Anthony Elanga is currently out at the 2026 World Cup finals with Sweden, they play their opening group match against Tunisia in the early hours of Monday morning (UK time).
I wanted though to travel back to summer 2025 and what I think proved to be a pivotal period of time for Newcastle United that involved Anthony Elanga.
On Sunday 25 May 2025, Newcastle United qualified for the Champions League despite losing at home to Everton on the final day of the season.
Immediately after the game Eddie Howe gave his post-match press conference.
In that press conference the Newcastle United Head Coach said he was meeting the club’s owners with the summer 2025 transfer window to be discussed. Eddie Howe saying it was vital that a dynamic approach was taken to try and make early signings.
The Newcastle United squad had been seriously thinned down over recent windows and with such a huge 2025/26 season ahead and four competitions to contend with, major team and squad strengthening was needed. With it being essential that the majority of major signings were made in time to have a proper pre-season, so that they could integrate into the squad and be brought up to speed by Eddie Howe on the training pitch and non-competitive matches ahead of the real thing.
Less than two weeks after ending the 2024/25 season…
Report on The Mag – 7 June 2025
‘Newcastle United have now made an approach to sign Anthony Elanga. That news comes via a media exclusive from The Mail. They report that talks are now in their early stages but Anthony Elanga could be set to be Eddie Howe’s first signing of the summer.
Nottingham Forest paid Manchester United £15m for Anthony Elanga in 2023 and The Mail state that their information is that it will take at least £50m for a deal to be done now by Newcastle United.’
This was exactly what Eddie Howe (and the Newcastle United fans) wanted to hear.
Early moves by the club to bring in Howe’s transfer targets. We knew that Newcastle United and Eddie Howe were interested in Anthony Elanga having previously tried to buy the player at the very end of the summer 2024 window, something the player himself had confirmed. The interest was even more understandable with the 2024/25 season having seen only two players, Mo Salah (8) and Jacob Murphy (12), register more Premier League assists than Elanga’s 11.
The exclusive from The Mail on 7 June 2025 was to prove very much on the money in many ways. The new Newcastle United approach to try and buy Anthony Elanga was very quickly confirmed.
This is where I think something has been totally lost.
The real red flag that the Anthony Elanga signing should have signalled.
I am not talking about the fact that 12 months later we are still waiting for Anthony Elanga to prove himself properly in a Newcastle United shirt. There are no guarantees with any signing and when NUFC were linked with Elanga the reaction from Newcastle fans was overwhelmingly positive.
I believe that so much has been forgotten about summer 2025, largely due to what then followed, an exhausting and draining 58 match season for everybody connected with Newcastle United, including/especially the fans.
One of those things that has been forgotten is just how long it took to get this Anthony Elanga signing over the line. I knew it felt like it took forever but even I was surprised when I checked, at exactly how long.
The Mag report – 11 July 2025:
‘Welcome to Anthony Elanga, now a Newcastle United player, finally! An official club announcement on Friday evening revealing the news. The usual undisclosed transfer fee but previously reported by all the more reliable Newcastle United media as a £55m deal. With £52m guaranteed to Nottingham Forest, potentially £3m more in future add-ons.
A transfer saga finally at an end….’
Yes, five weeks (34 days) it took to get the Anthony Elanga signing done from that media exclusive reporting the new bid on 7 June 2025.
Looking back, this is where the real red flag was waving, or should have been.
Why did it take such a ridiculous length of time? That original exclusive from The Mail correctly reported that it would take over £50m for Newcastle United to buy Anthony Elanga and so it proved, £52m (plus £3m in future add-ons).
There were almost daily updates across the five weeks, a number of bids made before concluded, with it reported that minority owner Jamie Reuben eventually got involved to help get the signing over the line. Yes, we all know that tens of millions of pounds is a lot of money and it is easy to forget this with modern football, but at the same time this is the kind of transfer that normally gets quickly done. Elanga desperate to come to Newcastle United, not a case of him also interested in other clubs and them competing for his attention, Eddie Howe and NUFC definitely wanting the winger, so what went wrong?
I think that as fans we were all pretty laidback about it at first as the talks and bids dragged on, mid-June 2025 and so plenty of time to still get Anthony Elanga and other signings in.
Like the rest of you I don’t have any inside information as to why this signing took forever but we can all still form our own opinion. An opinion that can also be formed by what else was (and wasn’t) happening.
Personally, I think there were a couple of major issues. The Newcastle United owners weren’t showing the kind of dynamic action that Eddie Howe said was needed, doing what was needed to get early key signings made. Rather than getting into intense negotiations to get deals done quickly, my guess is that lowball offers were made on Anthony Elanga and others, then time allowed to pass before going back and trying to progress the deals. The fact that Newcastle United were operating without the two key members of business-side staff in place, an active Sporting Director and CEO, was undoubtedly a huge negative when it came to making dynamic moves in the transfer market. This especially crucial when the majority Saudi Arabia PIF oversee the club remotely and as regularly reported, have been notoriously very slow to make decisions when needed.
If you are looking for the key reason(s) why the summer 2025 preparations for the new season proved such a disaster, I think what happened with this Anthony Elanga transfer saga is a huge help.
We had seen numerous big signings made in the recent past, the likes of Bruno, Hall, Livramento, Tonali, Isak and so on. None of them so torturously slow to get done as the Elanga one. Something had changed for the worse.
After he was eventually signed, the reality is that Anthony Elanga was the only summer 2025 signing to have a pre-season with the Newcastle United squad and to work with Eddie Howe. You look back at the minimal squad and first team options that Eddie Howe had in that pre-season, the 4-0 hammering at Celtic and the long distance trip to Singapore and South Korea.
On 12 August 2025, Malick Thiaw became the second player bought by Newcastle United in summer 2025.
The Premier League season kicked off for Newcastle United on 16 August 2025 at Villa Park.
Jacob Ramsey signed for United on 17 August 2025.
Nick Woltemade and Yoane Wissa arrived at the very end of the summer 2025 window, with Alexander Isak exiting in the final hours before the window closed.
Why did everything take so long, why was there not more urgency shown? As well as the Anthony Elanga one, the Alexander Isak saga was the other key informative piece of the jigsaw puzzle as to the disastrous pre-season preparations. The Newcastle United owners insisting across the summer that the on-strike Isak wouldn’t be allowed to leave, only to sell him at the very end of the window and bring the much needed two new strikers in far too late. Rather than dealing with the Isak situation the NUFC owners stood back, then in the very closing stages of the window when on Tyneside for the Liverpool home match, the Newcastle United owners went round to Alexander Isak’s house to try and persuade him to stay.
Please let this make sense.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion but it does leave me baffled how any Newcastle United fan can lay all of the blame for last summer’s pre-season preparations (and what then followed across the 2025/26 season) solely at the door of Eddie Howe.
It was a massive dereliction of duty from the Newcastle United owners, with Eddie Howe and the fans badly let down.
Eddie Howe has to take some of the blame for what happened last summer and with the Premier League results but the vast majority of blame lies elsewhere to me.
Better news now and the irony…
On the positive side of things, the current situation feels very different.
Only one signing made so far in the shape of Ewen Jaouen, whilst Anthony Gordon sold and a number of other first team squad players allowed to move on at the end of their contracts. However, it feels like things are getting done as they should be, that proper plans are in place, with transfer targets in place and to be properly pursued. A strong chance seemingly that Victor Munoz could shortly be signing number two, whilst maybe even James Trafford to be successfully landed at last.
The irony of course is that the man who is now in charge of trying to get Eddie Howe’s key targets over the line, is none other than Ross Wilson. The man who was on the other side of the fence 12 months ago when working at Nottingham Forest, Wilson will absolutely know why that Anthony Elanga transfer took forever last summer.
As I said earlier, there are no guarantees that any new signing is going to be successful.
At the same time, you have to give your summer signings as much chance as possible of becoming successes at St James’ Park.
If at all possible, getting as much of your major business completed as early as possible is a huge part of that. Especially when you are looking at major restructuring of a Newcastle United squad, which was the case in summer 2025 and same again this time.
Lessons learnt hopefully and we will never see a repeat of the shambles of summer 2025 at Newcastle United.