New signings Cabaye, Marveaux and Adeid all penned five year contracts while Cheik Tiotealso recently signed a five-year extension to his deal. This should help secure long term future of club and therefore is a win-win situation for them. If these players turn out to be a success after a few years, they will still have a considerable length of time left on their contract to allow Newcastle to receive a large transfer fee.
However should they prove incapable of making it in England, they would be able to move back to France with the Magpie’s likely to recoup the fee they paid for them in the first place.
One major criticism of this policy is that it could limit how far the club could progress as you are unlikely to reach the highest echelons of the English game by selling your best players and not replacing them or replacing them with unknown players. Ashley’s rational transfer policy may be based around maximising the fee received should they decide to sell these players but what is the point of building a young talented squad if they are just going to offload them to rival clubs in the future?
Despite this issue, the much maligned Mike Ashley deserves some credit for trying to run a sustainable football club. The days of bringing in older and expensive players, like Michael Owen, who demand high wages and long contracts, are long gone. The main ambition now is get value for money in transfers while also recruiting young, hungry players who want to play for the club.
Newcastle is certainly developing into a stable well-run Premier League club that operates within the financial constraints set down by the board. If Ashley’s strategy prolongs this success, how long will it will be until other clubs start to follow suit?
So what do you think about Ashley’s transfer policy at Newcastle, leave your comments below and also follow me on twitter @aidanmccartney for even more discussion about the biggest issues affecting the beautiful game and probably a little bit about Scunthorpe United.
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