Newcastle United will have to pay over the odds in both wages and fees in January, according to The Daily Mail.
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With Eddie Howe’s team currently three points off safety with some difficult fixtures ahead, things look incredibly bleak. Indeed, the opening 17 games of the season have yielded just one win and, while Watford and relative safety are within touching distance, it would take some miracle to turn things around.
Clearly, history is not on the club’s side. No one in the Premier League era has stayed up after just one win so far into the season but, then again, no one (at least in theory) had the resources Newcastle have heading into the January transfer window.
How risky is overpaying?
Hugely.
We’ve seen the likes of Portsmouth, QPR and Sunderland struggle to shift players on huge wages when dropping down into the Championship and the idea of gladly overpaying is somewhat crass in the wider scheme of things.
Still, it might be a necessary evil. If the club can convince top-level players such as Kieran Trippier to join the club, perhaps that can give them a mid-season lift other teams just cannot afford to fund. It’s not as if Newcastle are yet cut adrift and that injection of quality could seriously help.
Are the owners prepared to do that?
Speaking on the Totally Football Show earlier this month, The Athletic’s George Caulkin did suggest that the main focus of the new PIF owners was to ensure Newcastle were a club that makes money.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t pay of course but to imagine they would be prepared to spend the kind of money Manchester City and Chelsea did upon their takeovers does some somewhat farfetched.
“For all the sort of talk about Newcastle being the richest club in the world – theoretically they are – that’s very much not how they’re going to be run,” he said.
“The idea is that it makes money, not loses money.”
