Despite his vow to make a lasting impact on the team after playing a’supporting’ role this summer, Paul Mitchell claims the transfer strategy he walked into Newcastle was unfit for purpose.
After missing out on Eddie Howe’s main target, Marc Guehi, last month, the new sports director has come under fire from supporters and club great Alan Shearer. Howe was left unhappy when the Magpies abandoned a £70 million agreement for the Crystal Palace defender and ended the transfer window with just two new players at a cost of just £10 million.
Prior to this summer, the head coach was more involved in transfers. He worked with former co-owners Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi as well as head of recruiting Steve Nickson to establish a team that backed
But Mitchell says the club, which avoided breaking PSR in June by “the skin of their teeth,” is paying the price for overspending, failing to sell players, and having a depth and breadth of scouting knowledge that he feels is too small. This could be seen as a jab at some of the people named.
“I believe it’s challenging to develop a predetermined plan,” he remarked. Should we cast a wider net in order to conduct more thorough scouting and recruitment? It most certainly should, as this is developing into a very complex market where it is no longer possible to just capitalise every year and acquire a large number of players at their best prices and ages. Naturally, it must be, and that is my obligation, the
Is it suitable for the task? Not the previous winter, but the one before that. Is it appropriate for the current game? Since other clubs that have taken a different tack throughout time and have greater intelligence and data knowledge than we do have succeeded during this window. We must now develop to that point.
“You look at the money we have invested over the last two and a half years—a net of £250 million—up to this point.” Was our plan in place so that we could invest more money to improve the team to the extent that we would have liked? Apart from what we were compelled to do by PSR, we haven’t sold a player in that period, therefore I don’t think it was.
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Mitchell stated that Howe did not wish to pursue other targets, but he did not mention Guehi by name. He stated, “We had a player as the key, core target.” We continued to communicate with Palace throughout, but Eddie made it very plain that, as I play a supporting position, it is not my place to declare, “We’ll do this and that,” after seven weeks.
Other targets were present. Was it possible for there to have been more? Potentially, is how I would put it. However, Eddie made it very evident that, given our roster of excellent players, he had to be confident that the new hire added something special. We arrived where we did for that reason.
And he’s intelligent; he participated in all of the discussions around PSR, spend, cost, and cash flow. As a clever head coach, he has the ability to stay informed about these discussions. And that’s the choice he made; either that player or he thought our current caliber satisfied him.
In the end, all of the coaches I’ve worked with want good players. That is a naive perspective. But Eddie just wants good players, I believe. I believe that both he and I have a shared responsibility to realize that there are other avenues we can pursue in order to add those talented players to his squad so they may be trained by him.
Despite Howe’s repeated claims that he was unaware of anything that was happening, Mitchell maintains that he was constantly informed of developments this summer.
“We converse on a variety of topics every day at least once, and on a nightly basis, contrary to popular belief,” he stated. “I believe this notion that Eddie and I haven’t had a full conversation”
