Quantcast
Transfer News

Benitez reveals how Newcastle nearly lost out on star signing

|
Image for Benitez reveals how Newcastle nearly lost out on star signing

Newcastle manager Rafa Benitez has revealed how a dispute over “couple of million” could have led to the club losing out on winger Matt Ritchie in the summer.

The 27 year old signed from Bournemouth for £10million before the start of the season, but the Magpies boss says that Managing Director Lee Charnley was shocked at the Cherries’ asking price for the player, and had to be persuaded to shell out extra cash in order to land the winger. He is quoted by the Chronicle as saying

“With Ritchie Lee Charnley was phoning me to say the ‘price is that’ and we were not expecting that. I was saying, ‘please’, he is an important player, he has experience, we have to do it we cannot be worrying about a couple of million when we are in this position where we have to get out of this division.”

Ritchie has scored 15 goals in all competitions for Newcastle this season, and his ability and experience in the Championship has contributed hugely to the Magpies being on the cusp of promotion back to the top flight.

Benitez also explained how difficult it was to get signings into the club. There was huge turnover of players in the summer, and the Spaniard said that he had to work under tough financial constraints to ensure a profit on transfers was made:

“We had to work so hard, so quick to turn things round really quickly. We had to sell really well to have some money for buying new players but we still had to pay some (big) money for players. In some cases the value could be less but we still had to pay this money because we needed to sign the player.”

Share this article