Newcastle United's summer transfer budget may not be as impressive as we hoped - The Athletic

The Magpies are set for a busy summer as Eddie Howe looks to rebuild his Newcastle United squad after a season which exposed the frailties of the current crop.

Newcastle are coming off the back of a tough campaign which saw them top the charts when it came to number of days missed through injury. Many other clubs had similar issues, but most of those clubs had a squad much more capable of handling their injury crises.

Eddie Howe had to resort to filling his bench with goalkeepers and kids, even throwing youngester Lewis Miley into midfield for more games than he'd have liked. Meanwhile in defence the rock-solid back five from 2022/23 hardly played together at all.

Up front there were several games when Newcastle took to the field without a recognised striker. All of this points to the fact that our squad simply lacks quality in depth.

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Newcastle's summer budget may not be as much as we'd hoped

So with a busy summer expected, well, needed, we'd be hoping for a decent war chest to be heading into the summer with, but a recent report in The Athletic has doused those flames spectacularly.

Their, hopefully conservative, estimate is somewhere between £70m-£100m. Which, when you consider that last season we signed 'bargain' Sandro Tonali for £55m is a worry.

That being said, however, the estimate last year was £75million and we did pretty well with that figure.

There are plenty of ways to stretch the budget

We must remember that we're not necessarily paying up front for players anymore, so we could sign an £80million player, but it would only hit £20m off the budget given how the deal is structured as an example I just completely made up.

Other things that will come into effect will be player sales and even contract terminations - clearing the wage bill will add to the pot too.

It all just sticks in your craw when you think about what our budget would be if Financial Fair Play wasn't so poorly thought out. The PIF could drop a suitcase filled with a million pounds and it wouldn't be worth their time stopping to pick it up, so £100million is nothing to them.

I suppose if we get really stuck, we could just sell our assets back to ourselves like Chelsea did, or sell a player to Saudi Arabia for 10 times their value like Manchester United are looking to do with Casemiro, because we all play by the same rules, don't we?