Alan Shearer, a Newcastle United icon, has not ruled out his boyhood club selling a star player to create finances in response to the Premier League’s profit and sustainability criteria.
Alan Shearer has stated that the Premier League’s financial and sustainability restrictions may force Newcastle United to trade one of its “big hitters.”
Last week, CEO Darren Eales indicated that if ‘we’re going to reach where we want to get, at times it is important to move your players’. Eales said it was ‘true’ that every player had a price and unprompted mentioned how Liverpool, Aston Villa, and West Ham had sold key players Philippe Coutinho, Jack Grealish, and Declan Rice to’reload’ and ‘create headroom’.
This fuelled concerns that Newcastle could be exposed if another club made a big offer for Sven Botman, Bruno Guimaraes, or Alexander Isak, while Bayern Munich has expressed an interest in Kieran Trippier. Eddie Howe, for his part, ‘can’t offer any certainty’ on the matter, and the Newcastle manager stated last week that ‘as much as I can say that I don’t think it’s a good deal….it would be taken out of my hands’.
On the Rest is Football podcast, Shearer alluded to Newcastle’s current dilemma, which is the result of restrictions implemented more than a decade ago.
“Look at Newcastle’s situation,” the club veteran added. “I believe they were one of the clubs that voted for it at the time.
“Now they’re desperate to spend money and bring in new players. They cannot. It appears that they will have to sell one of their key players this summer in order to raise funds to become a better team.”
It is worth noting that Newcastle have spent upwards of £400 million in recent years, with Allan Saint-Maximin and Chris Wood the only departing players to have brought in notable fees, but football finance expert Kieran Maguire said that the failure to raise the limits had hit clubs with new owners, such as the Magpies, ‘hardest’. Maguire stated that if the limitations had increased in step with football inflation, clubs may have lost £218 million over three years rather than £105 million. Micah Richards, making a similar point, believed the figures were ‘outdated’.
“Newcastle have been taken over, done things the correct way, not gone and bought ridiculous players but the right players to fit what they need,” said the former Newcastle manager. “They are currently dealing with an injury crisis, but how can they compete? It is not a fair ruling. If it had been signed a year ago and teams were leaving, I could understand, but it has been too long. It should be looked at again.”
The Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, acknowledged that the top flight is exploring adopting the UEFA squad cost ratio model. The UEFA rules limit spending on wages, transfers, and agent fees to 70% of income.
