Lucas Paquetá and Bruno Guimarães: Lyon's Brazilian Overlap

Two Brazilians, One Lyon Dressing Room

It is easy to forget now, with Paquetá synonymous with West Ham United and Guimarães inseparable from Newcastle United, that both men wore Lyon's shirt in the same campaign. Guimarães arrived first, signing from Athletico Paranaense in January 2020 for a reported €20 million. Paquetá followed that September, joining for €20 million of his own after two seasons at AC Milan had not quite gone to plan. By the 2021–22 season, the two were operating in the same midfield at the same French club, a pairing that, in hindsight, reads almost like a coincidence engineered by the football gods.

Paquetá's lone full season in Lyon colours that overlapped with Guimarães turned out to be his best in France. He was named in the UNFP Ligue 1 Team of the Year for 2020–21 and then won the inaugural Best Foreign Player of the Season award for 2021–22, beating out the likes of Paris Saint-Germain's Marquinhos and Lille's Jonathan David in a 20,000-strong public vote. It was the platform that convinced West Ham to pay a club-record fee, reported by the BBC at more than £50 million, to bring him to east London that August.

Diverging Paths to the Premier League

Guimarães left Lyon first, moving to Newcastle United in January 2022 for a fee of up to £40 million, seven months before Paquetá's own move to West Ham. The timing means their Lyon overlap was brief but real: the same club, the same season, before both took separate roads into the Premier League within months of each other.

What followed were two contrasting Premier League stories that cemented their current identities. Guimarães became central to Newcastle's revival, eventually captaining the side and lifting the Carabao Cup in 2025, the club's first domestic trophy in 70 years. He spoke of wanting fans to one day sing his name "the way they do to Shearer," a line that captures how thoroughly he became woven into Newcastle's modern story. Paquetá, meanwhile, won the UEFA Europa Conference League with West Ham in his debut season, assisting Jarrod Bowen's winner in the 2023 final in Prague, and was named in the competition's Team of the Season.

Why the Pairing Still Surprises

The surprise isn't that two talented Brazilian midfielders crossed paths in Ligue 1, plenty of South American careers pass through France. It's that both went on to become such complete emblems of two very different Premier League clubs that their shared Lyon season gets lost entirely. Paquetá later returned to his boyhood club Flamengo in 2026, closing a loop that started there in 2007. Guimarães, for his part, left Newcastle that same year for Arsenal, a reported £75 million move that again shifted his colours entirely. Two Brazilians, one Lyon season, and two Premier League legacies that never once overlapped on a matchday team sheet.