The Athletic’s Taylor Payne has claimed that Newcastle United defender Sven Botman has been the ‘best signing’ in the Premier League this season.
Over the past summer, the Magpies spent big on plenty of exciting new transfers such as club-record £63m signing Alexander Isak. However, Eddie Howe also wanted to add some more quality to his backline.
Newcastle brought in Botman from Lille for a fee reported to be in the region of £35m. It’s safe to say that up to this point in the season, it has been a pretty clever piece of business.
Indeed, the 22-year-old hasn’t lost a single game for the club in any competition and has established himself as a regular in the starting lineup during that period (via Transfermarkt).
Keen to praise the player in response to a question posed by Sky Sports, Payne took to Twitter to claim that Botman has been the best signing in the Premier League so far this season.
He wrote: “Sven Botman. 22 years old and playing like that. Nobody expected it and that’s why it’s the best signing.”
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TIF Thoughts on Sven Botman and Newcastle…
While Botman – who is now valued at around £30m (CIES) – has certainly impressed, it’s probably not quite accurate to say ‘nobody expected it’. After all, the Magpies did go out and spent a pretty hefty transfer fee of £35m on the defender.
On top of that, he arrived in England having been part of an impressive Lille team that managed to win Ligue 1 in 2021 with Botman playing 37 of 38 league games, so it’s not as if he’d arrived without any kind of established reputation, either.
Even so, he’s certainly met all expectations thus far, and seeing as he has taken so little time to settle in and adjust to his new environment, it’s easy to see why he’s been praised as the best signing in the division. He’s certainly up there.