Newcastle United board set for weekend summit at Alnwick Castle to discuss recruitment - Journalist

Newcastle United's board have booked out Alnwick Castle from Friday to Sunday this weekend to discuss club matters.

If you watched the Amazon Prime documentary last year you'll no doubt be familiar with the idea of the Newcastle board living like kings in Alnwick Castle while they discuss club matters.

Now that the new sporting director is in place in the form of Paul Mitchell, it seems like the board are convening to discuss a new recruitment strategy and no doubt several other matters pertaining to the club.

It does seem a bit late in the day to be hashing out a recruitment strategy given we're a few weeks into the summer transfer window, but with Paul Mitchell's recruitment only confirmed last week, it's the best they could do really.

Next week could see Newcastle's transfer activity ramp up

Journalist Joel Bland confirmed the Alnwick Castle news via social media this morning while he also confirmed that players will be returning to training this week with those who have been away on international duty likely given extra time off, with Kieran Trippier and Anthony Gordon still in Germany with at least one more game ahead of them, hopefully, two.

The fact that the club are meeting over the weekend would explain why things have been so slow with regards to recruitment so far with only the three new players coming in so far.

Fingers crossed this means that things will start to pick up next week in that regard and we start seeing some progress on some exciting transfer targets.

The board could discuss how to react if Manchester City win their court battle

We can't imagine that all three days are going to be spent talking about transfers, however, and other matters like the stadium expansion, potential partnership deals, how the club are going to regain the trust of Anthony Gordon after trying to hawk him to Liverpool, and avoiding another PSR-related headache will be on the agenda.

Also, given Manchester City's court case against the Premier League is wrapping up, we imagine there'll be some discussion about that and how Newcastle can react should City win their case.

We'd love to be a fly on the wall in that room, there's bound to be some juicy information and some impressive arguments going on.