Why Newcastle are selling Yankuba Minteh and not Miguel Almiron to satisfy PSR

Newcastle United are edging ever closer to selling one of their brightest young stars with Yankuba MInteh set to leave before Sunday's PSR deadline.

It has long been speculated that Newcastle must sell in order to comply with Profit and Sustainability Rules this summer as The Athletic reports that they are £25million over the PSR threshold in the current rolling three-year period which is set to end on Sunday.

That leaves the Magpies with the task of finding money this week in the form of player sales to prevent a possible points deduction akin to what Nottingham Forest and Everton were slapped with last year.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just selling a player we don't want to bring things under control. There has to be a market for that player, and therein lies the problem.

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We can't sell players if nobody wants them

Miguel Almiron has been tipped to leave since January with a move to Saudi Arabia falling through in the winter window but is expected to be revived this summer.

There are also people on social media questioning why we're selling Minteh when we have Almiron, Sean Longstaff and Jacob Murphy on the books who could be sold instead.

The answer is pretty simple ... there are clubs willing to buy Minteh, now and for a good price. Nobody wants Almiron, Longstaff or Murphy. At least not this week and for the price we're asking.

Are clubs doing 'mutually beneficial' deals to highlight the broken system?

All Premier League clubs are in the same boat when it comes to having to wait until Monday for the new reporting period to start, that's when budgets will become clearer and clubs can start making moves in the transfer window, but by then, it will be too late for Newcastle, so the reality is, we have to deal with what we can now to comply.

This is why we're seeing these stupid 'mutually beneficial' deals like our Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Yankuba Minteh swap with Everton and Aston Villa and Everton's similar swaps going on.

The rules are set for a shake-up at some point, but we still have to comply with the old PSR rules now. Hopefully, all these daft deals that are getting done will once again highlight how broken the system is and lead to another vote on scrapping FFP/PSR altogether.

We'll see how the new trial rules go, but we can't imagine they will fix anything at this point.