Newcastle man with longest streak of consecutive starts last season may not be who you think

Newcastle United had a shallow pool of players to pick from for a lot of last season after an injury crisis decimated Eddie Howe's squad.

Joe Willock missed most of the season through injury, Joelinton missed a huge chunk of games too as did Nick Pope and Sven Botman. Meanwhile Alexander Isak and Callum Wilson took it in turns to be injured and then towards the back end of the season Newcastle lost Lewis Miley and Jamaal Lascelles.

There were plenty of other minor injuries that kept players out of contention too and that saw Newcastle top the charts when he game to games missed through injury.

Now FIFPro have done a study looking at the workload of players and deemed a couple of Newcastle stars as being high risk for severe injury last season.

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Miggy had to play the most consecutive games for Newcastle last season

Those two players were Miguel Almiron and Bruno Guimaraes who both had long streaks of games without a rest due to a lack of depth in the squad.

It's Almiron who had the longest streak of consecutive games from 13th September to 11th November. A 59 day period in which Almiron played 17 games which put him third in the global rankings.

Bruno Guimaraes' streak started on the same day but ended four days and one game earlier than Miggy's. We already know that Bruno and Sean Longstaff played a lot of games while injured last season too, so Eddie Howe got away with things really.

James Bunce has been brought in by Newcastle to prevent injury crises from happening again

While FIFPro's aim is to ensure that players get more rest time - they claim that players currently get less than one day off a week when you look at the training schedule and fixture schedules, and they are using this report to campaign for a less rigorous calendar.

Internally, Newcastle have hired James Bunce to analyse and improve the workload of the players to hopefully avoid another injury crisis like the one we had last season.

In fact, it seems that Bunce's influence is already working as Sven Botman, despite making a rapid recovery after his ACL surgery, has been told he'll not return to action until December as was originally planned.