Sean Longstaff (£692 per week) and Yoshinori Muto (£54,000 per week) As a Newcastle United blogger, one of my occaisional pastimes is to peruse the details of Newcastle United’s payroll and after a few seasons of this, I thought that it’s about time I wrote a ‘blog about it as it contains quite a few interesting details.
For instance, Sean Longstaff, now a fairly regular choice for the first team, and who was recently the subject of speculation linking him with a move to Manchester United with sums as high as £50 million being bandied around, is still only receiving £692 per week (£36,000 a year). This is the lowest by a huge margin compared with all the other players who have featured in the first team on anything like a regular basis. Jamie Sterry (£2000 per week) apart, the next lowest player who has played in the first team with any regularity is Isaac Hayden, who is currently earning £22,000 per week (£1,144,000 per year). Meanwhile, the hardly used Yoshinori Muto is currently picking up £54,000 per week (£2,808,000 a year), making him the second highest paid player on the list. (more…)
Cabaye: Have we been conned again by Newcastle United?As I wrote at the time, with Newcastle United, the club of smoke, mirrors and downright lies under current owner, Mike Ashley, there are things we still do not know about the Yohan Cabaye kerfuffle at the start of the season.
In an interview as part of the France squad at the side’s Clairefontaine HQ, Cabaye made some rather suggestive comments about what Alan Pardew called “the situation” at the time. If you recall, Pardew made a series of simlarly suggestive statements, implying that Cabaye refused to play in early season games in order to allegedly force a move to Arsenal. However, he steadfastly refused to mention it outright under the pathetic pretence that he was “protecting” Cabaye, even though he was actually hanging him out to dry with innuendo. When interviewers did ask for a direct answer, interviews were quickly halted by a female press secretary and they quickly got the message.
However, the fleet-footed Frenchman has now cast doubt on the Pardew’s and the club’s narrative, suggesting that only he and Joe Kinnear know the truth of what really happened, challenging Kinnear to play “Deep Throat” and finally come clean on what really happened in the ‘Cabayegate’ scandal.
Below is the full exchange about Cabaye and the Newcastle United imbroglio (translated by myself):(more…)
Part of Mike Ashley’s £25 million transfer profit.Below are a series of tables showing the profits and losses (mostly profits) made by Mike Ashley in player trading since he assumed control of the club early in the 2007-8 season.
Firstly, they are broken down season by season from 2007-8. However, it should be noted the major transfers into the club in his first season as owner were either done in the days of Freddy Shepherd, or were arranged by Shepherd and completed in the transitional period of Ashley takeover, or the first days under the club’s new Chairman at the time, Chris Mort. Players in these two catagories include signings such as Viduka, Barton, Rozehnal, Smith, Cacapa, Enrique, Faye and Beye.
The following ones then display the season by season figures from the 2008-9 season (Ashley’s first full season as owner), with the first purely Ashley signings such as Fabricio Coloccini, Jonas Gutierrez, Xisco and the rest starting to come in. Of course, these are then followed by successive seasons up to the present day. (more…)
Owen: A bit of backtracking.“Newcastle fans, following my Football Focus interview, plenty of you tweeting me saying you don’t blame me for getting injured but for leaving when we got relegated.”
“Despite the club saying they did, they didn’t ever offer me a new contract despite them putting it in the press that they did. How could they when they had just been relegated? It would have been financial suicide. I’ve seen it a million times, a club will blatantly lie to their fans to take the moral high ground leaving the player with no leg to stand on. I’ve taken the stick for years which is fine but you really don’t know half of it. All will be revealed one day.”
Tweeted Michael Owen on his final season at Newcastle United. Then however, he backtracked somewhat, updating his Twitter with the following:
“Just to clarify. My tweet yesterday referred to no contract offer after Newcastle relegation. Which I said was understandable. Newcastle did make me an offer to extend in 2008 when Joe Kinnear was manager. Apologies to the club if there has been any confusion. I just didn’t want the fans to think I had deserted the club after relegation. I didn’t.” (more…)
Captain Colo: Wants to focus squarely on Newcastle.In an interview with Fox Sports conducted in Spanish when he was on duty with the Argentinian national side in Sweden, Newcastle United captain Fabricio Coloccini gave more insight into his plan to escape from Newcastle United and return to his home country.
Carefully selected excerpts of his thoughts have been translated and published on English sites here and there. However, as there didn’t seem to be a transcript of the whole part relating to his current Toon – San Lorenzo imbroglio, I thought I’d have a bash myself, and the results are below. I also translated his previous Coloccini’s open letter to San Lorenzo on the same issue some time ago.
Interviewer: “What happened? Why didn’t you play in San Lorenzo and why did you stay in Newcastle?”
Coloccini:“Let me be clear that there are many versions, some of which were lies and some which were right to some extent. At the moment you know that I had spoken with people from Newcastle to go back to Argentina for personal motives, all San Lorenzo did was open their doors and give me all the support I could get, beyond playing or not playing for San Lorenzo. Of course I said that if I could dissociate myself from Newcastle they wanted me to play there, and the illusion was mine too because I’m a fan. But hey, I was not going to untie myself from Newcastle because I wanted to go to San Lorenzo. There was nothing I could do … The issue was that I wanted to return to Argentina for “x” reasons and well, after San Lorenzo emerged it became part of the story of San Lorenzo.”(more…)
