Newcastle United chief drops £135m transfer bombshell as Liverpool & Aston Villa comparison made

Newcastle United CEO Darren Eales refused to rule out selling Bruno Guimaraes, Alexander Isak or Sven Botman this summer as the club battles Premier League Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR).

The Magpies have spent around £400million on new players since being taken over by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia-led consortium in October 2021. But Eales has explained why United may need to sell one of their key stars to unlock further spending power.

"When you look at FFP, just a take a step back and the way the PSR calculation works," said Eales, who spoke to reporters as Newcastle announced their accounts for the 2022-23 financial year. "There are ways to create some headroom.

"Raising commercial revenues and looking at our accounts today you can see there has been a 40% increase in turnover. That's back-to-back years of 40% rises since the takeover and that's great from a projection basis as it shows we have great growth potential moving forward. The accounts we are talking about today do not include the Sela shirt sponsor deal and doesn't include the Adidas deal after this year. There is a lot of positivity as we look forward with our revenue growth.

"But to put it into perspective, we want to be a top six sustainable club and Tottenham's latest accounts available was 440m. We are at £250m so there is a big step even to the lower end of the top six. We have also seen that Manchester City are £710m in revenue in their latest accounts. There is a long way to go in growing those revenues.

"That is one way to create headroom for investment. The other one, and it seems counter intuitive, but when you have player trading, and it's really interesting when you have an FFP system, it's slightly different if there was no FFP.

"You have a £50m player you can sell at your disposal and you bring in another player of the same value. What's the point in doing that, you might say it is risky as we've already got that player here and we know what they can do, but under FFP, if you sell a £50m player and bring in an identical one on £50m and the same wages, but amortise over the five years the player you are bringing in, that's only £10m a year so you are creating £40m of headroom.

"That's the reality of the FFP model. If you are churning players you create more headroom. We have seen lots of examples of this elsewhere. [Philippe] Coutinho at Liverpool and they brought in Alisson and Virgil Van Dijk. [Jack] Grealish going from Aston Villa and they have reinvested and reloaded. Decan Rice at West Ham, it's just the nature of the beast. If you trade players on it creates more headroom. You have to keep growing that headroom, increasing commercial revenue and player trading."

Asked specifically about Bruno, Isak and Botman - whom United bought for a combined £135m in 2022 and would stand to make a sizeable profit from - Eales said: "On any player, at any time, it depends on circumstances. It’s difficult to hypothesise but, if we’re offered £1billion for one of those players, then no one could argue against that making sense. Any decision we make will always be against the backdrop of the medium to long-term benefit for the club.

"It’s difficult to say specifically on certain players, but I can say that, if we’re going to get to where we want to get to, at times it is necessary to trade your players. Whether that is because of the contract length of the player in question, the offer is too good to refuse, you need to reload in certain areas, but all of this could make sense to trade that player.

"It is counter-intuitive and part of the inherent system of PSR that there is an incentive to trade your players if you want to re-invest, by the nature of the boundaries."

Eales has recognised it'd be an unpopular move but it comes with the "huge challenges" PSR brings.

"When the takeover took place, the PSR regime was already in place, so we have always known that those are the rules and we will always be compliant,’ he said. ‘But if you are trying to be an upwardly mobile club, it makes it a huge challenge.

"As an ownership group, we are process driven and we are patient. We are going to invest but the PSR regime undoubtedly makes it more challenging than if it wasn't there. It would certainly be easier (without it).

"We have to be efficient and maximise our resources. We can't think week to week, month to month. If we are going to get where we want to get to, which is a top-six sustainable club competing for trophies, we have to take a long-term vision."