The summer headlines saw Marc Guehi very prominent.
Rated by many as England’s best performer (in an admittedly not very competitive field…) at the European Championships in Germany, as Gareth Southgate and his players reached the final.
Very quickly after that, Marc Guehi making headlines for a very different reason.
On Friday 2 August, it was first revealed that Newcastle United were trying to sign the 24 year old.
A bid of £50m reportedly made by Newcastle and turned down by Crystal Palace.
Exactly four weeks later, the Premier League transfer window closed on Friday 30 August 2024, with Marc Guehi still a Crystal Palace player.
This despite a reported five bids by Newcastle United, with the fifth and final one of the window claimed to be for a total of £70m, including potential future add-ons.
This would have easily exceeded Newcastle’s record signing price of £63m, £59m plus £4m potential add-ons paid by NUFC for Alexander Isak in August 2022.
If Newcastle United had succeeded with a £70m offer for Marc Guehi, it would also have been the most expensive signing by any Premier League club this summer, beating the £65m paid by Spurs for Dominic Solanke, a player signed for Bournemouth by Eddie Howe back in the day.
So why didn’t Marc Guehi end up a Newcastle United player this summer?
Well, I don’t usually have a lot of time for him but on this occasion we have Steve Parish to thank.
The Crystal Palace chairman now explaining the sequence of events and why it eventually ended up ‘impossible’ for the South London club to sell Marc Guehi to Newcastle United in the final days of the summer 2024 transfer window:
“I don’t think the [summer 2024] transfer window worked out exactly in the same format that we thought it would…
“Maybe we thought at the beginning, it would be more likely that Marc Guehi went and we kept Joachim Andersen.
“We accepted that bid for Joachim Andersen, which then made it very difficult really to sell both of our starting centre-backs in one transfer window.
“That is not to say it wasn’t still an outside possibility that we got to the right number but then Chadi Riad got injured.
“That doesn’t look quite as bad as it seems but it still left us very light and really made it impossible for us to consider at that point [towards the end of the transfer window].”
For myself and many others, I think it was already clear some of what has been detailed here. However, it is very helpful that Steve Parish has put in the missing pieces of the jigsaw, joined the dots.
Maybe you will still think that Newcastle United should have done things better/differently BUT at least this information helps explain to a large extent just why NUFC persevered with trying to get the Marc Guehi done, especially if, as appears transparently obvious, this is who Eddie Howe really wanted to sign.
Once Crystal Palace were offered £30m by Fulham for a 28 year old Joachim Andersen, you understand why Palace snapped their hands off. Thus making Marc Guehi a more difficult sale for them, especially when Chelsea are due a significant percentage of any transfer fee that Crystal Palace (ever) agree for the England defender.
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