‘I have still got so much to give’: Callum Wilson on leaving Newcastle and new opportunities | OneFootball

Callum Wilson has been watching a lot of football. It wasn’t all preparation for a month of punditry. He feels he has watched too much in the last few months; the last two years, really. And not from the DAZN studio or a gantry but the dugout. During his time analysing the Club World Cup, he became a footballer without a club, his stay at Newcastle ending when his contract expired. Yet it will not prompt a free transfer to any of the sport’s broadcasters. Not yet, anyway.

“I am 33. I have still got so much to give in the game,” he said. “I feel mentally and physically still able to more than contribute in however many games in a season.”

It was why he left Newcastle. Theirs was a successful season: a first trophy since 1969, a fifth placed finish to return to the Champions League. Yet his was a frustrating campaign on a personal level: a tally of 18 Premier League appearances does not tell the whole story when 16 were in cameos, many of them brief, and the goalscorer’s only goal came in the FA Cup.

Wilson suffered from the success of a man he regards as one of the finest in his position in the global game. If he was an underused understudy, it is because the first choice was first class.

“It is just difficult, you are playing at a club when you have got arguably one of the best strikers in world football at the moment, in the form of Alex Isak,” he said. “To break in is difficult. I am never one who shies away from a fight, I would happily be there to push and take my opportunity when it arose, but it just didn’t seem to arise in the back end of the season. I was fit from January, I made two starts and numerous substitute appearances but they were all five or 10 minutes here or there. Alex deserves the right [to play]. He had has a fantastic two seasons at the club, all credit to Alex, but I don’t see myself permanently cemented as a No 2 striker.”

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Wilson played his last game for Newcastle against Everton at St James' Park in May (Getty Images)

And it was that sense that drove him to leave St James’ Park after “an amazing” five seasons. “I don’t want the last few years of my career to fizzle out and sit around on the bench and just collect money but not actually contribute to these wins, to these Champions League games, to these cup finals,” he explained. “You want to be part of it, you want to be scoring and assisting in these games and deciding these matches. Being the character I am, being as motivated as I am and ambitious in terms of trying to get into the hundred club and things like that, it was the right decision to leave Newcastle.”

The hundred club Wilson cites is the Premier League striking elite, the men with a century of goals in the division. He has been stuck on 88 for more than a year.

Yet a forward who prides himself on his numbers can threaten to be in a different sort of hundred club. He averaged a goal every 109 minutes in the Premier League in 2023-24, one every 104 the previous season. It is a return many another forward could only envy. But, Wilson reflected: “You have to be on the pitch to get these opportunities. When you are sitting on the bench, you are watching the team create so many chances but you are not on the pitch to take them, you are itching to get on.”

Now he is itching for another chance. “You want to play at the highest level so that is my ambition,” he added. “I am not saying wherever I go, I have to be first-choice striker but the rotation is going to be fair. I feel like I can break in and dislodge people within different leagues in my position.” And there was an Isak-shaped roadblock to his ambitions at Newcastle, a player with 44 league goals in the last two seasons.

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Newcastle qualified for the Champions League after finishing fifth in the top flight (Getty Images)

Newcastle don’t want to sell Isak. Wilson could not bank on him moving on. “If I was to pride myself on staying because Alex might leave and he doesn’t leave, it bites me on the backside,” he said. But there were conversations about his future with Eddie Howe, his former Bournemouth manager. Theirs has been a productive, long-term alliance. Now Wilson is looking for another patron.

He is determined to be in the best possible shape. “I am going to put myself now into a fitness camp for a short period of time and during that time I will be making a decision on my future,” he said. And meanwhile, Newcastle face the question of how to replace him.

Wilson’s punditry career has given him a glimpse of one of their summer striking targets. Instead, Joao Pedro scored a Club World Cup semi-final double for Chelsea. “He looks like a fantastic signing,” Wilson said. “Newcastle were trying to sign him as well which unfortunately didn’t happen for them.”

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Isak is among the Premier League's hottest property (Getty Images)

A new addition to the punditry team has tried to be an empathetic assessor of his peers. “When a striker misses an opportunity, it is not for the want of trying,” he said. “Was it the wrong technique or what happened five seconds before? I was trying to analyse it from that point of things rather than criticising.”

Indeed, he said, he has never needed the pundits to find fault in his game when it has gone wrong. “I am probably my biggest critic and I analyse myself more than anyone else would so when I play well, I don’t really feel I need to seek validation of people telling me I play good,” he added.

But he hopes to play, and play well. Even as he explores his future, he is hoping to postpone part of it. Punditry, he says, was about “experiencing something new, something different, something I have thought would I be interested in post career”. But that career, he believes, has plenty of games and goals left in it.