Allan Saint-Maximin has the kind of talent money can’t buy, which in the current market will cost you somewhere in the region of £25million ($32million).
If that reads like a contradiction, then it also sums up where Newcastle United are this summer, juggling what they need with what they have and how much they can get for it — a new proposition for a club that, post-takeover, has pushed its own boundaries in every transfer window.
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Ahead of a season that will bring Champions League football back to St James’ Park for the first time in two decades, Newcastle’s priorities have been to get better, stronger and more creative. Those priorities come with complications; it is not easy – or cheap – to get better than fourth place in the Premier League, their finishing position in May, particularly not when the bogeyman that is Financial Fair Play (FFP) now looms above their bed.
The Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules — the official name for their FFP regulations — permit cumulative pre-tax losses of £105m over three years. European football’s governing body, UEFA, has different regulations for clubs involved in European competitions, which cover solvency, stability and cost control.
To be fair to Newcastle, they have warned this moment will arrive, both in public and in private. In October last year, Dan Ashworth, the sporting director, called Newcastle’s rate of spending “unsustainable,” adding, “You can’t keep doing that every year. You just can’t.” There was another warning: “I can’t lie to you and say we’ll never have to sell a player, we’d always be able to hold on to our top talent. That doesn’t happen anywhere.”
At that point, Newcastle had invested more than £200million on new players. The total now stands closer to £310million and, aside from the £15million they brought in from Chris Wood’s sale to Nottingham Forest in January — a decent fee for a limited centre-forward who is now 31, but also a £10million loss over 12 months — they have recouped buttons.
After they confounded their own expectations and prised Sandro Tonali from AC Milan for €60million (£52.1m; $67.1m), one senior figure told The Athletic, on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, “I’ve said it 1,000 times – FFP is a restriction for us. We can’t go big again.”
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And then Eddie Howe, the head coach, laid the situation bare after Newcastle’s 2-1 friendly victory over Rangers on Tuesday night. “Maxi is the player that’s generating the interest,” he said. “FFP is a new dynamic which really came to the fore after my first window here when we knew it would impact us.
“Player trading is a key part of it — you can’t hit it, if you don’t trade. We’re forced to trade a player this window. If the deal didn’t go through, I’d be delighted. It would obviously impact our ability to bring any more players in, and then we potentially might have to sell another player. That’s the way that Financial Fair Play has hit us.”
Howe’s intervention was useful, necessary and blunt in terms of explanation and expectation management. While Newcastle have repeatedly briefed about the constraints of FFP – and there is a genuine determination at the top of the club, veering on the paranoid, about both avoiding Everton’s splurge of misspending and sticking to the rules – journalists have been made to look like mugs when business has closed and they have done more than anticipated.
That is not a bad thing. Newcastle have hardly been the giddy shoppers many predicted when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) bought the club from Mike Ashley in October 2021. Their purchases have been smart, ambitious and grounded in reality but the threat of relegation saw them spend far more than they envisaged in their first window, Callum Wilson’s injury meant the same in the second and then they brought forward a planned move for Everton’s Anthony Gordon six months ago.
That flexibility and opportunism has been an important part of their success to date; the irony is that their very success now leaves them less able to be flexible. They have reached the Champions League ahead of schedule, asking and answering their own questions – “Are we ready for it? No. Is our squad big enough? No,” the senior figure told us back in April – and although their qualification means more revenue, it is not enough to cover the growth they require to compete in Europe.
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Already facing what they openly call a “Newcastle tax,” when they engage in negotiations with other clubs, what they crave is value. They always saw relegated teams as a potential source of that but have wrestled with Southampton over a fee for Tino Livramento, the right-back, and with Leicester City for Harvey Barnes, who, all being well, will join Newcastle in the coming days after a fee in the region of £38million was agreed between clubs.
Saint-Maximin is close to leaving for the Saudi club Al-Ahli who, to add to the general merriment, are also majority-owned by PIF following its takeover of four clubs in the Saudi Pro League in June.
UEFA has rules to stop the same group or individual from having “control or influence” over more than one club playing in the same competition but the Saudi league is beyond its jurisdiction. Under Premier League rules, all transactions, whether they are between associated parties or not, over the value of £1million are also now checked to make sure they do not exceed “market value”, which might partly explain why the mooted fee is far from excessive.
The Frenchman’s departure does, though, give some room for manoeuvre and is also a source of sorrow and angst. Nobody can do what Saint-Maximin can do with the ball at his feet and unlocking other teams will almost certainly become more important in the months ahead – there is a firm expectation among the coaching staff that more teams will come to St James’ and sit back – but the counterargument is that he does not do it with consistency.
Under the previous regime, Saint-Maximin was often Newcastle’s saviour – if he or Wilson did not play, they could forget about winning – and he represented something precious and vital when everything else about the club was so grey. Even during the leanest of eras, fans have had a player to adore and he was it, all flying feet and trickery, balanced by a reluctance to track back and an end product which was flawed. There was not much to love back then, but he was something.
This is a different club, but Newcastle supporters have a visceral response when it comes to good players moving on. Retreat far enough back into the mists of mediocrity and it was the crown jewels like Paul Gascoigne, Peter Beardsley and Chris Waddle and then, under Ashley, it was a low glass ceiling and Andy Carroll, Yohan Cabaye and the rest.
Saint-Maximin going tickles an old scar although, as Ashworth said, all clubs have to sell at some point and the trick is to try and ensure the timing suits you.
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Is this the perfect moment to sell Saint-Maximin? No. In an ideal world he would stay and compete for a place in Howe’s team, bolstering an expanded squad, but FFP dictates otherwise. And this is another hangover from Ashley; with the takeover lingering in the background and Covid-19 a complicating factor, that version of Newcastle chose not to refresh and reinvest but retained the bulk of the players who got them promoted and then aged and lost worth.
Newcastle do not have many truly saleable assets, aside from the players they really, really do not want to sell, such as Bruno Guimaraes, Sven Botman, Alexander Isak and now Tonali. Saint-Maximin is an odd one out, a player who has a value – not that clubs have been queuing up to buy him – and who does not quite fit Howe’s favoured mantra of “intensity is our identity.” He knuckled down last season, but it was a poor one in terms of fitness and availability.
He is also the closest thing Newcastle have to a star, in terms of personality at least. He has always required more looking after than the others and both Steve Bruce and Howe have been prepared to give him leeway, with the calculation being he was just about worth it. Those maths might look a little different if Saint-Maximin remains out of the team and becomes disaffected but, as Howe said, he is “a difference-maker,” too, and he does not have enough of those.
It is also not only his decision — “I don’t think Maxi necessarily wants to leave, but he may feel it’s the right time for him to move,” Howe said post-Rangers. In some cases, Saudi clubs are offering life-changing money, even in the gilded existence of professional footballers.
Inside St James’, nobody is blaming anybody over FFP. There are the usual frustrations and tensions when it comes to transfers – all managers since the beginning of time have pushed for more and Howe, quite rightly, is no different – but everything Newcastle have done so far has been for sound reasons and just about every signing has worked out, which is an astonishing hit-rate.
Knowing how and when to say goodbye is fraught and Howe already has experience of it here.
When Wood and Jonjo Shelvey left for Forest in January he feared it would leave his squad light, even if he understood breathing space was needed on the wage bill. In the end, his team thrived, and the hope is they will do so again, but you cannot say getting smaller to get bigger is a move without risk, however necessary it might be.
Maxi will be missed – man, those feet – and the question that matters is: by how much?
(Top photo: Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)