Who To Pick From Newcastle

Drafting from Newcastle

Newcastle are among the flattest squads on the wheel, and the league numbers say so outright: a spread of 4, and nobody in the league is tighter. A squad of 25, a ceiling of 83, and a top five that runs Nico González 83, Nick Pope 82, Sven Botman 82, Joelinton 82 and Yoane Wissa 81. There is no ruinous spin here of the sort waiting at Liverpool or Chelsea, where 12 points separate the top of the best eleven from the eleventh man. There is also no spin that wins you the tie by itself.

Just 4 elite players out of 25 is the price of that evenness, and it is a real price. You are drafting reliability, not upside. The wrinkle worth knowing is in goal: Pope is an 82, yet the goalkeeping group averages 74 across four and is the weakest department at the club with more than one name in it. One of the club's best players and its worst position share an address, so the wheel is deciding rather a lot whenever it lands on Newcastle's gloves. Left wing at 80 across two, both men on 80, is the calmest place it can put you. Some 10 of the 25 are English, with two Dutchmen and two Frenchmen on the margins, so a Newcastle draft is very largely an England draft.

Alan Shearer at 98 is the legend to take, and the gap does the arguing for you. Newcastle's own forwards top out at Wissa on 81, which means Shearer arrives seventeen points above anything the current squad can offer in that shirt. David Ginola at 93 is the more entertaining spin and Alexander Isak at 93 the odder one, given he now sits in Liverpool's squad list at 92. But in a club engineered to hand you nothing extreme in either direction, Shearer is the single lever that changes the shape of your eleven rather than nudging it.