Newcastle Utd are having a tough time of it in the summer transfer window and manager Rafa Bentiez has blamed the “crazy” market for failure to recruit his targets.
Inflation has gone through the roof among Premiership teams, illustrated most tellingly by Swansea rejecting a £40 million bid from Everton for Gylfi Sigurdsson. The Toffess are flush after selling Romelu Lukaku to Man Utd for £75 million, and the prices being quoted for players are becoming stratospheric. It has left Newcastle struggling to recruit.
So far they have signed just Christian Atsu and Eibar defender Florian Lejeune, and fears have abounded regarding Benitez’s future, as he is said to be extremely frustrated by the lack of activity in the transfer market. But the Spaniard, who hoped to have most of his targets landed in time for pre-season training, which began last week, has deflected blame away from the club’s negotiators and laid it at the feet of the craziness of the big clubs.
“The top sides have a lot of money and the others are spending too,” he said. “It’s not easy for a lot of teams because the market is a little bit crazy. We have to try to do our best. We know where we are – that is not ideal because everybody wants to see a lot of players signing already – but we have to keep working and see what we can do.”
Benitez was promised around £100 million to bolster his squad this summer, but thus far Newcastle have only spent a fraction of that. “We can do nothing other than just keep working to find the players that we want, and hopefully we can do it,” he added. They already have a strong team, one that was good enough to win the Championship, but it is clear that quality reinforcements are needed.
Fortunately for Newcastle, their rivals are also struggling. Fellow promoted clubs Brighton & Hove Albion and Huddersfield have not exactly set the world alight with their transfer dealings so far. Brighton have signed a decent goalkeeper and an Ingolstadt midfielder, which is not exactly going to send rivals quaking in their boots, while Huddersfield have signed loanee Aaron Mooy on a permanent basis and snapped up Tom Ince, a player that has never really cut it in the Premiership.
You can get 8/11 on Newcastle to finish the 2017-18 season as the top promoted club and that still looks a really good bet. When Mike Ashley finally gets the chequebook out those odds could plummet so it is worth getting in there sooner rather than later. Newcastle are better than even money with 5Dimes, a bookmaker with extremely competitive odds, as this review shows, to beat Huddersfield away in their second game, and that is pretty telling.
The Magpies are all the way out at 9/2 in the relegation betting lines and rated as better than Huddersfield, Burnley, Brighton, Swansea and Watford. When you consider the way Bournemouth and Crystal Palace are spending and the season West Brom enjoyed last season, they are unlikely to be sucked into it, and Newcastle must aspire to be lumped in with that lot as a bare minimum next season.
There is still a long way to go between now and the close of the transfer window, and the club will have to work hard to strengthen, but there is still plenty of cause for optimism ahead of next season as Benitez sounds committed to the project and spending should ramp up across the board soon now that major dominoes like Lukaku have fallen down.
