Captain Hindsight and his disciples are loving it with Yoane Wissa.
What on earth were Eddie Howe and Newcastle United thinking of with this ridiculous signing?
How did it make any possible sense?
There is a total lack of honesty with so many people, when it comes to Yoane Wissa.
Let me take you back to summer 2025…
Newcastle United needed to bring in a new striker so that the club had two options to play through the middle.
Callum Wilson had been a great servant to the club but age and injuries had caught up with him, Wilson made 18 Premier League appearances in the final year of his Newcastle United contract and didn’t score a single PL goal.
So Callum Wilson needed replaced AND as it turned out, so did Alexander Isak.
This was a perfect storm for Eddie Howe and the Newcastle United owners ahead of their most challenging (2025/26) season so far.
The Newcastle United owners failed to act quickly and/or dynamic enough in the summer 2025 transfer market to sign Eddie Howe’s top striker targets, the likes of Joao Pedro and Hugo Ekitike.
Captain Hindsight and his followers might choose to forget the reality of summer 2025 but I don’t.
The Newcastle United owners and the senior club staff totally let Eddie Howe down. In years gone by the NUFC Head Coach had seen so many of his top transfer targets landed, the likes of Isak, Gordon, Hall, Livramento, Botman, Trippier, Bruno, Tonali etc all proving huge successes. In contrast, summer 2025 saw things go badly wrong, the Newcastle United owners failing to get the deals done on the top Eddie Howe targets. Eddie Howe and his recruitment team are responsible for identifying the players they’d like to sign BUT it is then down to the Newcastle United owners and their business side staff to then get those deals agreed and completed. It ‘might’ have helped if the NUFC owners had managed to have a Sporting Director and CEO working at the club across summer 2025…
Yoane Wissa
As it became apparent that Newcastle United would be needing to sign two new strikers, unless Alexander Isak decided to end his training and playing strike and go back on his pledge to never ever play for NUFC again, the situation became ever more critical.
Eddie Howe was left to fend for himself with no help from the club hierarchy. The owners continued to refuse to sell Alexander Isak and the entire summer preparations for this most challenging (2025/26) season of all, saw Eddie Howe with no striker available. The pre-season was a shambles due to this and the fact that only one of the eventual six summer 2025 signings had any pre-season with their new teammates.
Indeed, the 2025/26 season kicked off with no striker(s) signed.
Situation critical.
In the background to all of this, it had become apparent that Yoane Wissa was the last resort target if indeed the Newcastle United owners had a change of mind and sold Alexander Isak.
To prove some kind of point they waited until the very final day of the transfer window to sell Alexander Isak on 1 September 2025 and that same day they also finally signed Yoane Wissa. Waiting for the Isak/Newcastle situation to be sorted, if it was ever going to be, Wissa himself ended up on striker for a matter of weeks, not training with Brentford. He didn’t play any pre-season friendlies with them, never mind the fact he had no pre-season at all with his (eventual) new club.
Yoane Wissa ridiculous?
Yoane Wissa a Premier League proven striker.
Aged 28 when Newcastle United signed him, in his last three seasons at Brentford, Wissa had only missed three Premier League matches due to injury. Considering Wilson’s numerous injury issues and matches missed, plus of course Isak as well having his fair share of both, a massive positive in this respect with Yoane Wissa, a player with a great availability record and avoiding injuries.
More importantly, in 35 Premier League appearances across the 2024/25 season, Yoane Wissa scored 19 goals for unfashionable Brentford. The most goals scored by any PL striker in 2024/25 who didn’t take penalties.
Yoane Wissa had scored 45 Premier League goals in his four seasons with Brentford, whilst playing 8,315 PL minutes, at an average of a goal every 184 PL minutes. A goal in just over the equivalent of every two matches.
That only tells part of the story though because in at least half his starts for Brentford, Yoane Wissa wasn’t playing centre-forward. Playing left wing, number 10 and so on, a very versatile attacking player, Ivan Toney amongst those who were playing centre-forward instead.
Even better, when you look at the more recent stats, once Yoane Wissa was mainly playing through the middle, just look…
Remember, none of these are penalties. When you look at the 2024/25 season and the later stages of the 2023/24 one, the last 48 Premier League appearances for Brentford had seen Yoane Wissa score 27 PL goals.
Of course the eventual £50m transfer fee (plus £5m in future potential add-ons) was over the top BUT Brentford had Newcastle United over a barrel. This was down to the incompetence of the Newcastle United owners across the summer 2025 transfer window and especially their total failure to properly deal with the Isak situation.
What would you have had happen at this point? Decide to not sign any strikers at all, or pay over the odds for Yoane Wissa (and Nick Woltemade)? If I find myself at a music/sporting event where I am going to be there all day and it is £10 a pint and there is no alternative if I want to have a drink, do I say no thanks I will do without? You might but I bite the bullet and do what needs to be done, paying the price they are asking as there is no alternative.
Captain Hindsight and his followers want to forget all of this with Yoane Wissa AND then brush aside the ‘small’ fact that he picked up such a serious injury with DR Congo before he could even train with Newcastle United, never mind play.
Even if it had been mid-September before Yoane Wissa had been able to start playing for Newcastle United, I have no doubt he would by now be well into double figures for Premier League goals scored. Indeed, I reckon he would have scored 20+ in all competitions by now for Newcastle.
Based on what he had shown at Brentford, why wouldn’t you believe this to be likely?
Reality is that this injury has wrecked Yoane Wissa’s season and indeed Newcastle United’s to a significant extent.
When he returned in December 2025, Eddie Howe said it would take at least six weeks for Yoane Wissa to have a kind of pre-season during the middle of this frantic season, to get him hopefully fully up to speed. Clearly this hasn’t been achieved and the season ending up a bit of a write off for Yoane Wissa. That is just reality.
Can Yoane Wissa bounce back and prove a valuable player for Newcastle United next season, with a proper pre-season etc etc. I think it is possible.
What is not in doubt, at least for me, is that when last summer turned out as it did, Yoane Wissa made absolute sense in so many ways for Newcastle United to sign him.
Fate and injury have conspired against that. It happens.