leipzig‘s Yan Diomande and Everton‘s Iliman Ndiaye to boost their attacking options.

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TRENDING RUMORS

– Arsenal have scouted Newcastle United winger Anthony Gordon ahead of a potential move, according to TEAMtalk. The England international is one of several wingers Arsenal are said to have shortlisted, with Atlético Madrid‘s Julián Álvarez their “dream” target. Gordon, 25, is keen to compete at the highest level and would reportedly relish the prospect of working with Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta. The former Everton player, who has also been linked with interest from Liverpool, scored 10 goals in Newcastle’s UEFA Champions League campaign this season.

– Manchester United have shortlisted attackers Yan Diomande and Iliman Ndiaye ahead of the summer transfer window opening, Sky Sports reports. Diomande, 19, has shone in the Bundesliga this season with RB Leipzig, scoring 10 goals in 27 league matches. He is under contract until 2030, having arrived in Germany last summer from Spanish club Leganés. Senegal international Ndiaye has six goals and three assists in the Premier League for Everton so far this season. United have also been linked with Aston Villa‘s Morgan Rogers in recent days, as they look to bolster their left-wing options next season.

– Tottenham Hotspur are in “pole position” to sign Andy Robertson this summer, according to David Ornstein. The Liverpool left-back has announced his decision to leave Merseyside at the end of the season, with several clubs around Europe keen on landing him. Robertson, 32, is said to be “fully focused” on helping Liverpool for the remainder of the season, as the club look to secure Champions League qualification. As things stand, Spurs are a leading contender to sign him — should they avoid relegation from the Premier League — having made enquiries about a move for the Scotland international in January.

– Informal talks have taken place between Sporting CP and Manchester City over a future move for Morten Hjulmand, A Bola reports. The Denmark midfielder is a summer target for City following an impressive campaign in Portugal. Sporting have already made plans for Hjulmand’s departure at the end of the season, whose contract is set to expire in just over two years’ time.

– Chelsea could be willing to let Enzo Fernández leave the club if they fail to qualify for next season’s UEFA Champions League, AS reports. The Argentina midfielder recently hinted at his interest in a move to Real Madrid, leading to his removal from Liam Rosenior’s squad for two matches. Chelsea are outside of the Champions League qualification places, meaning a move away from West London, for the time being at least, remains a possibility.

EXPERT TAKE

ESPN’s Rob Dawson looks at Manchester United’s transfer plans for the summer:

Speaking to a small group of reporters at Carton House Hotel in County Kildare this week, Harry Maguire took the opportunity to send a message to the Manchester United hierarchy.

In Ireland, with the rest of Michael Carrick’s squad for a short training camp designed to rejuvenate players and staff ahead of the final push towards qualifying for next season’s UEFA Champions League, Maguire — with a new one-year contract signed and sealed — was already looking to the future.

“I think this summer is going to be a big summer,” he said, unprompted. “I think we’ve got to recruit really well.”

It felt like Maguire was speaking on behalf of a dressing room that has seen the benefit of positive signings — Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, Benjamin Sesko and Senne Lammens — this season and now want more to help the team finally challenge for the Premier League title.

But if Maguire’s comments were aimed at co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, CEO Omar Berrada, director of football Jason Wilcox and director of recruitment Christopher Vivell, they were probably unnecessary. Sources have told ESPN that there’s a feeling internally that getting this summer’s recruitment drive right is even more important than the appointment of the next head coach.

It’s not to say that the decision about who should be Ruben Amorim’s permanent successor isn’t a big one. But having been in position for more than two years, Ratcliffe and his team have learned that it’s easier to recover from manager mistakes than it is from ones made in the transfer market. They’re still dealing with the fallout from some of the decisions made before they arrived.

OTHER RUMORS

– Inter Miami are in talks to sign Casemiro on a free transfer this summer. The Manchester United midfielder has been offered a contract until December 2028. (Nicolo Schira)

– Atalanta midfielder Éderson is keen on a move to Atlético Madrid this summer. The Brazilian has previously rejected moves to Arsenal, Manchester United and Newcastle United. (AS)

– Salzburg and Hertha Berlin are monitoring the development of Juventus left-back David Puczka. (Nicolo Schira)

– Monaco have received calls from several Premier League clubs over the availability of youngster Maghnes Akliouche. (Fabrizio Romano)

– Interim Manchester United head coach Michael Carrick is now in “pole position” to become the Premier League club’s permanent manager. (talkSPORT)

– Paris Saint-Germain are optimistic that head coach Luis Enrique will sign a contract extension at the club. (Ben Jacobs)

Minnesota Duluth sophomore forward Max Plante was crowned the 2026 Hobey Baker Memorial Award winner on Friday night as the nation’s best college hockey player.

Plante, a Detroit Red Wings prospect, beat out Denver defenseman Eric Pohlkamp, a San Jose Sharks prospect, and Michigan forward T.J. Hughes, an undrafted free agent.

“I, obviously, had a great year, but a lot of props to my linemates,” Plante said. “They made a bunch of plays for me, and I was the beneficiary of it.”

A second-round pick in the 2024 NHL draft, Plante, 20, was second in the nation with 25 goals and third with 52 points. He ended the season on a five-game point streak, including an assist in the Bulldogs’ 4-3 loss to Michigan in the NCAA tournament quarterfinals.

Plante is expected to return to Minnesota Duluth next season to play alongside his two brothers: older brother Zam, a Minnesota Duluth teammate who was a fifth-round pick of the Penguins in 2022, and younger brother Victor, who is committed to play for the Bulldogs next season.

“That was a huge motivator,” Plante said. “Just the fact to have a chance to play with two brothers at that high of a level, and to try and achieve something that I haven’t achieved yet — a national championship.”

Plante is Minnesota Duluth’s seventh Hobey Baker winner.

Everyone mocked him at the time, but Arsene Wenger had a point.

In 2012, after Arsenal lost to Sunderland in the FA Cup and while they were down 4-0 against AC Milan before the second leg of their round of 16 tie in the Champions League, Wenger solidified the focus for the rest of his team’s season. He said: “The first trophy is to finish in the top four.”

While this lack of ambition seemed to some like it was a cause of Arsenal’s then-seven-year trophy drought, that wasn’t quite true. The construction costs of Arsenal’s new stadium had hamstrung their ability to spend as much as Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea — Wenger was merely citing the economic reality in which he was living.

To have a shot at competing with those teams in the future, the Gunners needed to secure the extra millions of dollars in revenue generated from qualifying for the UEFA Champions League by finishing in the top four of the Premier League.

While you don’t get any silverware for finishing in the top four, finishing there was much more likely to lead to a Premier League or a Champions League title than winning the FA Cup or the League Cup. And if a top-four finish is more important than two of the competitions they hand out trophies for, well it kind of is its own trophy.

It’s not like we don’t treat it as such, either — the top-four race is one of the three ways we give texture to each season along with the title race and the relegation battle. (I don’t think it was done on purpose, but I applaud our collective hive mind for not settling on “race” to describe a competition between teams that are trying to avoid, rather than achieve, something.)

Even with the added guarantee of a fifth Champions League spot for the Premier League, this season hasn’t been any different. From here on, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea will mainly be judged by whether or not they secure one of the five spots. As Liverpool manager Arne Slot put it back in February: “If we don’t have Champions League football, it’s definitely not been an acceptable season. … That does have an enormous impact on the way this club is run.”

The impact on revenue is massive, but in the world of fixture bloat and player burnout, might there be a hidden benefit to missing out on the world’s most prestigious competition for a season? After all, Man United and Aston Villa, two of the teams in the current top four, aren’t playing in the Champions League this year.

Maybe missing out on the Champions League isn’t such a terrible thing for Premier League teams after all?

• Premier League without set-piece goals: What would the table look like?
• Tracker: Champions League qualification, Premier League relegation
• 2026 World Cup squads ranked: All 48 national teams

The economic impact of missing out on the Champions League

Let’s take Liverpool as an example.

After nearly winning the quadruple in the 2021-22 season, everything fell apart the following year. Jurgen Klopp’s team finished fifth — the first, and only time, in his eight full seasons at the club when they didn’t qualify for the Champions League.

The impact here is pretty straightforward. Per data from Kieron O’Connor’s excellent Swiss Ramble, here’s the club’s broadcast revenue from European competition in all of Klopp’s full seasons at the club:

• 2016-17: none
• 2017-18: €81 million
• 2018-19: €111 million
• 2019-20: €80 million
• 2020-21: €88 million
• 2021-22: €120 million
• 2022-23: €84 million
• 2023-24: €27 million

In 2016-17, Liverpool weren’t in Europe competition at all, and in 2023-24, they were in the Europa League. As Slot said in February: “When I arrived here and only signed Federico Chiesa, it was after a Europa League season.”

This is true, and less revenue means less money to spend on improving the team. But what’s interesting is that Slot is suggesting that the financial impact from missing out on the Champions League actually comes a year later. The transfer spending at the club suggests as much, too.

The €12 million deal for Chiesa was Liverpool’s only permanent move in the summer of 2024. But after the disappointing 2022-23 campaign, Liverpool spent €172 million combined (per Transfermarkt) on the acquisitions of Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Wataru Endo ahead of a season without Champions League matches.

Don’t forget: They also agreed to a nine-figure, Premier League-record deal with Brighton for Moisés Caicedo, who instead decided to join Chelsea — another club that failed to qualify for the Champions League after four consecutive top-four finishes.

Now, I’m not totally convinced that Liverpool only cut their spending in 2024 because of the lack of Champions League revenue from the preceding season. They also signed current backup goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili from Valencia to a deal to be made permanent the following season. They had agreed to sign Martín Zubimendi from Real Sociedad too, only for him to make a last-second U-turn and stay in Spain for another season before joining Arsenal this past summer. Plus, they also had to sort out the contract situations for their three best and most expensive players: Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Unlike in 2012, when clubs such as Arsenal were competing financially with the top four teams in all of Europe’s other major leagues and added European revenue might mean you would sign someone who otherwise would’ve went to AC Milan, the biggest Premier League clubs are now only really competing with Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain for talent. The rest of the Premier League is competing with the top-four teams in all of Europe’s major leagues now.

The combined commercial and broadcasting revenues generated by the topflight in England means that losing out on Champions League revenue, on average, isn’t as painful as it used to be. In 2022-23, Liverpool and Chelsea ranked seventh and ninth, respectively, in global revenue among all clubs. In 2023-24, with neither club in the Champions League, they ranked eighth and 10th.

The potential benefit of not being able to win the Champions League

In 2016-17, with Liverpool rebounding into the top four after an eighth-place finish and Chelsea winning the Premier League title after a 10th-place finish the previous season, a new theory seemed to emerge: Not having to play in the Champions League was actually beneficial for your Premier League performance.

To test this, a trained astrophysicist and Harvard professor wrote a blog post where he looked at the relationship between the season-to-season change in European matches played by a given team and the season-to-season change in Premier League points won.

“[For] each extra game a team plays in Europe, they can expect to lose half a point relative to the previous season,” he wrote. “So, if a team plays 12 more games, it will be 6 points worse off [on average] than the previous season.”

The author, funnily enough, was Laurie Shaw, who now holds the title of “chief scientist” at Liverpool. At the time Shaw wrote the piece, a number of other analyses had determined that there was no “hangover effect” for teams playing in Europe. In other words, teams that had just played a match in Europe didn’t perform worse than expected in their following Premier League match. Shaw’s work suggested that there’s a kind of cumulative effect from extra devoting resources — energy, strategy, travel, etc. — to European matches.

Last month, the blogger Markstats looked at the past three seasons and found there still to be no clear hangover effect in the Premier League. Since we can’t ask Shaw to just rerun his analysis for every season since 2016-17, I decided to do it — but only with Champions League matches.

This is how it looks when you plot all of the pairs of seasons when a team competed in the Champions League in at least one of them:

While it’s not a strong relationship, it’s close to the same relationship that Shaw observed in 2016. You can see it in the downward slope of the trendline.

Based on this data: For every extra Champions League game a team plays, they lose a little more than a third of a point on average. So, every three extra games in the Champions League are worth about one point in the Premier League table. And if we remove last season, when the total number of Champions League games increased for everyone, then the numbers match Shaw’s — a point lost for every two extra Champions League games played.

Now, there are lots of confounding factors here. When some teams miss the Champions League, they’ve usually been unlucky to an unsustainable degree. The same goes in the other direction: Sometimes teams qualify for the Champions League because of unsustainable hot streaks. How much of this is inevitable regression to the mean? And how much of this is a genuine decline in performance related to the extra intense games on your schedule?

But at the very least, there’s something here. It seems reasonable to expect the best teams to actually play more games in the Champions League, so the fact that on average teams perform better in the Premier League while playing fewer Champions League games suggests to me that there is a real negative effect of the added toll of extra high-level matches.

I also looked at the total number of games played from season to season across all competitions, and there’s basically no relationship to changes in points, so that suggests there’s something about the Champions League in particular that affects domestic performance.

Of course, it would be absurd to say that it’s better not to be in the Champions League. We don’t watch or care about sports because of the financial results they produce — the finances help produce the results and get produced by the results. The point of all of this is to try to win things like the Champions League and the Premier League. The way you do that is by, you know, actually participating in the Champions League.

But I do think we’ve potentially entered a stage of the Premier League’s growth where the teams are so rich, and the competition is so grueling, that there’s potential for a one-year exponential boost for a club that drops out of the competition. You’ll still have lots of money to spend on your roster because of the European revenue from the previous season, you’re probably going to have some better luck going forward, and you’ll get a full season without the potentially deleterious effects of all those midweek Champions League matches.

Whoever misses out on the top five this season would seem like a logical pick to bounce back into the Champions League places next year. So, Liverpool or Chelsea fans: There’s something that might be able to help you sleep at night.