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Sunderland Top & Newcastle Bottom – Does The Table Lie?

11 years ago
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It is now 53 days since Newcastle United played the last match of the 2012/13 season.

It is now 37 days until the Premier League kicks off again, or 39 days in Newcastle and Man. City’s case.

As always in the summer it is the close window signings who make the headlines, or rather don’t in Newcastle’s case at the moment.

The split (different points of view) between Newcastle fans is roughly summed up by on the one hand those who believe, or are desperate to, that everything will turn out ok and no need to panic yet (blind faith?). While the rest look at the fact that as we speak, Newcastle are the only one of twenty Premier League clubs not to make a signing so far and fear the worst (miserable b***ards?).

I thought it would be quite interesting to see exactly which clubs have been the most active (or not as the case may be) and see if there is any pattern.

According to the excellent Soccerway website, there have been 59 signings in the Premier League this summer (including those new players coming in on loan) and so at an average of around 3 per club this is how it breaks down;

7  Sunderland
6  Aston Villa
5  Hull
5  Swansea
4  Liverpool
4  Everton
4  Norwich
4  Fulham
3  Chelsea
3  West Ham
2  Crystal Palace
2  West Brom
2  Stoke
2  Man City
2  Man Utd.
1  Cardiff
1  Spurs
1  Southampton
1  Arsenal
0  Newcastle United


Obviously it isn’t a case of automatically those making most signings will equal improvement in their team/squad, or at least I hope not considering who is at each end of the table!

With clubs now back training it must be a fairly decent time to take stock of where clubs are at because surely in an ideal world new players would be available to start that pre-season training with their new team-mates?

They always say that the teams at the top have a big advantage of having more stability because of their ongoing success and so don’t need to make sweeping changes, so little surprise to secondly Chelsea out of the top five making  more than two signings.

Maybe the most ‘interesting’ thing is to look at the clubs that were in and around Newcastle last season and all of them have made at least a couple, apart from Southampton, and he was a significant 10m Euros outlay from Lyon.

In fact 7 of the teams we’d be aspiring to finish above, seven of them (Liverpool, Everton, Norwich, the Mackems, Fulham, Villa & Swansea) have all signed four or more this summer.

Yes you can sign players up until September 2 but as we know to our cost so many times, you have to give players (especially from abroad) time to settle in or it can go horribly wrong. You only need to look at the desperate January signing spree and you’ll have heard fans referring to Debuchy as rubbish, Mapou not able to hack it at centre-back here and Sissoko found out after promising start. Like it was the most sensible thing in the world to get into a position where you buy five foreign players and throw them instantly into a relegation battle when they stepped off the plane.

Maybe we’ll have another look at this ‘league table’ a the end of this month because surely by then clubs will be looking to have most of their jigsaw pieces in place…

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NUFC to finish above; Sunderland 8/15, Villa 4/6, Swansea 8/15, Southampton 4/5
66/1 NUFC to finish Top Four – View all odds HERE

9/1   NUFC to finish Top Six – View all odds HERE
11/10 NUFC to finish Top Ten – View all odds HERE
4/6     NUFC to finish Bottom Ten – View all odds HERE
1/20  NUFC to stay up – View all odds HERE
8/1   NUFC to be relegated – View all odds HERE

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