Yankuba Minteh is a Future Star

Today we’re going to talk about PSR bleed, but first let’s take a closer look at Yankuba Minteh. (A.K.A Minteh Fresh. A.K.A. Mentos A.K.A. The Freshmaker.)

Newcastle are allegedly shopping this kid to help with their PSR accounting, but it is crystal clear that he should be in their squad for the coming Premier League season. Don’t expect him to start this season, but absolutely DO bring him on later in the game against tired legs and let him create chaos. These stats are less exciting coming out of the Eredivisie when you are 21 or 22, but very exciting when you are still 19.

Most of the things I love about Musiala (an admittedly more polished player), Minteh shares. Lightning-in-a-bottle dribbles, extreme pressing output, great close control, and some ability to finish with both feet are all present. Passing definitely needs some polish, but he’s good at creating for his teammates. The thing that’s probably most exciting though, is that he’s left-footed. Right Wide Forward is one of the hardest positions to fill at an elite level because there are so few left footers, period. Then you need ones with meep, who can shoot, create for teammates, and have real pace. There just aren’t a lot of these players developed in any particular year, so the ones that do exist are hugely valuable.

There are legit tactical reasons why Pep is obsessed with left footers, while Arsenal benefitted hugely from Saka’s natural progression from the academy, and Liverpool’s left-footed find Mohammed Salah turned out to be one of their greatest players ever. (Those last two teams would be very hot and heavy in the transfer market if Minteh weren't already owned by Newcastle, who likely do not want him landing elsewhere in the Premier League at a competitor.)

However, the story here is that Newcastle need to get money in ASAP to cover PSR issues, Minteh’s one of their best/only saleable assets, and they can probably get a 400-500% profit on their €8M fee. But to me, this is not the type of asset that you sell. This is one you develop as quickly as you can in the hopes he’s your Salah/Saka.

Checking back on another leftie, Chelsea/Aston Villa’s Ian Maatsen fee is complicated Omari Hutchinson going the other way, but as far as I can tell, it nets out to 20ish million. As noted in a past newsletter, this feels probably eight figures too low for a Champions League viable left back. The PSR contortions are not only making life difficult for teams, they are also triggering weird incentives (accounting swap deals), AND they seem to be forcing teams to sell players that could be future stars or for prices that are 20-40% under market.

Running a team well isn’t actually that hard. It means executing the playbooks around obvious edges, avoiding large mistakes, and then not compounding those mistakes with further fuckups as you try to dig your way out. Sometimes it’s better to just take the medicine.

The salary cap contortions are already proving expensive, and since the PL are serious about this, it feels like they’ll shut down more loopholes before next summer and we’ll see more weird/bad decisions even from teams that aren’t poorly run. (To be fair, I think Newcastle have been pretty good so far.)

No matter what, it works for The Transfer Flow as a newsletter, because we love the sweet sweet content….

Rumours and News

• Unlike some accounts out there, we’re not big into the ITK scene. But reliable sources in Egypt* are reporting Spurs are in for Omar Marmoush. This feels like a depth striker pickup, potentially at a bargain price - Big Dan Levy loves a bargain - but the sources are reliable enough for us to report, and people have asked for more Spurs rumours.
  
  *Okay, our Egyptian source is Mido… or is it?

• Speaking of ITK, we have confirmed that Nico Williams’ release clause is €60m more or less. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

• Something jogged my memory this week… Back when I worked in a football team, we had jokingly renamed some Championship teams and their squad compositions/transfer patterns according to the hot immigration topic of the day.
  
  Bournemouth were Soft Brexit
  Burnley were Hard Brexit
  Millwall were the English Defense League.
  
  It’s possible we were a little too connected to current events at the time… but the outcome of said events also directly impacted our work!

• Spurs are talking to Jonathan David’s agent. Most Spurs noise around transfers this summer has been very quite, but now we’re cooking!

• Atletico Madrid have turned down a chance to sign Matt O’Riley for £30M from Celtic.

O’Riley ticks a lot of boxes. He’s versatile, scores goals and creates for teammates from midfield, is left-footed and entering his peak age seasons. On the other hand, he’s not an elite dribbler, and there are always concerns when players move from the Scottish Prem to tougher leagues around adaptation, and those concerns are usually covered in the price. The price for non-PL teams feels £5-10M too high, though Newcastle are allegedly interested here as well.

• “An unnamed Premier League club is interested in signing Kingsley Coman.” I love stories like this. It’s clearly either an agent plant or a Bayern plant (who often do their business via Bild) trying to drum up additional interest/leverage for a move or contract. (Contract feels pretty unlikely given he has a 2027 expiration).
  
  Coman feels like one of those players who had every tool needed to become a world beater and fell just a little bit short. He’s still a great ball-mover from the middle to the final third, but given how his game works, I would not want to be on the hook for 3+ more years of contract.

• The rumour mill has decided that Manchester United are the most likely team to pay Kia his crazy commission on the Zirkzee deal and they are sticking to it.

• “Arsenal will carry out a medical assessment of Wolves’ Pedro Neto (24) before deciding whether to make a bid for the Portugal winger. -looks at stats- Yeah, absolutely not.

• Napoli will only consider offers of €100M for Victor Osimhen. We are pretty sure his initial transfer fee was inflated, and his trending his nowhere near that of a €100M player. I was a big fan when he moved from Lille, but that price is a huge mistake waiting to happen.

• Aston Villa have allegedly joined forces with Chelsea in staring at Hoffenheim’s Max Beier with intent. A diet of weights and creatine shakes are in this lad’s immediate future. [We’re not going to type Maximilian every time unless he’s actually descended from Prussian kings, in which case we will respectfully refer to him as King Maximilian Beier. If you don’t like it, you are free to read someone else’s dazzlingly handsome, and surprisingly buff free transfer newsletter.]