Newcastle face another summer of stress as Arsenal land first blows of another tiring transfer saga | OneFootball

We all know by now from bitter and repeated experience that the January transfer window is the very dampest of squibs. It’s never any good, very little ever actually happens, a good deal of what does happen will backfire massively, and the happiest clubs are generally the ones who are able to do sod all through the month through choice rather than necessity or failure.

Unless you’re Man City, of course, for whom just casually dropping another £100m on shiny first-team squad additions has become the norm.

But the most interesting line of the window may have emerged right at the very end, about a transfer that not only didn’t happen but had absolutely no chance of happening. Not in this window at least, where the idea was ‘stupid’ and ‘complete nonsense’.

And that non-transfer is, of course, Sandro Tonali not leaving Newcastle to not join Arsenal. We have lost track of whether we’ve double-and-triple-negatived ourselves back into positive or not there, but forget about that

What’s significant isn’t that Tonali’s agent – or at least some agent of some kind – was touting him to Arsenal. Nobody up to and including Tonali, Andrea Berta, the mystery agent, Arsenal and Newcastle thought that there might be a transfer to be done now.

This wasn’t the last forlorn act of the January window; it was the first bombshell of the summer. This was a tone-setting jolt. A scene-setter. A little controlled explosion that does no damage now but lets everyone know what the vibe for Newcastle’s summer is going to be.

And, yes, it’s going to be another summer when the vast majority of the noise is going to be about which big-name players are leaving rather than which big-name players are coming in. It’s going to be just like 2025, basically, but (in all likelihood) without the redeeming quality of some lovely Champions League football to look forward to no matter how it all played out.

That’s a significant aggravating factor for Newcastle, who are finding that the world domination they thought would be theirs by now is proving extremely hard to come by.

They are a better team than the one they had before the Saudi takeover. They’ve managed to win a trophy. But you do start to wonder how much all of this has been worth it. This was a club that had probably unmatched levels of goodwill from fans of other clubs.

Sure, we’d all rather be hated and successful than beloved and bottlesome. Being Fergie’s Man United was definitely better than being Keegan’s Newcastle, in the end. But Newcastle do seem to have thrown that ‘second club’ status away for not an awful lot.

They still haven’t made any truly transformative signing since winning the tainted lottery. They’ve signed more good players than they otherwise might, but via a combination of location, pesky rules and their own failings, they haven’t really snapped up any one individual player that it would have been inconceivable to imagine them signing before it all happened.

We’ve said it before, but this is why Robinho was, in so many ways, still a vastly significant moment in Manchester City’s history, and a huge stepping stone to what they have become. He may have done relatively little himself to herald City’s on-field transformation, but what he represented as an avatar for the new power City now wielded was far more important.

Newcastle just haven’t had that moment. And when the good players they have signed have elevated themselves to the status of genuine elite, it’s been hard to keep hold of them. Alexander Isak is gone. The Tonali jungle drums are now beating furiously. It feels like only a matter of time before someone waves an enormous fat contract under Bruno Guimaraes’ nose given he’s now 28, has two years left on his Newcastle deal and realistically one really massive contract left in him, wherever that may be.

It would certainly be asking a lot to expect him to hang around for another crappy part of the cycle in which Newcastle appear to have become stuck: good and big enough to have excellent seasons, but not good or big enough to manage two in a row when the European workload hits.

There’s still time for this season’s current course to be altered. The Premier League mid-table remains enormously congested, and Newcastle themselves have already shown how outsized the jumps and stumbles within it can be after just a couple of good results or a small handful of bad ones.

But they sit 11th in the table, and it’s almost impossible to make any convincing claim that this represents any kind of false position. It’s a position befitting exactly what they currently appear to be: a capable but flawed and inconsistent mid-table Premier League team.

It could be worse, they could be Spurs, but it could and should also definitely be better. Yet the early shots across Newcastle’s bow suggest another summer spent struggling and fighting just to stand still.