All is not well at Newcastle United behind the scenes with questions being asked of key staff members

Newcastle United officially failed to improve the first team in the summer transfer window as Friday night's transfer deadline passed with no new signings coming in.

Fans who went to bed before the 11pm deadline in the hope that going to sleep would make Transfer Santa come will have woken up disappointed this morning as the last update we got on any incomings was the early evening story of a failed move for Nottingham Forest winger Anthony Elanga.

This morning Craig Hope dropped a lengthy article on the Daily Mail that didn't make for pleasant reading.

My personal big takeaway from it was that we are not in the best of hands with Darren Eales.

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Darren Eales cried to the PIF and got Amanda Staveley the boot

It is absolutely worth mentioning that Hope's article relies on a lot of hearsay and may not be entirely factual, but he is just relaying what he's been told, and what he's been told is far from positive.

Hope says that the trouble behind the scenes started at the end of last season with Darren Eales complaining to Jacobo Solis, a senior figure at the PIF, about not being able to do his job because Amanda Staveley was too heavily involved.

That led to Staveley and her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi effectively being forced out of the club. Although you may remember reports at the time suggesting that they had been asked to stay on, so we can't know for sure what happened, but if what Hope is saying is right then that's not a good look for Eales.

Club Insiders wonder if Staveley would have delivered signings

More damning, however, was a quote from a club insider who compared the transfer business under Staveley to that under Paul Mitchell, claiming that Staveley would have got deals over the line.

"Everything around her was a million miles an hour, but she always wanted the best for the club. She got s*** done."

Hope followed that up with "s*** hasn’t got done this summer. In fact, it’s been a bit of a s***show". While we can't be 100% certain about what went on behind the scenes, we 100% agree with Hope's statement there.

Dancing Darren made a rod for his own back with his STACK antics

Eales has done himself no favours by dancing about on stage at the new STACK fan zone when fans would much rather have known he was inside the club doing his job. At the time it may have seemed like a bit of harmless fun, but now with the transfer window closed and two players that we needed to mount a serious top four challenge missing until at least January, that chant-leading outing doesn't look good.

Hope went on to compare Eales and Paul Mitchell to Mike Ashley bringing in Dennis Wise - the move that made Kevin Keegan walk out on the club for the second time.

That might be a tad harsh as Mitchell does have the experience and the contacts to do a good job, but there seems to be some big obstacles to overcome first - namely figuring out how to work with Eddie Howe who is not making life easy for the new sporting director. But that's another story.