A curveball was thrown out of left field when it was reported that Newcastle United were on the verge of agreeing on a deal with VfB Stuttgart to sign striker Nick Woltemade, who Bayern Munich had been trying to sign for months.
Shortly after said reports started to circulate, Woltemade officially signed as a Newcastle player on a deal that’s worth €75m plus an additional €5m in add-ons for a six-year contract. That €75m fee was what Stuttgart had been adamant on wanting from Bayern during their pursuit
of the striker despite his valuation only being somewhere in the range of €30m, hence why the reining Bundesliga champions eventually tabled their efforts to try to sign him. The player had expressed his desire to leave Stuttgart, and only leave for Bayern, but it’s clear the second part of the that sentiment wasn’t entirely true.
For Newcastle, they had long been courting Brentford’s Yoane Wissa, anticipating the departure of Alexander Isak to Liverpool, as the Swedish international has refused to play for the Magpies this season and desperately wants the move to Merseyside. Both Wissa and Isak had separately taken to social media via different means to express their own versions of frustration at having not yet been able to join Newcastle and Liverpool, respectively.
Ahead of Bayern’s Bavarian derby against Augsburg in the Bundesliga, sporting director Christoph Freund was asked about how the club felt with Woltemade’s move to Newcastle — there’s presumably a bitter taste left for the German Rekordmeister with how much effort they put in to try to sign the German striker. Freund did not want to pour any gasoline onto the fire or cause any unnecessary speculation, but he did speak about how the move is just another indication of just how much clubs in the Premier League are having their buying powers increase with their finance envelopes continuously being pushed.
“It says something fundamental when you see how many top players have moved from the German Bundesliga to the Premier League in the last twelve months – and also what sums are flowing there,” Freund explained (via Bild). “It says that the clubs in the Premier League have brutal possibilities. Not just at two or three clubs, but at many. Newcastle is a good club, but has not been in the top category in recent years. That shows how much money is in circulation – that’s extreme,” the sporting director continued.
Freund makes a valid point, too. Woltemade is just one of a handful of top Bundesliga talents to have left for the English top flight. Florian Wirtz and Jeremie Frimpong both just left Bayer Leverkusen for Liverpool, Hugo Ekitike left Eintracht Frankfurt for Liverpool, Xavi Simons just left RB Leipzig for Tottenham, Granit Xhaka just left Leverkusen for Sunderland, and Benjamin Sessko left Leipzig for Manchester United, just to name a few.
The Woltemade miss for Bayern is just another tab of a chapter in the book that is explaining how other European leagues are struggling to keep financial growth pace with the Premier League. Financial Fair Play rules and bylaws do not seem to be slowing down the English giants and, at this rate, it won’t take very long for the economic gaps to keep rising at exponential levels.
