I have tried to stay relaxed and positive about this Newcastle United transfer window, constantly telling those around me to stay calm and trust the process, but the time has come to ask the question.
What on earth are Newcastle United playing at with regards to bringing new players in?
I then saw the Lewis Jones article on The Mag yesterday that this has been a good transfer window, even if no more new signings, my head nearly exploded!!
For me, this was the transfer window where we made our big moves to create the squad capable of winning trophies and being regulars in the Champions League, I based this on a few assumptions and educated guesses with regards to our financial position.
June 30th 2024 brought us to the dawn of a new era or so I thought as it meant the massive losses from the takeover season of 21/22 were finally off the three year PSR cycle, having inherited a Championship bound squad languishing at the bottom of the Premier League, which meant that drastic action was required and indeed taken by the new owners, spending heavily to keep us in the league with zero income from marketing and players no other clubs wanted.
This resulted in a net loss of over £70m in that financial year and as we saw in the summer, this was a key part (along with over £73m losses in 2022/23) that left us in grave danger of breaching the PSR rules (although not all expenditure/losses count towards the PSR calculations).
With also significant money spent on new signings in summer 2023, that fed into a necessary sale of squad players in June 2024 to make up a widely reported £50m+ PSR shortfall for the three years up to the end of June 2024.
Newcastle United might have had plans on what they wanted to do but we’re reliant on other clubs wanting to buy our “surplus” and so I think they did a fantastic job to get two players sold for what reportedly equalled our record outgoing transfer fee when Elliot Anderson went to Forest and our third biggest fee ever received, for Yankuba Minteh, a player who never even trained with our first team, let alone at a £27m profit!!
So on July 1st I started checking all the media feeds like a man possessed for the inevitable influx of top quality players to take us to that next level…
I’m still checking like a lunatic every 30 minutes and still have nothing to show for it, except for pitying looks from my long suffering wife.
