In Their Time Of Need, Newcastle United Have Turned To Chris Wood To Save Them
It all happened so very quickly. The richest club on the planet came calling and within a couple days personal terms had been agreed and the medical was underway. Chris Wood has left Burnley to sign for Newcastle United. A cheeky £25m for his services which you’ll not be shocked to know is by far the biggest fee ever commanded for a New Zealand footballer - topping the £15m that the Clarets paid for him in the first place. It’s the fourth time that Chris Wood has been sold for a transfer fee in excess of seven figures. The Woodsman has signed a two-and-a-half year contract and will wear the number 20... the same number he wore on his All Whites debut.
Newcastle United aren’t worried about their cheques bouncing. They’re fresh from a disgustingly lucrative change in ownership and have also just signed England international right back (and former Burnley man) Kieran Tripper for a reasonable price, luring him back to the Premier League from Atletico Madrid. As it happens, Tripper is represented by CAA Base – a London-based sports management/promotion company whose clients include a wide variety of Premier League and Women’s Super League talent. CAA Base is the British footballing division of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) who are major players in the American market... but that fact doesn’t matter within this tale.
What matters here is that Chris Wood is also a CAA Base client. Doesn’t take much to imagine the Tripper negotiations wrapping up to a happy conclusion and everybody standing up and shaking hands before they leave the boardroom and then the CAA Base rep says something along the lines of: say, fellas, if you like Kieran Tripper, could I possibly interest you in a little bit of Christopher Wood, perchance? Next thing you know the man’s flying in for a medical.
We’ll get to the Burnley perspective soon but from Newcastle’s POV this is a pragmatic move. All the chat about the global superstars that they’re going to entice to St James’ Park... mate, you’re not getting Neymar or Erling Haaland to play Championship instead of Champions League so you’d better damn well not get relegated. Otherwise those grand plans get set back at least two years.
Right now they’re in an awful position on the Premier League table with only 1 win from 19 matches and they just got embarrassingly dumped out of the FA Cup by Cambridge United. Their main striker, Callum Wilson, is out for two months with a hamstring issue. They don’t have another trusted goal scorer and one of the main reasons they lost to Cambridge was some atrocious finishing. They play Watford, the only team outside the relegation zone that they can conceivably catch without a drastic change of fortunes, on the weekend. They’re drinking at the Saloon De La Desesperación. No time to waste.
They needed a striker and not just any striker. Someone who can come in and have an immediate impact, a proven Premier League goal scorer. Like for example somebody who has scored double-figure goals in each of the last four seasons (putting him on par with Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane, Jamie Vardy, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette, Raheem Sterling, Sadio Mane & Heung-Min Son). Chris Wood is That Guy. He’s a known quantity. Plug and play. Signing him weakens another team in the drop zone plus it just so happens that he had a conveniently affordable release clause in his contract which meant that they didn’t even need Burnley’s cooperation to get it done.
Of course Chris Wood could have turned around and said: nah bro. He could have told them that he’s loyal to Burnley, that they may be struggling right now but they always find a way to survive and he wants to be a part of that. But he hasn’t done that. Because perhaps merely surviving each season doesn’t quite match his ambitions, perhaps having turned thirty last month he’s ready for a new challenge, perhaps he fancies a pay-rise, perhaps he likes the idea of playing for a legacy club which regularly brings in 50k attendance for home games at their famous stadium, perhaps he’s been wooed and flattered by the idea that he, himself, none other, is the man that Newcastle United have summoned to save them in a time of need. He’s basically got half a season to bang some goals away and become an instant cult hero for the club now.
Burnley and Newcastle were level on points at the time of the transfer and had both just been knocked out of the FA Cup by lower-tiered opposition. On the surface it’s a sideways move... however Newcastle obviously have a whole lot more heft to them and are being proactive about trying to solve their issues. Wood’s stated motivation has always been to play at the highest level possible and clearly Newcastle have more upward-mobility than Burnley. There is the highly-publicised matter of the sportswashing owners... but that’s not something that necessarily matters to a player and it’s probably unfair to ask that it should (and it’s too complicated an issue to dig into here, one which goes far beyond Newcastle United Football Club). Plus it’s a fresh start after four and a half years at the same club. Sometimes you need that.
Also Kieran Trippier is one of the best crossers of a football out there and Allan Saint-Maximin as a thrill-a-minute winger while Jonjo Shelvey is still out there pinging deadly accurate passes – not to mention anyone else they may sign. He can pretty much rest easy that he’s going to get better service than he’d been getting at Burnley lately, whose lack of creativity in midfield has been glaring this season. Chris Wood hasn’t helped matters with a few bad misses along the way but those ones sting more when they’re your only major chance in a match. Give him 3-4 big chances and allow him to get some rhythm and see what happens. He’s always been that kind of striker.
Now, a lot of that makes it sound like there’s a perfectly carved Chris Wood-shaped spot in the starting line-up for him at The Magpies and there is... for now. In two months Callum Wilson will be back and that could be a complicating factor although the two should work nicely together in combination, they fit the ol’ big man/small man pattern perfectly. But come next season, should he do what he’s been tasked with doing and the club stays in the Premier League... well, they’re not gonna stop spending money.
Much flashier signings than Chris Wood will follow. If he builds up some positive karma over the rest of this season then that may give him a running start into the next one but not sure anyone is envisaging a world where Chris Wood is still the voluntary first choice striker for Newcastle in 18 months. That’s going to be an issue at some point. Something that Winston Reid could give him some good advice about – Reid’s long contract and high wages and injury history kept him on the West Ham books long after the club deemed him surplus to requirements. Probably best to deal with that bridge when he comes to it. As long as he keeps scoring goals then no dramas, there’s always a market for a proven goal scorer... damn, this transfer is proof of that much.
As for Burnley Football Club... I mean, look, we can’t really sugar-coat it: Burnley have cocked this up big time. Their most reliable centre-forward has left them for a major relegation rival. They were already getting toasty sitting so close to that relegation fire and now they’ve poured petrol on the bloody thing. No sooner had these rumours emerged than Burnley journos were referencing unnamed sources who claimed there was zero chance of it happening but we now know that was merely bluster. Burnley were fully aware that they were helpless against the release clause. A release clause that they themselves put into his 2019 contract extension.
To be fair, we’re talking about a 30 year old striker whom they got 4.5 solid years out of after bringing him in for a club record fee and somehow they’ve still made a profit with this sale. Ordinarily that’d be great business for a club like Burnley... especially at a time when their most marketable player, England defender James Tarkowski, looks almost certain to be leaving on a free transfer at the end of the campaign (quite possibly for Newcastle United, if talk is to be believed). Take that cash and sign two or three additional players to fill out their slim-pickings squad and they may well be in a better place. But this isn’t an ordinary situation. This is a potentially critical blow to their relegation survival and it never should have come to this.
The problem is that Burnley have not been a well-run club for quite a while. They’re financial minnows in the most profitable football league on the planet which leaves them with such a tiny margin for error to begin with and the fact that they’re still in the division at all is a testament to a superb job of coaching from Sean Dyche. Because this squad is basically still all the same dudes as were there in Chris Wood’s first season and in professional football, staying put means falling behind.
Burnley FC’s most common Premier League starters in 2017-18:
Nick Pope | Stephen Ward, Ben Mee, James Tarkowski, Matt Lowton | Jack Cork, Jeff Hendrick, Johann Berg Gudmundsson, Steven Defour | Ashley Barnes, Chris Wood
Burnley FC’s most common Premier League starters in 2021-22:
Nick Pope | Matt Lowton, Ben Mee, James Tarkowski, Charlie Taylor | Ashley Westwood, Jack Cork, Johann Berg Gudmundsson, Dwight McNeil | Josh Brownhill, Chris Wood
Keep in mind that McNeil came through the academy and that Taylor and Westwood preceded Wood at the club and have stepped into more prominent roles as others have left. And Josh Brownhill is only in the eleven because summer signing Maxwel Cornet has dealt with injury and is now away at AFCON with the Ivory Coast. That’s not good. In fact it’s terrible. These are all the players they’ve spent transfer fees on since Chris Wood arrived:
Joe Hart, Matej Vydra, Ben Gibson, Jay Rodriguez, Josh Brownhill, Bailey Peacock-Farrell, Erik Pieters, Dale Stephens, Maxwel Cornet, Nathan Collins & Connor Roberts.
All backups or busts with the exception of Cornet and the two other blokes who joined in the last window. Nathan Collins is a solid young CB who’ll replace Tarkowski next season. Connor Roberts should go well when he gets a run of fitness too – a Welsh fullback who’ll give them a little extra punch. The improved success rate of that summer window is not a coincidence as it was the first full window after the club changed ownership midway through last season. That change has helped. But the stasis that set in during the previous ownership took root over multiple seasons and will take multiple windows to fix.
Hence you wanna be careful with the dudes you’ve already got and that’s not what’s happened. With two seasons remaining from that 2019 extension and coming off a red hot run of form to close the last campaign, it was a surprise that Burnley didn’t offer Chris Wood new terms in the offseason. A surprise then and a downright mess now. They could have gotten rid of that pesky release clause in the process. It may well be that they tried to but Chris Wood wanted to keep his options open, in which case that’s worked out nicely for him now. Or it could just be that Burnley are bad at this.
See, it’s already been mentioned that they’ve allowed James Tarkowski to enter the last year of his current deal and look primed to lose him for nothing. Captain Ben Mee is also in his final few months though he seems like he’ll probably sign on fresh terms. And guess what? Jack Cork, Phil Bardsley, Aaron Lennon, Erik Pieters, Dale Stephens, Jay Rodriguez, Ashley Barnes, and Matej Vydra are all also free to leave at the end of the season if nothing changes. Letting this many players wind down their contracts at once is almost unheard of in the Premier League. A few may have options in their contracts, dunno, but this is not how an efficient club operates. And it’s that inefficiency that has caused them to lose the top Premier League scorer in their squad to a relegation rival mid-season.
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