If there’s one player who can firmly be described as a Newcastle United flop, it’s Henri Saivet.
The player, who started his career at Bordeaux, was signed by the Magpies in 2016 for around £5.4m, and expectations were placed on him because of his potential.
However, reality was very different, as the player only ever made eight appearances for Newcastle, scoring one goal along the way, eventually leaving them in 2021.
It really isn’t what Newcastle or the player will have wanted, and there was even talk of him leaving as early as 2019, when he returned from a loan in Turkey with Bursaspor.
That never ended up happening, as he explained in an interview with L’Equipe recently: “During the summer of 2019, we agreed with the leaders of Newcastle that I would terminate the last two years of my contract. However, I played in the Africa Cup of Nations and my value increased.
“When I returned, there were only two weeks left before the end of the English transfer window. I was told that they finally preferred to sell me, and I was not registered in the list of 25 players for the league. I didn’t leave and I couldn’t play. We had reached a point of no return.”
Then came the Covid pandemic, which meant things got even more complicated, and he wasn’t always able to train with the Newcastle first team because ‘the club didn’t have enough Covid tests’, with Saivet stating at least five or six players were in his situation.
The player said he was then ‘sent to the reserves’ in January 2021, where he played four games in six months, but the midfielder admitted it did him the world of good.
He said: “It’s with them that I started enjoying football again. With the pros, the sessions were on the side of the group or they were putting me in defence. They’d taken away that passion from me. In the U23s, I could play in my role and train regularly.”
Saivet then spent a year without a club, before Pau FC in Ligue 2 in France eventually decided to give him a go, which has worked out in their favour, as the 31-year-old has scored four goals in his first eight games with his new club.
