Graeme Souness on his time at Newcastle:
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I made a mistake when Alan Shearer was going to chuck it by persuading him to play on and give me another year because I felt he was good in the dressing room. In doing so we only ended up getting Michael Owen in during the summer when, in reality, we needed two strikers. Alan was on his last legs and if he hadn’t stayed on we would have ended up getting the two we needed.
“Initially I’d wanted to sign Nicolas Anelka. I’d had a meeting with his brother
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“It had got to about 10.30pm and I was about to leave when they suddenly said ‘Before you go, have a look at these’. (Football agent) Paul Stretford came in with a pile of CVs and said ‘What about one of these?’
“He handed about 50 pages of players who were top scorers in all the leagues in Europe. ‘Pick one of them,’ he said. Unbelievable. Less than 48 hours before the transfer deadline, I was being asked to pick a player who I had never seen play, because he had a track record of scoring goals and because they thought they were not getting Michael.
“I just said ‘I’m going home’. Dean Saunders lived opposite me and at about 1am, he was throwing stones at my window to wake me up – I had turned my mobile off by this point – to tell me Michael had phoned and said he was coming to Newcastle United after all
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I’d watch a game at night, come in and have my breakfast with my staff at the training ground and I would say a throwaway line like, ‘Did you see the game last night, such and such played really well.’ That was all I said, but on three or four occasions Kenny Shepherd would come back to me and say, ‘We’ve spoken to his agent, he’d love to join us.’
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A pretty damning insight to the way to the club was being run under the late Shepherd, an absolute willingness to throw money at anyone and anything to keep the club relevant whilst knowingly racking up club ending debt. £150m to be exact for a club that was rapidly fading away from the top four, then removing itself from any form of European spot all together. £150m now is a drop in the pond but back then it was a debt that left Newcastle 3 weeks away from doing Portsmouth before they did it. I think Shepherd would have borrowed from elsewhere again though and just added more debt to keep us afloat.
Stretford being the bloke portions of united fans hate? because he's your best mate but he's touting the same player behind your back to someone else (See Rooney to Man United and his involvement in getting another club - Newcastle to basically drive up the price and sweeten his payment in the end) The bloke literally had an office at St James' with Freddie's son. I still believe the above is true, I don't think there was ever a question of where Rooney was going, it was always United and Stretford and co were all in on Newcastle essentially making shill offers.