This is/has been a great Newcastle United transfer window – No matter what the haters say | OneFootball

The Newcastle United transfer window only has one more week to go now.

Then we can thankfully forget all about this summer 2024 window and start stressing about the January 2025 one!

We would all love it to be like Football Manager or whatever other online/computer game you might play (forgive me if these aren’t the best kind of up to date descriptions of what the cool kids (and old kids!) are playing these days, as you might guess, they aren’t my thing).

However, real life is a little different.

On Tuesday I caused a little bit of a stir with my last article on The Mag, entitled ‘This is an excellent Newcastle United transfer window – Even if no more signings made’….

Clearly some Newcastle United fans not agreeing!

I just wanted to have another go at explaining what for me is something so transparently obvious, though that is just my opinion.

For round figures, these six transfer windows under Eddie Howe and the current Newcastle United owners, have seen overall spending on transfers of around £452m, whilst in terms of selling players, only around £108m has been recouped.

These are the significant transfers (more than £1m) in and out of the club, in these most recent six transfer windows, since the Newcastle United takeover:

JANUARY 2022

IN:

£12m Kieran Trippier

£25m Chris Wood

£3m (loan) Matt Targett

£13m Dan Burn

£41.65m Bruno Guimaraes

SUMMER 2022

IN:

£12m Matt Targett

£10m Nick Pope

£35m Sven Botman

£63m Alexander Isak

OUT:

JANUARY 2023

IN:

£45m Anthony Gordon

£3m Harrison Ashby

OUT:

£5m Jonjo Shelvey

SUMMER 2023

IN:

£7m Yankuba Minteh

£58m Sandro Tonali

£38m Harvey Barnes

£38m Tino Livramento

OUT:

£15m Chris Wood

£23m Allan Saint-Maximin

IN:

OUT:

SUMMER 2024

IN:

£28m Lewis Hall

£4m Odysseas Vlachodimos

£15m Will Osula

OUT:

£35m Elliot Anderson

£33m Yankuba Minteh

(The transfer figures I have used above are the ones generally reported and in most cases we don’t know the exact figures, however, for these purposes in this article, I think it is simply about seeing the bigger picture.)

As I said above, for round figures, these six transfer windows under Eddie Howe and the current Newcastle United owners, have seen overall spending on transfers of around £452m, whilst in terms of selling players, only around £108m has been recouped.

If/when Marc Guehi is finally allowed to leave by Crystal Palace, say for £65m, that would make it £112m spent in this Newcastle United transfer window.

It would also make it £517m spent in three years since the takeover.

Of the £108m of players sold, £68m of that was due to Minteh and Anderson going, to square off the PSR shortfall by the 30 June 2024 deadline.

The bottom line is that even with amortisation (spreading the purchase price over the length of a new sign’s contract), it all eventually catches up with you.

Fact is that Mike Ashley had left a squad with very few saleable assets, certainly not beyond the key players that needed to be kept.

The sales of Anderson and Minteh have solved the immediate problem of that 30 June 2024 deadline and to an extent helped with the finances going forward, especially taking into account the £70m losses of the 2021/22 season that have now dropped off the three-season PSR. However, in reality this has just helped stabilise the position and given a slightly better platform to move forward once again. The future is very bright, I have no doubt.

This is how bizarre things have got in my opinion.

As I reckon that even if Newcastle United break their transfer record this month, there will be STILL a number of NUFC fans talking about this having been a disappointing Newcastle United transfer window!

I have also seen plenty people wanting to use the sales of Minteh and Anderson as one of the key reasons to be expecting far higher incoming transfer activity in this window. As though we were starting from scratch with PSR and the finances generally and the reported £68m should then be added to whatever the club were able to spend without that.

That is totally looking at it the wrong way!

The sales of Minteh and Anderson were in effect helping to pay off (in PSR terms) the signings of Bruno, Botman, Trippier, Tonali, Pope, Barnes, Isak, Gordon, Livramento….

Maybe this Newcastle United transfer window can be seen as having to take a step back with the sales of that pair BUT we are still taking a couple of steps forward, with the likes of Hall, Kelly (who looks very good, to me at least) and Guehi, once he arrives!