It’s difficult to ignore the elephant in the room when he’s 6ft 6ins.
In what promises to be a hectic final week of the transfer window, Nick Woltemade is one to watch. A year on from becoming their club record signing, his future as a Newcastle United player feels increasingly uncertain.
In some ways he is not to blame. He was a panic buy, signed by a transfer committee that wasn’t fit for purpose who had been engulfed by chaos all summer. Woltemade was the last man standing in a transfer window when Newcastle missed out on all their top targets and they wound up recruiting someone who was never a natural fit for a press that was meant to be relentless. It was those failures that informed this summer’s more proactive attitude in the transfer window.
If Woltemade was a bad fit for Eddie Howe he feels even more of a mismatch for Matthias Jaissle, who has cranked the volume up to 11 in a bid to get Newcastle playing rock and roll football. With no European football he has a licence to demand intensity in every match – but that is just not Woltemade’s game.
“Hard worker” was how Jaissle described him afterwards and it’s not a problem of effort. Perhaps it would be better if it was because then you could see Jaissle getting inside his head and getting more out of him. The issue is that he can’t press like Will Osula, the striker whose injury makes Newcastle’s efforts to sign a forward in the next few days even more critical.
He also can’t break from deep like Wissa, who made such a difference doing that against Liverpool. Woltemade is a striker-cum-playmaker, the sort who would surely prosper in La Liga or the Bundesliga, the division where he scored 12 goals in the breakout season that convinced a panicked Newcastle to sign him.
But the Premier League? Nothing we saw against West Brom, a game Championship side who were picked apart three times, suggests he’s about to turn a corner in Jaissle’s system.
The manager was coy afterwards. Would Woltemade be staying, he was asked. He nodded and then added the mother of all caveats.
“I expect all the players to stay as we are speaking today but football is complex. Things can change from one day or the other,” he said. Given Newcastle are now in the “alive to market opportunities” stage of the summer, his backing for Woltemade felt less than definitive.
The solution may be an uncomfortable one, financially. Under Uefa rules every player has a cost attached to them and selling a player at a loss dents your ability to spend. So even if Newcastle wanted to, they can’t really afford to cut and run. Not if they are to retain their prized financial discipline.
At £69m, Newcastle overpaid. Everton, who liked him last year, rated him at around £40m then and that – in truth – is probably closer to his true value. But no-one at St James’ Park is going to swallow that kind of loss.
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So here is the fix: if Newcastle get their top targets in the coming days (and there is a measure of confidence they will), perhaps a loan may be considered if the terms work.
And the truth is, those targets feel like much more convincing fits for this new era. Lille’s Matias Fernandez-Pardo remains on Newcastle’s radar – even if sources counsel caution on it – and there have been talks with Stuttgart’s Bilal El Khannouss. Both players are open to joining Newcastle, even if their clubs want big money.
They have held talks with a third target who can fill in up front whose identity is yet to emerge. So they know that strengthening that area is a priority. For Woltemade – who was all the rage a year ago – it feels like a Newcastle career that never really got started is heading for a crossroads.