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An innovative strategy Newcastle can take advantage of?

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Twitter’s influence on football is growing ever stronger. Not just can you read about what smug Michael Owen is saying, but you can get closer to footballers in an age where the fan and the player are quite a way apart. Well, now it seems like Twitter is not only giving fans the opportunity to find out more about their players, but it’s also allowing them to have an influence on teams’ transfers. I bring to you the ‘twansfer’.

Ok, that’s a stupid name and one that I won’t use again, but fans of Yeovil Town have actually had a real influence on who the club has bought by airing their views on Twitter. Young Yeovil manager Terry Skiverton asked fans to tweet him suggestions on who the club should buy in the summer, and the ideas came flooding in. A little time later and Yeovil had signed free agent Kieran Agard, a player who had been highly recommended by many fans. So, is this innovative strategy possibly one that Newcastle could use in the future?

To be honest it seems pretty unlikely. Newcastle pay Graham Carr and the rest of their scouts hundreds of thousands of pounds to search out the best talent across Europe and around the world, and of course their job depends upon how good the players that they recommend are. Sign a few Cheik Tiote’s and the scout gets a pat on the back, bring in someone like Xisco and you’re given a right rollicking.

However, with all the football that is available to watch on TV and online, there’s no questioning that a lot of fans have a great knowledge of many different leagues. Fans are no longer just going by the stats on Football Manager, we’re actually watching football from around the world, being tipped off by fellow fans and then checking them out for ourselves. Whether that means we could do the jobs of professional scouts, I’m not so sure.

It is a good idea, though, and perhaps the way to go about it would be to see who the fans recommend, then get the scouts to go and watch them for themselves. It’s nice to see a young manager showing a bit of innovation and trying ideas and for smaller clubs who can’t fork out a lot of money on scouts, it might well turn out to be a decent idea. For the likes of Newcastle and other Premier League clubs it’s perhaps a bit far-fetched, but if Alan Pardew asked you to tweet some transfer targets to him, who would you suggest?

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