Emotic

My expectations have been brought so low that I'd genuinely be chuffed if Odion Ighalo were to be unveiled today, mind.

I get the impression that there will be one or two "out of the blue" signings, on top of these rumoured ones. And those will be so much more exciting when they suddenly happen.

Nip in and gazump Arsenal for Bruno Guimares from Lyon. Imagine having an all-Brazilian central midfield pairing of Big Jow and Guimares. Absolute sex.

A young player from a slower league would need time to bed in and nurture, tbh. With Man City, he'd be a star in two years. With us in our current state, he'd be 2022 Hugo Viana.

Please no players who would be tied up at the AFCON, man, else Zero would be inconsolable.

Is Barcelona basically attempting to will their overpaid crocks to Newcastle FFS. Dembele asking for 40mil a year and Umtiti on 200K a week, man.

Isn't Belotti out with the same type of injury as Wilson?

Yep. “Familiar with a relegation scrap” signing, if true.

Ousman Dembele, Isco, Dybala and Ramsey would be some kind of permacrock Galactico fantasy come true, mind.

Isco, anyone? Real seems to want rid of him.

It's been patently obvious that Howe is extremely considerate in his interviews. He always bigs up his players, and never undermines them publicly. This keeps morale high and team spirit strong. He (or Tindall) even said Darlow was good, right when everyone was begging for Dubs to come back. I don't think he'd turn down 5 or 6 players if offered them, when we are fighting relegation and our best players are injured.

Ousmane Dembele on 40mil a year (or even half of that) would be taking the piss. It will immediately unsettle everyone else in the team, as well as disrupt any negotiation with other targets. It's probably just agent bullshit.

Watching that highlights video, his interceptions and one-touch layoffs are sublime, man.

We should gazump Tronna for Insigne if reports of him being a free agent are true. Perfect backup for Fraser in the "wee man" role.

OM just signed him this last July, he hasn’t been pulling up any trees for them, and he just had a major bust up with Sampaoli. I’d avoid him.

It's tough to be the new owners of a club at the bottom. Everything right now is a confounding factor. You cannot splash out on top top players as none of them want to come. You then target players who can first get you to safety, but you'd have to splash out too, just to get these players. That affects your budget (as well as your player quota) for the summer, IF you get to safety with these second-tier players that you have to now pay a load just to get them to agree to sign on for a relegation dogfight. Everything is complicated when your club is at the bottom.

Kennedy? Sounds more like Trump!

This is a fair comment and my own (wildly speculative) reading of the events since takeover is that the new owners had a Plan A Blueprint to follow in the event of a smooth, pre-season takeover. They tried to institute "Plan A", but were caught out by the fact that "Plan A" executive picks would balk as a) they were now under contract in the middle of a season; and b) Newcastle United is mired at matchday 14, at the foot of the table. So, they had to, very recently and belatedly, pivot to a "Plan B" - get a team to help with January transfers, and get us to safety as a first priority. Leave the big hires for later, when we're safe. Again, wildly speculative, but not an impossible scenario.

Richard Scudamore as CEO and Michael Edwards as DoF/Sporting Director would be a executive "Dream Team". Scudamore would certainly know how to navigate the snake pit that is the Premier League. Our top priority now is to NOT. GET. RELEGATED. That can be done without a top CEO or a DoF for now. We did it last season with Charnley. Just do that and then bring in some solid picks with a vision of a title in three years.

And in order to attract that calibre of executive, I'd daresay that we'd need to offer assurances that the club's trajectory will be ever upwards, with an eye on the ultimate prize. It won't be easy at this juncture when we're in the bottom three, with just one win this season. The prospect of one (or more) "lost years" in the Championship will temper the appetites of top-quality football execs, no matter how much the proffered pay (and it's not like PIF would pay stupid money either). I'd postulate that a fair few of our prospective targets would want to wait until later in the season, with us where we are in the table. And our owners are moving strategically to get us up the table as a first priority, without rushing into quickie hires of what ought to be long-term staff to fulfil a vision.

This is precisely why a "short-term hire" to assist Howe out for the January window isn't the disaster that some on here claim. It's just a small team that will help Howe land some solid players that will help get us out of the foot of the table, whilst Howe continues to concentrate on the training and tactics. A "proper" DoF will then be a part of the larger reconstruction, provided that we move far up enough in the table to have a measure of confidence that we'd be building for a challenge for the Premier League title, and not the Championship title.

Spot on. Take the CEO role, for example - they need someone who knows the league, knows the movers and shakers, can schmooze with them to get what the club wants, and yet is firm enough and respected enough to tell them to get stuffed in the face of any anticompetitive shenanigans. And this is just for the "football side" of the corporation that he (or she) will have to run. There aren't a lot out there who meet these qualifications and most of them are contracted to our rivals in the league. If Newcastle United has any ambitions whatsoever to be in the big leagues in the medium-to-long term, the corporate hires have to be as thoroughly selected, top-quality candidates, as much as the playing staff. If it takes some time, I'm willing to wait. On the playing side, we have a good manager. Let him pick who he wants to get us out of the bottom three come January. Not hard to do. The CEO and DoF can come in later and work with Howe on post-safety reconstruction and review the squad at that juncture.

That's right, good managers have systematic approaches to tackling a particular opponent and will clearly communicate each player's role in the system. You can do wonders with limited players by making them "functional" whatever their skill level. We need Howe to find everyone's function and optimise them if we're to stay up.

Fill yer boots, boys! Sure, it's the Mail, but we look sound here. Everton though, poor Rafa. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-10108067/How-Premier-League-club-spend-transfers-FFP-rules.html

Just based on Youtube scouting of the last two pages worth of names, a forward line that featured Luis Diaz, ASM, and that Georgian lad would be absolutely mental