The 28-year-old is reportedly on the verge of joining Premier League champions Arsenal for a fee of around £75 million.
Guimaraes’ exit would mark the third major player departure from St James’ Park this summer, with Anthony Gordon moving to Barcelona and Sandro Tonali to Spurs respectively.
Perhaps the biggest shock of all, however, was manager Eddie Howe stepping down from his position and since being replaced by the highly rated Matthias Jaissle.
Speaking to reporters at Newcastle’s pre-season training camp in Spain, Wilson said: “We didn’t want to sell Bruno. It wasn’t in the plan to sell Bruno. None of us — or ownership — wanted to sell Bruno.
“He’s our captain, he was very, very important to us and the debate over his price — it’s a world-record fee for a player of his age.
“What we had to weigh up was, very respectfully from Bruno with his behaviour towards us, very emotionally as well, effectively told us he wanted to leave and move on.
“That doesn’t mean he can go but it certainly plays a part in what our thinking is when we hit a certain range of number. But there’s no part in saying it was part of our strategy and was in our thinking this summer — it wasn’t.
“But we have got to be flexible and react to things that happen. It might have been in our plan to sign one player but we didn’t get him so we move on to another. We can only be honest about that.”