Newcastle United fans – Summer transfer window silly season has opened even earlier than usual | OneFootball

As the season draws to a close, serious football supporters, including Newcastle United fans, start to prepare for a summer of cold turkey.

During the enforced hiatus that comes in the years between Euros and World Cups, your only hope is looking for action in leagues elsewhere in the world.

However, if, like me, you are a Newcastle supporter first and a football fan second, this always delivers a greatly reduced reward.

The big irony in that statement is it’s not as if until very recently there has been much in the way of a reward for us as Newcastle United fans; other than not (always) getting relegated!

Remember when we only wanted a team that tried?

Well we certainly have that now!

Five more cup finals to get us enough points to get us into the Champions League and then I can crack open that nice bottle of Westvleteren I have been saving for the occasion.

Anyhow, I digress.

One thing I tend to do most summers is to start look for something to fill that gap, and those like me who have no other sporting interest, often start looking around whatever football related content online that can help you scratch that itch.

Until the last few transfer windows there had never been any point in following Newcastle summer transfer rumours as… well… there were none… other than the S…ts Direct owner’s annual leaks about this year’s transfer kitty and a few of the usual transfer suspects’ names being bandied around at season ticket renewal time.

Suddenly, the last three transfer windows have all had a purpose and we have all become experts at sifting through the stories where any half decent overpriced European based player was linked to the club.

With any big name players looking to move, we invariably found our name being tagged onto the end of the list of interested parties regardless of any interest from the player or the club!

The only one of these rumours that seemed to eventually become true was Sven Botman, and that took two transfer windows, the rest remaining just rumours.

However, the silly season seems to have begun early this year!

I have already had the pleasure of reading two articles in particular, one of which says that Liverpool have allocated £70m, another one £100m, to buy Bruno in the summer.

While that would represent a tidy profit for the club it overlooks three fairly major points:

Newcastle United don’t need the money.

The club are clearly building the team around him.

Liverpool are not guaranteed Champions League football next year.

ASM is apparently a £30m  target for the Gunners over the summer season as he’s apparently frustrated at his lack of game time under Eddie Howe.

Obviously in just the same way that Martin Dúbravka marched into Old Trafford and claimed the number one jersey from David de Gea, ASM is going to the Emirates to claim Gabriel Martinelli’s slot on the left wing.

However, the one ‘news story’ that made me really laugh was this one.

Remember the leaks from the chairman of some French club about that Hugo Ekitike bloke who eventually snubbed us for PSG?

Things have worked out really well for Hugo at PSG: finally achieving his dream of rubbing shoulders with Messi, Neymar and Mbappe… when they were subbed off and asked him to move further up the bench.

It will be interesting to see if PSG actually take up the option to buy. According to one football website, when PSG manager Christophe Galtier was asked about Hugo’s lack of playing time he apparently replied:

“Obviously, he is a talented player, who must compensate for his lack of playing time in training.

“We also asked that he works more, that he puts in more intensity. So that he can be more striking when he plays.”

Ouch!

The article then went on to suggest that Newcastle United might come back in again for him in the summer!!!

If the quotes from Galtier are true, I would imagine that in the highly unlikely event that he hadn’t already been deleted from the spreadsheet, that Dan Ashworth and Eddie Howe will be reaching for the delete row option just about now!

Don’t believe everything that you read online, not even this!

Just trust in the process that has got us this far.

If Eddie and the lads keep taking it one game at a time and reset as and when required, then there is no need to alter the recipe.