10 Exceptional Players Newcastle United Should Never Have Turned Down
6. Michael Carrick
Kevin Keegan might have done a lot of good things for Newcastle United, but he also did some bad. It was his claims for £10m that partially turned Mike Ashley against the fans and the media (understandably on Keegan's side though, since he was constructively dismissed), and he also got rid of the club's reserve side. That spelled the end of potentially middling Newcastle careers for the likes of Steve Guppy and Darren Huckerby, but it also robbed the club of a genuinely gifted player who could well have been the next Rob Lee. He would certainly have become the Next Big Geordie Thing, but the lack of a reserve team meant that his parents thought he wouldn't be able to develop, so he scarpered down to West Ham, where he showed Newcastle's lack of judgement up for what it was. John Carver was working at the academy at the time and confirmed the reason he left:
We lost Michael Carrick because of (having no reserve team). His parents asked Wheres he going to play, John?. I said the first team and they told me to come off it. We had the Entertainers so he was never going to get in there. So they took him to West Ham.
