Newcastle United to follow Liverpool and Aston Villa transfer lead? Very different situations | OneFootball

Something that crops up quite often, is that Newcastle United should follow the transfer lead of the likes of Liverpool and Aston Villa, amongst others.

The two examples most quoted, are the sales of these two players.

Liverpool bought a 20 year old Philippe Coutinho from Inter Milan for £8.5m in January 2013. Then sold a 25 year old Coutinho in January 2018 in a deal worth a guaranteed £105m, which was reported at the time could rise as high as £146m if hitting various targets.

In August 2021, Aston Villa sold 25 year old homegrown through the youth ranks Jack Grealish to Manchester City for £100m.

The thinking goes as follows…

Liverpool finished 6th, 8th, 4th and 4th, in the last four Premier League seasons they kicked off with Philippe Coutinho in the team.

However, after selling him in January 2018 to Barcelona and that money going a long way to paying for Virgil van Dijk (in January 2018) and Alisson (in August 2018), Liverpool then finished 2nd, 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 3rd and 1st.

Aston Villa selling Jack Grealish in August 2021 having finished 17th and 11th with him in the team, then using his transfer cash (and the huge added PSR flexibility) to help makes various signings, have finished 14th, 7th, 4th and 6th.

Newcastle United

Thus the reasoning goes, for certain Newcastle United fans, journalists and other outsiders, that NUFC should do the same. Sell one or more star players in order to then be able to have far more cash and (especially) PSR flexibility to overall seriously increase the quality of team and squad.

So, is this the way for United to go? Will this help bring about a huge further leap forward when it comes to the ability of Newcastle United to compete with their rivals towards the top end?

When people quote these two specific Liverpool and Aston Villa examples, they pretty much always ignore one important thing. That is, both Coutinho and Grealish were determined to leave Liverpool and Aston Villa respectively, for Barcelona and Man City. The sales were in reality forced on the clubs.

The sales of those two players and the recruitment the deals helped fund, did quite clearly turn out very positively for both Liverpool and Aston Villa.

However, it is easy with hindsight to cherry pick the success stories of selling and buying, after the fact, after success has followed from player trading. You don’t tend to hear too much about the cases when this goes the other way. The sales of Alvarez and Cole Palmer looked very advantageous for Manchester City, especially from a PSR point of view, but I can’t help wonder whether these two sales have ended up as the key factors in their relative demise, no longer dominance.

Newcastle United were actually well ahead of the game, having finished eighth in the English top tier in 1987/88 they sold Paul Gascoigne for a new British record fee of £2.2m to Spurs.

Issue 1 – August 1988

Using just that record fee they half rebuilt the Newcastle United first team, with Dave Beasant, Andy Thorn, John Hendrie and John Robertson arriving in summer 1988. Selling the star player, the World class Gazza, using the money to buy four new first team players, certainly took United to a new level. The second tier! Yes, instant relegation in that 1988/89 season after the Gazza sale and the four new signings arriving.

To be fair, Paul Gascoigne was determined to leave back in 1988, unhappy with Newcastle United’s ownership at the time, who wouldn’t/couldn’t show the necessary ambition to persuade him to stay.

The thing is, unlike the Gazza, Coutinho and Grealish examples, this current Newcastle United era hasn’t seen any of the best NUFC players determined to leave, not yet anyway. Some of you no doubt will be claiming didn’t Anthony Gordon want to leave last summer for Liverpool? I think that is very unfair on him because this was all a bit of a shambles at the club at the time as the large PSR shortfall suddenly became public in June 2024. Money had to be generated by one or more player sales and it ended up young squad players Minteh and Anderson leaving, rather than a Gordon, Isak, Bruno…

I am not convinced that a move to Liverpool was ever really a realistic possibility and most of the media pointed to Newcastle United pushing a potential emergency sale of Gordon if needed due to the PSR deadline of 30 June 2024, rather than the former Everton winger demanding an exit.

As it stands now at Newcastle United

I think that my attitude is quite simple, so long as Eddie Howe has the final say on which first team players are bought and sold, then I am not going to stress whatever happens.

If Eddie Howe believed it was the right move to sell anybody, yes, even Alexander Isak, then I would be backing him 100%. Just as when Kevin Keegan sold Andy Cole and next season came so close to winning the Premier League, with new signings Gillespie, Ferdinand and Ginola key to that upturn. The Cole transfer fee a key part in enabling that major team upgrade overall.

If Eddie Howe thought the sale(s) of Isak or whoever would then lead to a better overall team and squad, who am I to disagree with his judgement?

Another reason why I am so laidback about it all, is that due to brilliant Eddie Howe judgement on signings so far AND the club’s excellent handling of things on the contract front, all of our key assets, best players who are in their prime or approaching it in the years to come, they all have at least three years left on their Newcastle United contracts.

This is also why I don’t go over the top when our best players are constantly linked by the media to other clubs.

It is a nightmare if you lose your best players for way below market value due to contract clauses and/or short contract length remaining, or none at all when the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold and others cynically run down their contracts to deprive their clubs of a massive transfer fee, simply to bank even bigger fortunes themselves.

However, this is very much not the case at Newcastle United.

Isak, Hall, Joelinton, Livramento, Tonali, Gordon, Miley, Barnes and Bruno all have three or more years left on their contracts. Botman only has two years but he has been badly impacted by injuries and I’m sure that in the near future his contract will be extended.

So there is no pressure at all from a contract point of view for Newcastle United to be forced to sell any of the club’s biggest assets. Whilst if any player did end up having another club they desperately wanted to join, there is no way that any departure would happen without the full market value paid by the buying club.

I think it is always a very risky idea to think that selling one or more of your very best players will automatically improve things overall.

I also think that when you have real top quality with the likes of Isak, Bruno and Tonali, they then also help make the players around them to perform far better, raise their games.