stozo

I think people here are just generally getting a bit delirious with everything that is going on. Briefing media that we are moving on to other targets, after Brentford demand £40m for a 29 year old with a max of 2 years left on his contract and who is currently on strike to force a move, is a perfectly valid negotiating tactic.

To be fair, if we’re only offering him £200k per week then what do people expect to happen? He’s obviously going to want a move to somewhere he can get paid 50%+ more. On the flip side, I don’t think it’s the wrong move for us to control our wage bill. Now is the point though where we need to become Palace/Brighton/Brentford style difficult negotiators. He is for sale for £150m and until we get that fee he is staying.

Pinning the Isak and Trafford stuff on him really annoys me. It's obvious to anyone who has read anything about the club that we were once again razor tight on PSR this year - which is why we signed only Osula last Summer and sold Almiron and Kelly in January. We certainly could have re-signed Isak and signed Trafford - and then sat ourselves down on June 30 and watched the fire sale to meet the PSR deadline become an annual tradition instead of a horrible one-off.

None of us have any idea about the consequences of his decisions, because we have very little idea who made what decisions.

Yep. And I think the bust of a loan also means he still fails to qualify for a UK work permit, so presumably it’ll be another loan this year.

Bruno is our top earner at sub-£200k per week. I imagine Isak will be in the region of £150kpw based on the fact he signed pre-Bruno extension and that he wasn’t an elite player when he signed. So you are looking at more like £10m per year. There are then a few things to consider. Number one is the main problem is not the Premier League’s PSR rules, it’s UEFA’s wages to turnover ratio rules. If you give Isak an extra £200k per week then MAYBE Longstaff was on £50k per week - so that means you still have to take another £150k per week off the wage bill to even stand still before signing another player. Then you factor in that Isak re-signing breaks the dam on our wage control. Every single negotiation you do after that (renewal or signing) becomes benchmarked against that. Botman, Gordon et al. now know you can and do go that high, so every negotiation becomes more expensive. And finally, it’s very conceivable £350kpw doesn’t get the deal done. I put a plus on the end for a reason. It is absolutely not inconceivable that a Liverpool or Chelsea of this world make it known to his agent that he’d get £400kpw-£500kpw there and that then becomes the figure you have to match.

I think this is the problem most of our fans have right now though - we’ve become a bit detached from the PSR reality. Put simply, there is no way we can renew Isak at £350kpw AND substantially invest in the squad. The implications of doing the Isak deal would both massively erode our PSR headroom directly but also in a secondary way by moving the dial on what we pay our current and future players.

Let’s not kid ourselves this is what will make a difference to Isak. The difference is are we going to pay him £350kpw+ or not.

It’s negotiation time for Isak. I don’t think he wants to leave per se, but he wants to be paid as a Top 5 world striker - which is going to mean £350k per week plus. This is the summer where he either gets us to stump that up or he starts the process of looking elsewhere. I suspect the noise is all part of that negotiation process. FWIW, and it sucks this is the case, we absolutely should not renew him at a Top 5 world striker price. It’s going to be fucking horrible losing him but we cannot afford to renew him at £350kpw+ on our current revenue - not least because that becomes the benchmark every current or future top Newcastle player works towards. It will massively hinder our ability to squad build. The move is sell at £150m or above and rebuild.

This should be pinned at the top of the forum. A rare dose of common sense.

Aoife Mannion confirmed - https://www.newcastleunited.com/en/news/aoife-mannion-joins-newcastle-united-women

Great to see.

@JonBez comesock any more ITK gossip on who might be next to give us some good news to distract us from the Ekitike saga?!

It's about the same if we sell at £130m. Rice went for £105m which West Ham booked in full, because as you say he is homegrown. We bought Isak for £63m, but have already amortised £31.5m of the fee. So effectively you subtract the £31.5m remaining from the total fee (let's say £130m) and then you have your PSR headroom - so basically about £100m, which is similar to Rice. The one unknown which could hurt us is if Sociedad have any kind of sell-on clause.

At £130m you’ll walk away with about £100m additional PSR headroom, which using West Ham’s sale of Rice as a guide probably gets you four £40-£60m players-ish.

Very interesting 12-15 months ahead if Ekitike happens. Very hard to see how the maths works on Elanga, Ekitike, Trafford and a Scalvini-esque RCB, without a substantial sale somewhere.

Yeah - it flies in and out of Frankfurt (or more precisely, usually the nearby Aschaffenburg) regularly so my initial thought was it could be a plane Eintracht use but from the photos of where it's been & the limited recent flight data I can see online it doesn't follow any pattern of use by Eintracht. And it's flown to Innsbruck several times. I can see 29 December 2024 and 22 January 2025 as the most recent (you generally need to pay to access full data of a longer period - and I'm not that committed!).

Just did some very amateur sleuthing to see if there might be anything to this - no obvious links to either Eintracht or football more generally. And it's flown to Innsbruck before, so this isn't an unusual journey by the look of it - https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/11725678. Sorry to ruin everyone's day.

I half wonder whether we are going for Ekitike this Summer (potentially at a release clause level) to try and create a situation where it forces Liverpool to move for him this Summer, and in turn makes us re-signing Isak easier. If Liverpool did feel they needed to swoop in to get him at his release clause then summer, then doing Wirtz + Ekitike this Summer and then Isak next Summer is a crazy high level of spend...potentially to the point where it makes Isak at north of £120m unviable for them.

It's obviously harder to judge new signings in the women's game given we see far less of other teams but this feels a bit of 'Hmmmm' signing. Southampton finished 13 points behind us last season, so signing a full back from there doesn't feel like the start of a 'We're going to smash the league this season' approach.

11 July in my book. I'm not super worried as things stand, but if we haven't got one player in within the next fortnight I'd be starting to worry.

Any rumours on who we might sign? I imagine with the departures we are looking at maybe 7-10 new arrivals?

Well at least we can stop complaining about us not doing anything now.

Not sure Pivas will as I think he may still be ineligible for a UK permit. So imagine it will be back out on loan somewhere again.

I presume we are getting very little news until closer to July 1. My guess would be we'll want to book costs for new signings in the next financial year, allowing the current financial year to end in a profit (or at least low level loss).