Newcastle's newest appointment Paul Mitchell will not take up the same role as vacated by Dan Ashworth

Newcastle United this morning announced former Monaco director of football as the successor to Dan Ashworth who handed his notice in at the club back in February.

After a lengthy spell on gardening leave while Newcastle and Manchester United argued over a compensation fee for Ashworth's defection, Newcastle had been working in the background to replace the former Brighton man.

Several new roles were created while Newcastle's focus shifted to bringing in a sporting director whose role would be more heavily focused on transfers.

Contrary to popular belief that wasn't really Ashworth's role at Newcastle.

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Daniel Wales confirms that Mitchell will be a lot more hands-on with transfers

When Ashworth was appointed the club referred to him as being the central cog in the wheel. He was basically there to create a new culture within the club and to be the main main to liaise with all departments to ensure everything ran smoothly.

As confirmation of this, when speaking to journalist Daniel Wales this morning about the Mitchell appointment, he told us:

"I've been reliably informed that the main difference between Ashworth and Mitchell is in terms of how hands on they are with recruitment - Ashworth less so, which was always the misconception about him. Ashworth basically pulls the strings at a club and gets people working the right way and in the right places. Mitchell will do that to an extent but is more heavily involved in recruitment."

Newcastle's transfer strategy could now entirely change

It'll be interesting now to see how Steve Nickson and Andy Howe's roles change with the introduction of Mitchell.

More crucially, however, is how much our transfer direction will change.

While it's always advisable to take transfer rumours with a pinch of salt anyway, we now suspect that the names we see going forward will be a lot different to those we've seen recently, and even then, we all know that we often tend to be surprised by who we do actually sign as the club almost always manages to keep the media off the scent. I mean, they just did it with Mitchell himself.