Newcastle United bristle at being branded the world’s richest football club. If it was up to them, they’d adopt the rather less exciting moniker of the world’s most careful club.
“We have an FFP budget and we stick to it,” minority owner Amanda Staveley told the Financial Times’ Business of Football summit earlier this month.
“That guides a lot of our transfer policy – we can’t afford to have a dud and we have to be very careful and analytical in everything we do.”
Careful isn’t the same as cautious, though. Newcastle’s transfer team rolled the dice to sign striker Alexander Isak from Real Sociedad in a club record £59million deal in August and that gamble is starting to pay off just as the race for Champions League qualification tightens.
“We might have overpaid for the player he is now,” was the stark admission of one insider to i when the deal was first struck.
A transfer delegation had flown to San Sebastian to table an opening offer of £33million but after that was flatly rejected, they returned within a few hours to agree to improve the offer by £26m with £3m of add-ons and a 10 per cent sell-on clause thrown in. That’s how highly they rated his potential.
There were no regrets about the deal, even then. “In years to come it will look like an absolute bargain,” the same source said. If Isak’s late season impact ends up re-energising their top four hopes and opening the door to Champions League revenues, that prediction will have come true sooner than expected.
Momentum might be swinging back to the Magpies at just the right time given the travails of others.
While Spurs fracture, a united Newcastle are coalescing around the electrifying talent of Isak and a team as well drilled as any in the division.
If the accusation was that they’d become pedestrian, Isak is the antidote. At his very best the Sweden striker combines athleticism, searing pace and tremendous technique to devastating effect and neither Wolves nor Nottingham Forest were able to live with him.
While every striker in the Premier League is operating in the shadow of the extraordinary Erling Haaland, Isak’s goals-per-minute record is actually second only to the Norwegian.
Haaland has scored every 75 minutes he’s been on the pitch in the Premier League whereas Isak (who has only played 619 minutes so far) has netted every 103. Six goals in seven starts – some played when he wasn’t fully fit – suggests he is a natural born finisher.
“Everything that a centre-forward needs, he has,” Eddie Howe, a man not prone to exaggeration, said last week. “He’s capable of great things.”
What has held him back so far is a thigh injury suffered back in September. Howe sparked concern a fortnight ago when he admitted that Isak, despite now being injury-free, was not yet ready to play a full 90 minutes.
What he meant, he later explained, was that Isak didn’t yet have the stamina to meet the demands of a Newcastle playing style based on Howe’s mantra that “intensity is our identity”. The implication there was clear: there is much more to come.
Newcastle will need him given the tantalising run of games they have when the international break resumes. Two points shy of ailing Spurs in fourth, the Magpies welcome Manchester United to St James’ Park next up. Arsenal, Brighton and Antonio Conte’s side are all yet to journey to the North East.
As they bid for a transformative top four place, behind-the-scenes Newcastle have rolled out the next phase of their recruitment plan.
The club have now started interviews for seven first team and emerging talent scout roles that will cover South America, Latin America and 13 European countries identified as markets the Magpies can move into.
A sizeable part of their remit will be to help Newcastle steal a march on Europe’s elite when it comes to moving for the best young talent in the globe. It feels like a club on the move.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/tbVl3vZ
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