Eddie Howe

[bobbydazzla]

2 hours ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

 

I feel like with our first trophy in forever and CL qualification we thought we might be able to convince players that we were an attractive destination. Certainly the likes of Joao Pedro, I had no reason to think we couldn't get them. 

 

If we're going up against any of the clubs that PSR doesn't apply to, then most times the player will choose those clubs over us.

 

They have more prestige, they can pay more, they can afford to spend more on the transfer fee.

 

To land a player like that, we need the stars to align. And the stars rarely do.

 

Last summer we were big game fishing, but the other fishermen we were competing against had bucketloads loads of chum and we were naively dangling a maggot thinking we had a genuine chance. 

[Kid Icarus]

3 hours ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

 

I feel like with our first trophy in forever and CL qualification we thought we might be able to convince players that we were an attractive destination. Certainly the likes of Joao Pedro, I had no reason to think we couldn't get them. 

I feel like with hindsight the players we missed out on will be because we maybe went in a step too late with some of them. Joao Pedro was ours when he was at Watford and we let him go to (understandably) pivot to Isak. If only we'd got both, but it's a tall order.

[Thumbheed]

6 hours ago, Zero said:

 

We played our best pressing formation with all pacey players deployed already

 

I meant possession retention but also our inability so score goals and change the dynamics of the game from a psychological point of view. 

 

I do think we've been less dominant in the press, but you put the defensive side under far more pressure when your not converting your chances and the opposition still feel theyre in the game. 

[bobbydazzla]

34 minutes ago, Thumbheed said:

 

I meant possession retention but also our inability so score goals and change the dynamics of the game from a psychological point of view. 

 

I do think we've been less dominant in the press, but you put the defensive side under far more pressure when your not converting your chances and the opposition still feel theyre in the game. 

We’re scoring plenty of goals, problem is we’re conceding more than we’re scoring

[Bimpy474]

Don't often agree with Simon 'Pompus' Jordan, but he said some very sensible stuff today on Eddie and our situation.

 

Simon Jordan has told Newcastle United not even Luis Enrique could do a better job than Eddie Howe in the current circumstances. The Magpies saw their Champions League hopes come to an end on Wednesday night when they were hammered by Barcelona at the Spotify Camp Nou.

 

Newcastle arrived in Barcelona with high hopes of pulling off a shock after enjoying the better of their last-16 first leg clash at St James’ Park, but only coming away with a 1-1 draw. And although Howe’s side only trailed 3-2 on the night at the break, they were swept away in the second-half as the hosts scored four times without reply.

 

Newcastle host bitter rivals Sunderland in the Tyne-Wear derby at St James' Park on Sunday afternoon, but their hopes of securing a top five finish appear slim.

 

But former Crystal Palace owner Jordan believes there are a number of problems that continue to hold the club back, and no one, with the tools currently available, can do a better job than Howe.

He told talkSPORT: "The challenge for them is: How do Newcastle United square this circle of having the idea of having the world's richest owners? Having this marvellous fanbase that are - not demanding success - but wanting it so much and obviously we saw that last year when they won the League Cup.

 

"And how do they do it? What are they, ninth in the league? Who is in front of them who should not be in front of them on paper, perhaps Aston Villa, perhaps Brentford and Everton?

"Other than that, where is the argument, what can Newcastle do? They've got to punch massively above their financial weight to break into the top six, so really and truly what we are talking with Newcastle being ninth in the Premier League, is if they go past Brentford and Everton and finish seventh or sixth, they've done their job.

 

"But they won't have done their job prima facie because they have been successful in getting into the Champions League.

"They have got the moniker of having the world's richest owners, but they have got the backdrop...the commercial reality (is) they cannot go pound-for-pound with these boys who are spending £250m every transfer window.

"They can't keep their best players, because their best players are going to legacy clubs like Liverpool. So what do they do? The only thing they can do is do something that they should have done and what they should be doing now, which is build a new stadium. Increase the capacity of the stadium, increase the revenues, get some more opportunities to be able to monetise themselves better.

 

"That is the only way Newcastle can achieve anything vaguely resembling what their CEO said about being a dominant force in 2030. That is it, end of discussion.

"You can bring in Luis Enrique if you want, you can bring in the reputed best managers in European football. Unless they are given the tools to work with, they are not going to do anything better than Eddie Howe is doing."

 

 

Edited March 19 by Bimpy474

[James]

I think with hindsight when Liverpool offered us a free shot at Ekitike if we’d open a deal with them for Isak we should have taken it.

[dcmk]

48 minutes ago, James said:

I think with hindsight when Liverpool offered us a free shot at Ekitike if we’d open a deal with them for Isak we should have taken it.

I don't think they were ever going to turn down the chance of signing Ekitike.  

 

They wanted both, but thought Isak was unavailable. 

[TheBrownBottle]

7 hours ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

 

I feel like with our first trophy in forever and CL qualification we thought we might be able to convince players that we were an attractive destination. Certainly the likes of Joao Pedro, I had no reason to think we couldn't get them. 

Big players want to play for teams who are trying to win the CL, not play in it.   Big players don’t want to play for clubs who celebrate getting CL football - they want to play for clubs where not to qualify is massive failure.  I don’t think a League Cup win adds any prestige whatsoever, as emotional as it was for us.  No footballer is choosing us over Chelsea, Man Utd or Liverpool - I wouldn’t if I was them. 
 

That doesn’t mean we aren’t attractive and can’t sign good players - but we need to get them on the way up, not when they’re established.   We should be shopping in the same places as Brighton and Brentford, and we’d be absolute favourites to sign players ahead of them.  We need to buy young players with huge potential resellability - any club outside a handful is a selling club; that’s what we are and need to be, only I think some of our management as well as our support has imagined otherwise, which culminated in last summer.

[Holmesy]

10 hours ago, TheBrownBottle said:

Big players want to play for teams who are trying to win the CL, not play in it.   Big players don’t want to play for clubs who celebrate getting CL football - they want to play for clubs where not to qualify is massive failure.  I don’t think a League Cup win adds any prestige whatsoever, as emotional as it was for us.  No footballer is choosing us over Chelsea, Man Utd or Liverpool - I wouldn’t if I was them. 
 

That doesn’t mean we aren’t attractive and can’t sign good players - but we need to get them on the way up, not when they’re established.   We should be shopping in the same places as Brighton and Brentford, and we’d be absolute favourites to sign players ahead of them.  We need to buy young players with huge potential resellability - any club outside a handful is a selling club; that’s what we are and need to be, only I think some of our management as well as our support has imagined otherwise, which culminated in last summer.

It's a topic that has been covered a number of times on here and people still try to find a way to argue against it, but they're arguing against common sense (which happens a lot on here). We should be thinking 2-3 windows/seasons ahead, significantly improving our scouting network and adopting a higher risk profile - become the best in the PL/world at unearthing top talent and give ourselves an edge - we have the finances to do it.

What happened last summer wasn't a one-off, it's the state of play - we will continue to get pipped to the best established talent by the tier of clubs above us. We might land one or two 'purples' and i'm not suggesting we shouldn't try to sign them but putting all our eggs in a few baskets left us desperate last summer, and look where we are. We seem to lack a long-term strategic plan to get where we want to go. It all feels a bit 2004 and at times, reactive.

Chelsea built a very successful business model (aside from being owned by a corrupt oligarch and fiddling the books) of loaning out 15-20 quality youngsters per season, and many of them got bought for decent prices.
Brighton have consistently punched above their weight using a data-led strategy and excellent managerial succession planning. 
Bournemouth consistently unearth very good young players who keep them punching above their weight in the league and make them healthy profits.

Again, to reiterate, i'm not suggesting we become a selling club or try to compete at the level of Bournemouth and Brighton. But they punch above their weight because they're incredibly smart about what they do. We're not competing in a level playing field, so we have to be incredibly smart about what we do to upset the natural order of the cartel, and I don't think we see a lot of smart thinking and long-term strategic planning from the club. It's all just a bit obvious for the 'richest club in the world'.

 

 

Edited March 20 by Holmesy

[Monters]

9 hours ago, TheBrownBottle said:

Big players want to play for teams who are trying to win the CL, not play in it.   Big players don’t want to play for clubs who celebrate getting CL football - they want to play for clubs where not to qualify is massive failure.  I don’t think a League Cup win adds any prestige whatsoever, as emotional as it was for us.  No footballer is choosing us over Chelsea, Man Utd or Liverpool - I wouldn’t if I was them. 
 

That doesn’t mean we aren’t attractive and can’t sign good players - but we need to get them on the way up, not when they’re established.   We should be shopping in the same places as Brighton and Brentford, and we’d be absolute favourites to sign players ahead of them.  We need to buy young players with huge potential resellability - any club outside a handful is a selling club; that’s what we are and need to be, only I think some of our management as well as our support has imagined otherwise, which culminated in last summer.

Polite questions,

When do stop being a selling club in this model?

How do you close any gap on the non selling clubs by selling them our best assets?

How do we eventually become a club that attracts the bigger / better players when we never win anything of significance? You dismissed the League Cup win…

Would we really be favourites to sign players over the clubs mentioned? They are happy to make up the numbers in the league and advertised themselves to players as an entry point into the league. Will we do that? Do you want us to do that?

 

Personally I don’t have the answers but do get frustrated at the mentions of Brighton / Brentford etc being Stella clubs when our fan base and lots on here would go mental at their finish positions in a normal year. 
 

I wish I knew what would enable us to jump from 7th / 8th to fighting for the league but it feels to me following Brighton is not that. 
 

I’m often wrong though! Case in point I was excited we signed Wissa 🤦‍♂️

[AyeDubbleYoo]

This is the difficult point. No doubt we have to be smarter, especially if we want to a larger number of signings. But we do have to aim much higher than Brighton and Brentford. 

[Ellis H]

Since the start of the 22/23 season, we've got 239 points and Man Utd have got 231. Nowt in it apart from about a billion pound spent and twice that on wages.

 

(The gap might be bigger if anyone can be arsed to work out Howe's NUFC Vs Man Utd)

 

Wrong thread but you get the idea.

 

 

Edited March 20 by Ellis H
wrong thread

[Holmesy]

37 minutes ago, Monters said:

Polite questions,

When do stop being a selling club in this model?

How do you close any gap on the non selling clubs by selling them our best assets?

How do we eventually become a club that attracts the bigger / better players when we never win anything of significance? You dismissed the League Cup win…

Would we really be favourites to sign players over the clubs mentioned? They are happy to make up the numbers in the league and advertised themselves to players as an entry point into the league. Will we do that? Do you want us to do that?

 

Personally I don’t have the answers but do get frustrated at the mentions of Brighton / Brentford etc being Stella clubs when our fan base and lots on here would go mental at their finish positions in a normal year. 
 

I wish I knew what would enable us to jump from 7th / 8th to fighting for the league but it feels to me following Brighton is not that. 
 

I’m often wrong though! Case in point I was excited we signed Wissa 🤦‍♂️

And that right there is why you can't have this discussion at a reasonable level on here. No one is saying or has said that they are stella clubs we should be competing with. We are literally talking about the way they operate behind the scenes, and if you're not able to understand the smart thinking and decision making that keeps them punching above THEIR weight, you're missing the whole point. 
We need a strategy that allows us to punch above OUR weight, not theirs. And our weight is a tier below the cartel unfortunately because the system has been designed that way. Competing head-to-head with them isn't an option because the system is rigged. So how do you get around a rigged system - with seriously smart thinking which we don't have, from the outside looking in.

Every club is a selling club to a degree - Man Utd lost Ronaldo to Real Madrid, Spurs lost Bale, Villa lost Grealish, Liverpool lost Trent etc. We should never operate as a selling club but we have to accept that right now, when we unearth and establish talent, bigger teams will come calling. But rather than going out to the market reactively, armed with £100m that everyone knows about, we should have their replacement already at the club or identified, scouted and strong relationship built with their club/agent.

 

 

 

Edited March 20 by Holmesy

[AyeDubbleYoo]

I don’t have a problem with selling the odd player.
 

The issue with the southern spreadsheet club model is more finding signings that are of the right level to help us get better while also not being on the radar of the top clubs. 

 

 

Edited March 20 by AyeDubbleYoo

[Froggy]

20 minutes ago, Ellis H said:

Since the start of the 22/23 season, we've got 239 points and Man Utd have got 231. Nowt in it apart from about a billion pound spent and twice that on wages.

 

(The gap might be bigger if anyone can be arsed to work out Howe's NUFC Vs Man Utd)

 

 

 

[Kid Icarus]

14 hours ago, James said:

I think with hindsight when Liverpool offered us a free shot at Ekitike if we’d open a deal with them for Isak we should have taken it.

That's a scenario that didn't exist, they wanted both and got both. 

[Conjo]

44 minutes ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

This is the difficult point. No doubt we have to be smarter, especially if we want to a larger number of signings. But we do have to aim much higher than Brighton and Brentford. 

 

What do you mean when saying aimimg much higher than these clubs? In terms of league position or quality of players? 

 

I wouldn't mind competing with them for the same players. We just need to be able to keep more of them when they break through.

[Holmesy]

Just now, AyeDubbleYoo said:

I don’t have a problem with selling the odd player. The issue with the southern spreadsheet club model is more finding signings that are of the right level to help us get better while also not being on the radar of the top clubs. 

Exactly, but is there anything stopping us hiring the brightest minds in the game of football to put that system in place? We're the richest club in the world - paying big transfer fees isn't the only way to spend that money. The head-to-head system has been designed to stop us competing in an obvious way with the European Super League teams, and it's working. So, let's do it in a different, smarter way. It's not for you and me to blueprint what that system looks like, it's for the people who run the club - I just question whether they themselves are smart enough to go down that route.
Bournemouth alone have had two CBs signed by Real Madrid and PSG - youngsters they unearthed and signed that seemingly weren't on the radar of the cartel, so these players are out there. 

[AyeDubbleYoo]

3 minutes ago, Conjo said:

 

What do you mean when saying aimimg much higher than these clubs? In terms of league position or quality of players? 

 

I wouldn't mind competing with them for the same players. We just need to be able to keep more of them when they break through.

Well both really. Presumably the players that those clubs target are below the level of the ones the top clubs go after, otherwise they would be finishing higher.

 

There are examples like Mbeumo who turn out to be top level, but the majority don’t.  
 

Everyone agrees we want cheaper and better signings who turn out to be brilliant and we can keep. You won’t get any argument from me on that, just not sure how much that tells us about what we should actually do. 
 

Either way we do need to develop our recruitment department and the data we have about potential signings.
 

But I still think we’ve made some great signings since the takeover, just last summer’s arrivals have underperformed and we lost Isak. 

 

 

Edited March 20 by AyeDubbleYoo

[Holmesy]

3 minutes ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

Well both really. Presumably the players that those clubs target are below the level of the ones the top clubs go after, otherwise they would be finishing higher.

 

There are examples like Mbeumo who turn out to be top level, but the majority don’t.  
 

Everyone agrees we want cheaper and better signings who turn out to be brilliant and we can keep. You won’t get any argument from me on that, just not sure how much that tells us about what we should actually do. 
 

Either way we do need to develop our recruitment department and the data we have about potential signings.
 

But I still think we’ve made some great signings since the takeover, just last summer’s arrivals have underperformed and we lost Isak. 

 

 

 

The two scenarios are entirely different though - Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton and the like have more filler players in their squads because of their relative standings and budgets, and i'm sure they accept that. But their average squads are interspersed with some exceptional young talent they unearth through smart scouting.

For us, because of our higher standing, those gems would be our squad players, some of whom would break through into the first team and establish themselves. So we've got quality first team acquisitions - the Brunos, Tonalis, Halls - with a conveyor belt of exceptional young talent coming through. If those clubs can find them, there's nothing stopping us from finding them. We just don't have the infrastructure in place or the strategy mindset to do that. Who that is dictated by, i've no idea, could be Eddie, could be PIF.
 

[ToonAbroad]

The whole embargoed Sundays section got broadcast on the website just now by mistake it seems if anyone is interested.

Schär targetting a Palace return...not too much else headline worthy that I got from it though. 

[SteV]

22 minutes ago, ToonAbroad said:

The whole embargoed Sundays section got broadcast on the website just now by mistake it seems if anyone is interested.

Schär targetting a Palace return...not too much else headline worthy that I got from it though. 

Yeah, I thought they weren’t supposed to be showing that when I was watching!

[Coffee_Johnny]

1 hour ago, Froggy said:

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

😂 genuine lol moment. It is not a bad stat though. 

[The College Dropout]

People are either stupid or acting stupid re: Brentford and Brighton.  
 

The idea isn’t to emulate them exactly to finish where they do in the league.  The plan is to leverage what they do well on a higher level to similarly over achieve and create revenue.  And then adjust as we grow. They don’t raise their wage bill to get a higher calibre of prospect - we will be doing that. 

[Froggy]

26 minutes ago, Coffee_Johnny said:

😂 genuine lol moment. It is not a bad stat though. 

 

Aye not a bad stat, but you'd swap the points for the FA Cup, I know that for sure.