Newcastle United’s financial results have been the hot topic of discussion all day today, particularly how the club has sold assets to subsidiary companies to improve the bottom line.
However, aside from the financial jiggery pokery, which we believe is the official parlance, it was revealed by CEO David Hopkinson that Newcastle are likely going to have to sell to buy in the summer.
There is money there to be spent, but it’s not as much as many people had thought, and of course, the financial restrictions in place cut into the budget even more.
It’s therefore more likely that the sale of one or two ‘stars’ will have to be the reality for the Magpies this summer in order to fund a rebuild after an indifferent season. Sandro Tonali, Anthony Gordon and Tino Livramento are three players who could be sacrificed for the sake of moving forward.
Speaking about the potential disruption to the squad in the summer, TalkSPORT’s Simon Jordan even went as far as suggesting Bruno Guimaraes could be a casualty of this shift in transfer stance.
“Well, if I imagine a difficult time for a whole raft of reasons, if you’re selling. Now, people will say sometimes you have to sell players to refresh, and no club survives only on one decent player or two or three decent players, but they do build the best sides around them.
“So if you suddenly develop these wonderful players into actually being very, very good in English football, like Tonali, who got himself into all kinds of trouble, didn’t he? And the reward for them with Tonali is that he’ll go off somewhere else.
“Guimaraes will potentially go as well. I mean, they’ll keep the players that they bought, like Woltemade and people like that, because no other ****** will want them.
|But the bottom line is that I don’t see how it can’t be a difficult summer. I don’t see how Eddie can’t be more frustrated because in order to overcome the shortcomings of this season, they need to improve.”
Simon Jordan may be wide of the mark in expecting Bruno Guimaraes to leave this summer, but his point as a whole is a solid one. We wouldn’t expect Jordan to be familiar with the relationship Bruno has with the club, so he’ll only be looking at him as a sellable asset.
In terms of everything else Jordan said, about teams building around their best players, that’s a very valid point. So if Newcastle want to reach these lofty ambitions of being contenders by 2030, they can’t be seen to be selling their top stars.
Selling one top player to buy two or three good players isn’t progress. However, in the current financial climate, with the restrictions Newcastle faces and the fact that Eddie Howe’s squad is demonstrably way too small to be competitive on four fronts, it is probably the right move to make right now.
There’ll be time in the future to start adding world-class players to the ranks and keeping them at the club, building around them, but first, we need a good squad that can be rotated without seeing our form dive off a cliff.