£7m player admits he never played in his best position while at Newcastle

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Once upon a time Newcastle United and ‘young French talent’ were practically synonyms but for every Yohan Cabaye there was a Jean-Alain Boumsong.

One young star that failed to meet expectations when making the well-worn path from France to Newcastle was Remy Cabella.

Newcastle had been linked with Cabella for a longtime before the £7million move from Montpellier finally happened in 2014 and the Magpies had landed the player they had coveted for months.

Cabella was loaned out in his second season at Newcastle

Spending two years at the club he was only present for one with the second season being loaned back to France with Marseille.

Cabella made 34 appearances for Newcastle in 2014/15 only scoring two goals and providing one assist which was far from what was expected of him. He went on to make 45 appearances for Marseille on loan scoring six and assisting three with the French outfit signing him permanently at the end of their agreement.

Remy Cabella went on to be a good performer for Marseille which suggested he was definitely a good player but not one suited to the Premier League.

He has now admitted as much in an interview with Sofoot (via SportsWitness) where he said: “It’s true that my career would have been different if I’d spent my time in the middle.

Newcastle playing someone out of position? Never!

“At Newcastle, I often played on the right, and it wasn’t simple. Over there, my best games were against the bigger teams, because the game was a bit more open, but I wasn’t in my role.”

It looks that, like Joelinton almost was, Cabella was a casualty of Newcastle United’s inability to sign the right players for the right position under Mike Ashley.

Seeing Cabella flop at Newcastle was such a huge disappointment after some of the French success stories that went before, but mostly because of how long it seemed to take to get the deal over the line.