The thing that sickens me the most about this club is this:
About 18 months ago, Nikolai Jorgensen, a then 25 year old, was available and bought for £3m. Not a back-alley transaction, but Leverkusen and Feyenoord involved. Even in the Championship, we easily had £3m and could beat Feyenoord on wages - look at what we spent on Mo fcking Diame. Where are NUFC then? Davie Selke, although only tenuously linked, moved just 6 months ago from Leipzig to Hertha Berlin for around £7m. Leipzig are well known to English clubs, with Liverpool recently signing one of theirs for, what, £50m?? Where are we then?
In July 2015, Josh King moved to Bournemouth for £900k. We were put off by his £20m+ price tag. But where the **** were Newcastle in 2015?
Willian Jose, from Maldonado to Sociedad, July 2016 - £5m fee. Where the **** were we?
Vincent Aboubakar, actually on loan last season at Besiktas, £2m the fee for a year. Porto bought him for £10m in 2014.
Where are we, all the time?? This is what fcks me off about Ashley more than anything. You go in a SD shop, try getting service. He employs skeleton staff as it contributes to bottom line. I cannot get why, in 10 years of being a moron, he doesn't realise that you need to spend money to make money in football? We need a deep reaching scouting network, if the model is buy cheap/sell high. Instead we have essentially one ****ing scout, and even he came on the cheap from the u-21's. If you're not going to bother scouting talent, you need other networks to exploit contracts - this is what Carr did, he used connections to find out who was cheaper than they should be. Had no bearing on whether the team needed them! But we got good deals and a very good season. But it can't last - it was a trick that had a shelf-life, teams became much more aware of contracts which is why all these insane release clauses exist now. We didn't evolve from the "can we get a bargain" model, so we're sat here complete fcked by the incompetence of the owner.