£3m

On 26 July 2018, following Deportivo de La Coruña's relegation from the La Liga, Schär signed a three-year deal with Newcastle Unitedafter the club had activated his £3 million buy out clause in his contract.





£3m ****ing quid man for Schar.

Unbelievable bit of business by Rafa.

The lad is worth £20m now easy.

The Rafa effect.

To think... Longstaff and Scher cost a combined £3m... Sexy Spanish genius.

 

Class player all season tbh

 

Schar is top top class.

 

Lejeune schar longstaff all tremendous at long passing .

 

I thought it looked like a good bit of business at the time and he's really working out well.

 

He was always one of the best young prospects in Europe back in the fifa 14ish era. He is really doing well but credit to lascelles and lejuene for being the foundation and letting him get forward.

 

Every single player in the starting XI and who came on yesterday cost £10m or under bar Almiron - who on the basis of about 180 mins of football looks ever penny value for money - and Ritchie depending on what source you take for his fee £10-12m.

 

Laecelles £2m or summat
Dubravka £4.5m
Schar £3m
Perez £2m
Longstaff free

Wowzer

 

I think Pardew paid £5m for Lascelles. Still a bargain obviously when we look at it now. Our business is generally good under Ashley. Rafa has done particularly well with his defensive signings. Pardew was better with who he brought in for midfield and attack. All though have had to get creative in the market with this owner. The only one who didn't was McClaren. Which kind of sums up Mike Ashley and Lee Charnleys understanding of football. Won't give Rafa any money, but will happily allow a ****wit like McClaren to spend 77m. Not that McClaren bought bad players but it was all poorly thought out.

You can even go back to Tiote 3.5m, Ba Free, Cabaye 4.5m, HBA 5.75m, Debuchy 5m - we've generally bought quite well. Ashley just pushes them to the brink by not allowing them to do enough.

 

Laecelles and Darlow were a £5m package together I believe.

Re: McClaren, the summer signings were all done above his head (Gini, Mitro, Mbemba and Thauvin), Shelvey and Townsend were his signings, he specifically said in that January window that he was glad to finally be able to buy the players he wanted.....you could tell from the way McClaren spoke about Mitro in pre-season interviews that he was very wary about him and didn't really like him.

Pardew had a decent defence in 11/12, but as Colo got lazier, he basically let it rot away to nothing and relied far too heavily on Colo, Willo and Saylor, and when he tried to update it, he only brought in **** (see Yanga-Mbiwa).

Rafa has always been very defence minded (see Liverpool days of Carra, Agger, Hypia, Mascherano etc), so it's not surprising that the first thing he did was so out the **** defence, feels like now that's solid that he can inject flair into it with Miggy.

 

I hope the owner and charnley can start to see where he is going with things. Rafa was very outspoken last night when pushed by Jake Humphreys about the contract situation. He clearly wasn't gonna give us fans the news we want to hear as he needs to have certain things in place at the club before he will commit to anything which you can fully understand. I don't think he's playing games, I think he is very frustrated as he can see the massive potential here and he clearly loves being here. I think he'll be here next season if I'm honest, the arrival of Almiron and the discovery of Longstaff should send a clear enough message to the owner/chairman that we can both promote from within with the right infrastructure as well as strengthening in key areas in the transfer market with a little investment now and then. £21m is not a massive amount of money if it ensures PL status. There's no reason why Rafa shouldn't have at least that to spend once a year and there's no reason why that can't improve things for us.

 

Sadly not. Although if you go off Transfer Market which is usually in the ballpark, they have them slated as roughly 4m each. Which is a great deal because you'd still get your money back on Darlow now, if not more.

I'm not sure that's right about being done above McClarens head. He admitted he had a part control and say in matters. This is when the infamous board came into operation! Probably unfair to lump at McClarens door as Carr, Charnley and Moncur had their part but it would have been led by McClaren and Carr. McClaren was all happy about it when he signed up. Typically like most managers, he then moaned about it once he ****ed it up. Ultimately McClaren can present any excuse he wants - the team he had was good enough to stay up. McClaren was actually a big fan of Mitro and still is.

“I think this is a fantastic signing for us. We’ve fought off a lot of competition to secure a top young talent in Europe,” he said. “Aleksandar is someone who can develop with the team and someone who will help us to get to where we want to go.
“As a board we have worked hard to make it happen. It’s another demonstration that we are wanting to push on.”

He then said something along the lines of "People can now see why we brought him in at Newcastle" when asked about his form for Fulham. So McClaren is just playing the game, he had some say in it regardless what he likes to put out there as an excuse. The mans unemployable now such is his ****wittery.

I just think Rafa has a better eye for a defender than an attacker. Then again though how much say does Rafa have, he certainly won't be doing much scouting himself. Not sure if Nickson is the man leading on the likes of Almiron? As with most things its a team effort which the managers takes both the plaudits and the blame for. Nature of football I suppose.

 

I think the fans are very focused on transfers. If you listen to Rafa he simply wants to see investment full stop. He wants the training and youth facilities upgraded. I don't think that's unreasonable provided he is going to change his normal ways and give youth a chance. By that I mean putting them in by design rather than it being forced upon you.

So I think he wants money to spend but I think he is looking at the bigger picture too. Whether Mike will acquiesce to those demands is unlikely.

 

There is no place on this board for behaviour like this......please leave!

 

Just trying to bring a bit of class to proceedings. Its all part of preparing you lot for our European campaign when our late surge up the league takes hold. We don't want to be seen as Geordie heathens.

 

It's next to impossible to accurate gauge transfer fees these days, as they're usual for an "undisclosed amount" have countless add ons, and that's before you take into account agent fees....but I guess we can at least agree on the fact that the Laecelles/Darlow deal was definitely a steal.

McClaren had just got sacked from Derby when he came to, getting a job a big Premier league club was a massive coup for him, so he was hardly in a position to complain about a board overruling him, Rafa on the other hand is a far stronger character, and would never put up with the **** that McClaren did.

At the end of the day, everyone would say positive things about Mitro cos he's such a likeable player, but McClaren said all sorts of wierd stuff about him before he played i.e. "he's got a devil in him", and the totally ****erish comment about him about him having issues with him "because he's a Vich". It was just telling the way McClaren specifically said after we signed Shelvey and Townsend that he finally had been able to buy the players HE wanted.

Rafa obviously starts out defensive and builds from the back, and uses that as his base, but he gets a bit of a bad rep in terms of being just a defensive manager imo - look at the attacking players he brought to Liverpool - Torres, Maxi Rodrigeuz, Luis Garcia, Baros, Kuyt, Zenden etc

 

Defo Rafa had good attacking signings at Liverpool and Napoli (Mertens). Its just he is very much a hit and miss type of manager with transfers, more so than the top managers. He is quite a quirky manager though so he goes for players no one else would go for because of specific characteristics. Some come off some don't. You look at someone like Riera at Liverpool. Never a top player at any other time in his career. But Rafa liked something in him and got quite a bit out of him too. He is very much the opposite end of the scale to your modern manager who are possession based, high tempo and attacking. Your Poch, Klopp, Pep etc all have that trait. Rafa was unique back then at Liverpool and he is fairly unique now. His first thought is always how can he stop the opposition. Its a weird way of looking at the game, but you can't knock his results.

We won't agree on McClaren, I think its just classic deflection after the event for me. Waxes lyrical about Mitro on his arrival and happy to attribute it to the board. Gets sacked, does ****, so blames the system. Otherwise he'd have to hold his hands up and say he himself wasn't good enough. You then get him waxing lyrical and polishing his own knob 3 years later when Mitro does well. They say us fans are fickle, the blokes a walking hypocrite. McClaren got the fairest crack of the whip of any manager under Ashley. I thought it was 77m but turns out it was 83m. I know sales generated some of the money. However as with Benitez, whereas you have to take it into account because players need replaced and the job is bigger, he still had 83m to spend on a first team just as Rafa had 60m in the championship. Neither can moan about support from the board in those seasons.

We will always do good business under Ashley. We just won't do enough of it.

 

I'm in no way trying to defend McClaren, I just think he was clearly a yes man in the way Pardew was and would basically put up with anything the board said or did, cos getting the Newcastle job after his record of utter ****ness was clearly beyond his wildest dreams. There was clearly most influence from the board in terms of transfers than there has been under Benitez.

Yes McClaren was a walking disaster, but what did people expect? The wally with a brolley, the useless twat who had just been sacked by Derby, the knob who had mangled Forest....if he'd been **** in the Championship, was anyone expecting him to deliver the goods in the Prem? The only blame I attach to the McClaren debacle is with the idiots who appointed him in the first place.

Yes Ashley never actually wanted to pay money for a manager but this is pretty much always a recipe for disaster, Rafa is clearly an anomaly, and this business model will lead us to having managers like McClaren, Pardew, Kinnear, Carver etc.

So although I don't blame McClaren for being a **** manager (that's what he is after all), the one time I truely wanted to punch him was when I went to the pub to see us vs Fulham in the opening match of the Champ season, who should be a guest giving half time analysis? Yes, Steve ****ing McClaren after mangling us and getting us relegated now has the audacity to to sit on the couch and tell us what we did wrong.....well, I guess doing things wrong was his speciality ....

 

He was just **** and you're right the responsibility for his appointment is bewildering. I just don't buy the notion he wasn't involved in these signings. All the soundbites from him at the time and on arrival were that he was heavily involved. Fast forward to his sacking and his story changes. I don't believe him basically. I think his sacking was down to him, I think he fully partook in the signings with Carr, and I think he should be penetrated with a rusty spike.

Classic Ashley though isn't it. In terms of ****wittery. Pay bottom dollar for a **** manager, give him 83m. Pay top dollar for a good manager, give him ridiculous money to get out of the championship, then nothing when you are promoted and really need to spend money. Anyone looking in from the outside would suspect he does it deliberately.

 

It was very much the time Carr was dominating transfers, so although McClaren may have been giving his opinions about transfers, all the targets were identified by Carr.

I don't think McClaren wanted Thauvin at all, didn't want to play him and didn't rate him in the slightest .....didn't help that Thauvin was a useless prick of course, witness his reasoning for being **** with us, apparently he was crap cos Alan Shearer singled him out for "violent criticism" for turning up in a tux (what Shearer said was "you don't turn up in a tuxedo"....oooh, harrowing):

https://www.fourfourtwo.com/news/shearer-singled-me-out-tuxedo-criticism-thauvin

As for the others, Gini was obviously a hot property when we signed him, so McClaren clearly jumped at the chance to get him, I doubt McClaren had heard of Mbemba before, and with Mitro the board were obviously very keen (young player + highly rated = definite saleable asset for profit), so imagine McClaren went along with them and thought it was worth taking a risk on him.

No one knows for sure, but from the quotes from Pardew, it seems he hardly had any involvement at all with transfers, and I can't imagine that changed radically at any point that Carr was with us.