Newcastle United have not started the season with their trademark fluency and snap in transition, but it would be remiss to suggest that Eddie Howe’s side have lost their way.
Indeed, Newcastle have started slowly, staggered by the din of the Alexander Isak saga, with the Sweden striker having scored 27 goals last season, leading the club back into the Champions League and scoring what proved to be the winning goal at Wembley against Liverpool.
It was a cruel blow, especially after PIF had fought so hard to keep the rebel forward at St. James’ Park, but ultimately, he was intractable in his desire to leave for Anfield, and United banked a British record £125m fee.
An old adage says that no player is ever bigger than the club, and this is doubly true on Tyneside, with the sum of Howe’s team always greater than its individual parts.
They may not be firing on all cylinders yet, but there’s no question that it will come together.
Howe's new-look Newcastle frontline
Newcastle replaced Isak with Nick Woltemade, signing the 23-year-old German from Stuttgart in a club-record £69m deal. The rangy forward scored the winner on his debut against Wolves, but faced a sterner task on the south coast against Bournemouth last time out, albeit offering encouragement in the stalemate.
He’s rivalled against Yoane Wissa, who joined from Brentford on deadline day but has yet to make his debut as he recovers from a knee injury which will not require surgery.
That makes up number nine, but Newcastle needed more than just goalscorers, having finally ended an interminable search for a right-sided forward upon landing Nottingham Forest’s Anthony Elanga.
One of the fastest players in the Premier League, Elanga hasn’t quite hit his stride in black and white, but offers an exciting dimension to Howe’s outfit.
Whether Elanga was worth the £55m paid to the Tricky Trees remains to be seen, but Newcastle have signed a Prem-proven player, something they sought to do a couple of years before.
Indeed, Raphinha is certainly one who got away, having just contested Paris Saint-Germain’s Ousmane Dembele in the bid for the Men’s Ballon d’Or.
When Newcastle missed out on Raphinha
Newcastle have kept four clean sheets from five Premier League matches so far this season, with the basis of Howe’s tactics as deeply-rooted as ever.
Now, he needs to overlay that foundation with attacking flair once again. Isak would have helped with that, sure, but Raphinha would have too, and based on his extraordinary form with Barcelona, it’s a shame Newcastle didn’t push to land his signature in 2023.
Having registered their interest in Barcelona’s man in 2023, Howe and PIF were hoping to take advantage of the La Liga giants’ financial problems, having even made a £60m verbal offer in May 2023, feeling out the chances of a big-money bid when the transfer gates swung open.
Barcelona had swiped Leeds United’s talisman from both Arsenal and Chelsea the year before, with the Londoners engaged in a transfer tussle for one of the Premier League’s most underrated wide forwards.
His first few years in Spain were somewhat middling, but Hansi Flick changed everything for the Brazil international, whose potency proved instrumental in the fight to win La Liga last season.
The 28-year-old scored 34 goals and assisted 25 more across all competitions, with his manager even remarking in October 2024 that he had “never had a player like him”.
Al Hilal from the Saudi Pro League have since been sniffing around, interested in completing a £87m deal for the Brazilian. Barcelona are not quite so cash-strapped as in recent years, but they remain beset with monetary issues.
It’s a shame that Newcastle didn’t strike while the iron was hot. Raphinha outperformed every single player in Europe last season, from a prolific perspective, at least, and so it’s not hard to understand why he was higher in the Ballon d’Or standings than stars such as Chelsea’s Cole Palmer and Liverpool playmaker Florian Wirtz.
Raphinha
34 (25)
59
Mohamed Salah
34 (23)
57
Harry Kane
38 (13)
51
Ousmane Dembele
33 (15)
48
Kylian Mbappe
42 (4)
46
Just imagine Raphinha plying his craft down the Newcastle right; picture the kind of attacking combinations Howe could have spun together, weaving with Isak and Anthony Gordon and co a web of offensive skill that would have proved too much for most every opponent the Magpies came up against.
The £276k-per-week talent proved himself in the Premier League while at Leeds, and he’s only gone from strength to strength since.
Neither Wirtz nor Palmer, it’s worth observing, reached the top 20 for goal involvements last season. Wirtz hasn’t got going in the English game yet, but both are considered among the finest players not just in the Premier League but across all of Europe. Raphinha, on recent form, at least, is a cut above.
Even in England, at Elland Road, the La Blaugrana man was described as a “magician” of a player by his erstwhile teammate Dan James.
Raphinha has grown into a superstar, one who owes a debt of development to Hansi Flick. But there’s no reason that Howe couldn’t have shaped him into one of the world’s best himself, with Raphinha indeed hailed last season as being “the best player in the world” by Statman Dave across the 2024/25 campaign.
Given Howe’s expertise on the interpersonal front and his sharp, raise-the-bar coaching, it’s hard to envisage Raphinha falling by the wayside in some parallel version of events.
Who knows, maybe it would have been the tonic that United needed during their injury-riddled 2023/24 campaign, and perhaps it would have provided the boost the club needed to take things one step further last term, not just winning the Carabao Cup and returning to Europe but achieving something even greater.
We’ll never know how it would have panned out, but Newcastle have kicked on regardless, and having absorbed the damage of a turbulent summer transfer window, are ready to write another illustrious chapter into their history.