Newcastle can never allow repeat of Elliot Anderson-Odysseas Vlachodimos transfers

There was something cruelly poetic about Odysseas Vlachodimos’ second-straight loan move to Sevilla being announced by Newcastle United just as the formalities surrounding Elliot Anderson’s £116million ($153.6m) move to Manchester City were being concluded.

If Newcastle fans did not find it painful enough watching one of their own play a central role for England at a World Cup, they have been reminded of one of the most consequential transfers in their history. For important reasons in the short term, but more for the damaging effect that double deal had in the long run.

While Vlachodimos is still on Newcastle’s books and is (still) not part of Eddie Howe’s plans — despite a decent 2025-26 at Sevilla and his parent club embarking upon an overhaul of their goalkeeper department — Anderson is moving to the most successful club in England over the past decade for a fee which represents a record for a British player.

With most big-money transfers, at least those concerning a player who has previously moved clubs, the potential financial dividend owed to their former side will be highlighted. If Bruno Guimaraes was to leave Newcastle this summer, for example — and the club are adamant their captain is not for sale — then Lyon would be due 20 per cent of any profit above the roughly £40m they received for the midfielder in January 2022.

Yet with Anderson, Newcastle will not make a penny from this transaction. That is because there was no sell-on clause inserted into the deal which took Anderson to the City Ground.

That has understandably — and to a large extent justifiably — generated much anger across the Newcastle fanbase.

That is with the benefit of hindsight, mind. Without attempting to defend an exchange which, in a purely footballing sense, is indefensible, context is required to remind everyone of the economic rationale behind that transfer.

Put simply, come Saturday, June 29, 2024, Newcastle were in a desperate position.

That morning, club officials knew they needed to plug a financial black hole that exceeded £60m in less than 48 hours or face what they feared would be a double-digit points deduction — something their majority owners, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), wanted to avoid.

Newcastle’s frantic late attempts to comply with the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) — which have now been replaced by squad-cost rules (SCR), and they are less restrictive for the club, at least domestically — by their annual accounting deadline led to a fraught and largely unedifying week of discussions about the potential sale of more than half a dozen first-team players.

With Alexander Isak deemed unsaleable and the prospective transfer of Anthony Gordon to Liverpool having collapsed, Newcastle knew their easiest route to compliance was by offloading two exciting prospects. Winger Yankuba Minteh had never played for Newcastle but he moved to Brighton & Hove Albion for north of £30m, yet the perverse attraction of selling an academy graduate for “pure profit” — meaning all of the fee received can be banked in the accounts, with no deductions for (amortised) fees paid to sign them — became impossible to overlook.

Nobody at Newcastle wanted to lose Anderson, and Howe definitely did not. But Newcastle were determined to avoid a points penalty and that is the vulnerable position they found themselves in during discussions with Nottingham Forest that June weekend.

Ross Wilson, Newcastle’s sporting director, was Forest’s chief football officer at the time and was part of the negotiating team who struck what has proven to be an inspired deal for the East Midlands club. For Newcastle, it remains an unpleasant episode.

Newcastle were in a position of such weakness that, not only did they accept a paper fee of £35m for Anderson — which they felt was undervalued, and that is not a rewriting of history because insiders, speaking anonymously to protect relationships, stressed they felt the Geordie was worth at least £50m — they agreed to sign Vlachodimos for around £20m in return, to ensure Forest were PSR compliant.

Anthony Elanga, who moved to St James’ Park a year later, was the player they wanted. Howe had not been looking to sign Vlachodimos — the Greece international has made a solitary substitute appearance for Newcastle since and will spend a second successive campaign out on loan in 2026-27 — but Newcastle’s negotiators acquiesced to secure the money they needed before deadline.

That meant forgoing a sell-on clause for Anderson, which is why they will not receive even a small percentage of the £81m profit Forest have made.

Laid out as bluntly as that, the deal only looks even more embarrassing from a Newcastle perspective. Most of those viewpoints have been reached (at least outside of the Newcastle fanbase) after the fact. The initial £35m Forest invested in Anderson was queried by those who felt he was overpriced, given the then-21-year-old was not a regular starter in Howe’s strongest XI.

Even so, the optics of Anderson’s record-breaking transfer being finalised at the same time as Newcastle were sending Vlachodimos out on loan again only acts as a painful reminder of the position the club got themselves into in 2024.

One that is apposite, too.

Newcastle have been fined a combined €6m for breaching UEFA’s more restrictive financial rules and, moving forwards, they must find a way of complying or face further economic and potentially even sporting sanctions.

Many fans will lament the regulations and how they constrain challenger clubs like Newcastle, Aston Villa and Forest — and there is much merit to those arguments — yet that is the framework the Tynesiders are operating within.

The St James’ hierarchy insist they recognise their situation and, rather than find themselves in a similarly perilous state again, they are looking to take Newcastle on a sustainable, if ambitious, growth path.

This summer, that means key player sales — Gordon already and Sandro Tonali to follow — to allow for reinvestment. Rather than defer facing their true financial standing as they did for two years leading up to June 2024, Newcastle are adamant they are sober to their present economic position and looking to address it.

How achievable ‘Vision 2030’ is within the regulatory parameters remains a source of fierce debate among the fanbase, but what is unquestionable is that Newcastle can never allow a repeat of the Anderson transfer situation.

To have any chance of competing regularly at the top, Newcastle need to be making every penny possible on player sales, be that through the initial transfer fee or through any proceeds from sell-on clauses. Gordon’s move to Barcelona for up to €80m has one and that should become standard.