Newcastle United have completed the signing of Jacob Ramsey on a five-year deal from Aston Villa.
Having sold Sean Longstaff in July, the Magpies were in need of a new midfielder to give them more depth ahead of a busy 2025/26 campaign.
Jacob Ramsey has officially been unveiled as a Newcastle United player, with Eddie Howe’s recruitment team taking advantage of Aston Villa’s PSR troubles to poach one of their top academy graduates.
Ramsey has signed a five-year deal with the Magpies and will wear the No.41 on at Newcastle, the same number he had with the Villans.
The deal is worth around £44million including add-ons, with the initial fee believed to be in the region of £40million. In his first interview with the club, Ramsey mentioned Newcastle players Anthony Gordon and Lewis Hall, who have earned England call-ups thanks to their work with Howe, so moving to Tyneside to work under him was an easy choice.
While Newcastle have managed to get a deal over the line with relative ease this summer, it could have been done much earlier.
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Newcastle United held talks with Aston Villa over Jacob Ramsey in January 2024
The three transfer windows succeeding the summer were rather bleak for Newcastle. There were no major arrivals aside from Lewis Hall’s loan being made permanent, and PSR had forced Elliot Anderson to join Nottingham Forest, with winger Yankuba Minteh going to Brighton.
Now, Newcastle are in a much better position with PSR, but it has hindered their chance of getting deals done until this summer.
It was evident in the 2023/24 season that Longstaff would not be a long-term regular starter for Newcastle, so they were hunting for the next star who could come in. In January 2024, they found Ramsey, just 22 at the time.
According to The Athletic, Newcastle ‘held dialogue’ with Villa over a move for Ramsey. A fee of £50m was discussed, but Villa were reluctant to sell an academy player. Instead, they sold Douglas Luiz to Juventus.
The report states that clubs like Tottenham Hotspur and even German giants Bayern Munich had shown interest in Ramsey at the time.
Newcastle United were right to wait until 2025 to sign Jacob Ramsey
While Villa did not want to sell Ramsey then, they have been backed into a corner this summer and have had their arm twisted into selling a useful academy star.
Unai Emery will be happy with the fee they got, but the reaction from the Villa players to Ramsey’s exit is telling. Tyrone Mings and Morgan Rogers were gutted to see Ramsey leaving Villa, stating how important a player he was to the club at his age.
At the time, £50m would have been very steep for Ramsey, even for the modern day. However, some will argue that his fee this summer is a bargain.
In the time since those talks in January 2024, Ramsey has helped Villa qualify for the Champions League, played in the competition with them, and kept them in Europe the following season.
Newcastle are getting a much more experienced player than they were in 2024, so they were much better off signing him this summer rather than 18 months ago.
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