The strange case of Odysseas Vlachodimos – Newcastle's £20m goalkeeper they didn't want

It has been a good week for Odysseas Vlachodimos.

He played in both wins for Greece, who lead England on goal difference at the top of their Nations League group, and achieved clean sheets in each match. Next month it is Harry Kane and company at Wembley, an inviting prospect for a goalkeeper who, at the age of 30 and with 44 caps, two Portuguese league titles and 32 Champions League appearances behind him, can justifiably claim to be at the peak of his powers.

Vlachodimos made his big move this summer, signing for Newcastle United, whose Saudi majority ownership has a stated ambition to be “No 1” in the world. He is younger than any of his new club’s other ‘keepers and more decorated in Europe, while his £20million ($26.1m) transfer fee — which has never been acknowledged in public but is widely accepted — puts him 14th on the list of Newcastle’s record signings, according to Transfermarkt. It is the most they have ever paid for a goalkeeper.

Here, on the face of it, was an upwardly mobile club getting on with business, except for a few peculiar caveats.

Namely that Vlachodimos, who joined from Nottingham Forest, will not be selected for the game against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday, has not been involved in any of Newcastle’s matchday squad this season and has already been told he can leave St James’ Park, an opportunity he declined.

Rather than representing the next step on Newcastle’s journey towards conquering football, the man everyone knows as “Ody” represents a compromise they made when a possible points deduction loomed and they were scrambling to bring in money to comply with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR). Before then, he had not even featured on their list of targets. In this regard, he represents a very modern transfer.

It is one of the strangest deals of the summer.

After his decent week away on international duty, Vlachodimos will get his head down and work. He is praised for his upbeat attitude — “He is one of the nicest human beings you’ll meet,” says a senior Newcastle source who, like others quoted in this space, was granted anonymity to speak freely — and the official line is that he is competing against top-class goalkeepers including England international Nick Pope.

Newcastle now have five senior goalkeepers on their books, which is fairly remarkable in itself. No Premier League club has more.

Given that Vlachodimos is yet to warm up on the pitch for a competitive fixture with the club, let alone play on it, it is reasonable to suggest he is behind Pope, Martin Dubravka and John Ruddy in the pecking order, with Mark Gillespie completing the group. Number one for his country, he is number four (at best) on Tyneside.

When asked about Vlachodimos’ situation last month, head coach Eddie Howe gave a simple response: “He’s fighting for his place.”

Ody’s story is an odd story: the £20million goalkeeper Newcastle desperately signed but did not want.

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On the morning of June 29, less than 48 hours before the end of their financial year, Newcastle had a £60million hole in their accounts. PSR rules state that Premier League clubs cannot make more than £105m of losses over a rolling three-year period and after their heavy spending on players following the takeover in October 2021, a reckoning was approaching. Internally, they had been discussing the possibility of a 10-point deduction.

For a few days, everything and everybody was on the table. “It was horrific — the worst period I’ve ever experienced in football,” a senior club employee has previously told The Athletic. “The way it seemed, everyone had their price,” midfielder Sean Longstaff said during pre-season.

In the end, Newcastle squeaked through, selling Yankuba Minteh to Brighton for around £30million and Elliot Anderson to Forest for £35m, although these basic facts do not do justice to the sense of drama as the deadline approached.

Newcastle had been speaking to Forest about possible deals, including Minteh, for a while. Their Anthony Elanga, the Sweden international, was a long-term target of Howe’s and plays on the right wing, one of Newcastle’s priority positions for the window, but Forest were reluctant to sell. For their part, Forest wanted Anderson, the 21-year-old Geordie midfielder Howe had tipped for great things.

With a day to go and Newcastle frantic about breaching, Forest threw Vlachodimos into the mix; they would only take Anderson if the goalkeeper moved in the opposite direction. “We had a gun to our heads,” a source says. The way PSR is calculated, the entire sum received for Anderson would be booked as profit in the 2023-24 accounts, whereas Vlachodimos’ fee would be amortised — or spread — over his contract. Newcastle felt they had no choice but to agree.

None of which would have mattered very much if Vlachodimos or Anderson had refused to move, just as Minteh had turned down an earlier transfer to Lyon in France. The difficulty of the situation was explained to Anderson, who had no desire to leave the team he supported as a boy. He reluctantly accepted, knowing that he would be granted regular first-team football at the City Ground. “Losing Elliot was heartbreaking,” one source says. “Nobody wanted that.”

If anything, Newcastle believe that Anderson is undervalued in the deal; a gifted, versatile, 21-year-old homegrown player, the type that come at a premium, and someone Howe rated as a future England international. This theory has gathered weight from the promising start to his Forest career and his immediate call-up for England Under-21s.

With the best will in the world, the same cannot be said about Vlachodimos’ fee. Certainly not after his one season at Forest turned out to be so underwhelming.

Vlachodimos had arrived at the City Ground with quite the pedigree at Europe’s top level. He signed for an initial £4.5million from Benfica in September 2023, and performance-related add-ons could have taken that significantly higher.

Born in Germany but of Greek heritage — his elder brother, Panagiotis, is also a footballer, most recently a winger at Dynamo Dresden — Vlachodimos rose through the ranks at Stuttgart, his local club. He represented Germany at every level from under-15s through to under-21s, winning the Under-21 European Championship in 2017, and earning a move to Athens giants Panathinaikos in 2016.

By 2018, his form caught the attention of Benfica, and he usurped Bruno Varela as the Lisbon side’s No 1 almost immediately. He was included in the Champions League’s “breakthrough team of the year” in 2018 and racked up more than 150 Primeira Liga appearances.

During each of Vlachodimos’ five full seasons in Portugal, he finished with a positive differential when post-shot expected goals (PSxG) — a metric used by fbref.com to determine how likely a goalkeeper is to save an effort — is subtracted from his goals conceded. The average number of goals he ‘prevented’ per season was 5.0.

According to fbref.com, a positive number ‘suggests better luck or an above average ability to stop shots’. For context, Pope has prevented an average of 1.5 goals per season across the last six full campaigns as a Premier League goalkeeper for Newcastle and Burnley. Dubravka has prevented an average of 0.9 goals across his seven league seasons in England. Vlachodimos’ record at Benfica, at least in a relative sense, was good.

Such performances at club level propelled Vlachodimos to the Greek No 1 jersey, which he retains.

He played the full 180 minutes without conceding as Greece beat the Republic of Ireland and Finland during the latest international break, though he faced only two tame shots on target, neither of which required a save of note. He did show his ability as a ‘sweeper-keeper’, in the style of Pope, by regularly coming off his line (if not quite as effectively).

His distribution is also decent, with Greece regularly using Vlachodimos as part of their build-up.

Below is an example against the Irish in Dublin, with Vlachodimos receiving the ball from a centre-half and lofting it accurately to his full-back.

At Forest, however, Vlachodimos struggled with his shot-stopping and was largely kept out of the team despite the regular No 1, Matt Turner, making a series of costly mistakes.

Vlachodimos had been under the firm belief he had joined Forest to be the first-choice goalkeeper — he thought it was virtually promised after dealing with the club’s Greek hierarchy.

When it turned out not to be the case, he politely knocked on the door of Steve Cooper, then Forest’s manager, who explained that he had never been made aware of any such agreement. It set the tone for a miserable stay in Nottingham, in which the player and his family never properly felt comfortable at the club or in the city.

He did not make his league debut until November but, after keeping a clean sheet in a 2-0 win against Aston Villa, he retained his place for a further four league games without looking comfortable.

Across those five games, Vlachodimos faced 22 shots on target and conceded 12 goals. As the table above showed, the PSxG he faced totalled 7.9, meaning he conceded 4.1 goals more than would be expected of the statistically average goalkeeper. This is a small sample size, but indicates why he struggled for game time.

The accident-prone Turner returned to the team before Matz Sels, who had struggled in the Championship with Newcastle in 2016-17, joined in January, relegating Vlachodimos to third choice. He was not even named in a matchday squad for the final 15 matches of the season, despite being fit. Forest’s supporters debated whether he was one of their least impressive goalkeepers for many years.

Still, when Vlachodimos’ name was floated in conversations with Newcastle, Dubravka was expected to leave. Newcastle officials (not Howe, who was not involved in negotiations) indicated to Vlachodimos that he would have the opportunity to challenge Pope, whose previous season had been disrupted by injury, for the starter’s jersey.

There were a few problems with this theory.

First, Dubravka, who was already established as number two, did not leave. Second, Pope has looked fit and robust. Third, the free transfer of Ruddy from Birmingham City of the EFL had already been agreed, which meant immediate complications.

Like the others, however, Vlachodimos was told he would be judged on his training performances.

Evidently, he has yet to sufficiently impress Howe. He played four times during pre-season, including a start against Yokohama F Marinos in Tokyo and the save below against Brest at St James’ Park, but Vlachodimos’ displays have not earned him an appearance in a competitive matchday squad.

When Dubravka was ill last month, Max Thompson, a 20-year-old academy graduate, even travelled to Bournemouth as goalkeeper cover, ahead of Vlachodimos.

While his attitude has been commended, the prospects of Vlachodimos playing for Newcastle any time soon are said to be almost non-existent.

It is no reflection on him or Howe — the head coach knew it was a transfer that had to be done — but Vlachodimos does not fit Newcastle’s profile and he was told before the transfer window closed two weeks ago that he was unlikely to play and that perhaps it would be best if he moved on again.

With no obvious options in any of the big leagues and with his family settled in the north-east and a third child on the way, he stayed.

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Newcastle’s summer window was a failure. While their fruitless month-long pursuit of Crystal Palace defender Marc Guehi and their inability to materially strengthen Howe’s first XI has been widely explored, their intended goalkeeping restructure became another casualty of their PSR mad dash.

That seems perverse, given Loris Karius left as expected and two goalkeepers were brought in, as was the plan, yet the five-strong contingent now at the club is not the senior cohort Howe envisioned.

Initially, back in the spring, when Newcastle still retained a decent prospect of securing European qualification for 2024-25, a genuine rival for Pope’s No 1 jersey was considered. A dislocated shoulder sidelined the England international for five months last season and, before he had returned and proved his fitness in May, Newcastle were conscious of the potential impact of losing him for another extended period.

Essentially, Howe wanted to avoid last season’s scenario, when Pope’s spell on the sidelines affected his side’s defensive solidity and hampered their stylistic approach.

Before the injury on December 2, Newcastle had conceded 14 league goals from an expected goals against (xGA) figure — measuring the quality of shots a side has faced — of 14.3 across 14 matches. They had the joint-meanest defence in the Premier League and the second-best xGA.

Across their next 23 matches, before Pope was restored for the final-day win away against Brentford, Newcastle (and Dubravka) conceded 46 goals (the fourth-worst tally) from an xGA of 46.5 (the second-worst).

Checks were made on Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsdale, now at Southampton, and Valencia’s Giorgi Mamardashvili, now signed by Liverpool, but once Pope proved his fitness after shoulder surgery, Newcastle targeted a different profile of goalkeeper — a backup who could provide competition and, longer term, succeed Pope.

The player they wanted was James Trafford, the England Under-21 international. Newcastle opened negotiations with Burnley for Trafford in early June, but paused them after the Championship club demanded more than £20million for the 21-year-old.

The intention had been to revive those discussions, but the goalkeeper reshuffle was affected by the PSR fallout.

Ruddy was already joining before Vlachodimos’ unforeseen arrival on June 30, meaning Howe was left with five senior goalkeepers.

Theoretically, Dubravka was still available, but no substantive offers arrived for the 35-year-old. Vlachodimos, meanwhile, received tentative loan interest, including from Anderlecht in Belgium, but he opted to remain.

With both staying, Newcastle would not reignite discussions for Trafford, despite Howe’s keenness for them to do so. Paul Mitchell, the new sporting director, even watched Trafford play for Burnley against Sunderland at the Stadium of Light on August 24, but no exits meant another goalkeeper would not be signed.

Howe’s goalkeeper resources appear deep but Newcastle are actually light in that department.

Dubravka failed to impress last season, Gillespie has never played a senior game under Howe, and Ruddy was brought in for experience, not to play. Vlachodimos, meanwhile, was an unplanned addition who cost more than the initial £18million fee Southampton paid for Ramsdale, who could have challenged Pope to be No 1.

It is a far from ideal situation for Howe or Vlachodimos but Newcastle are responsible for getting themselves into such a difficult position.

‘Ody’ is the human face of what a senior figure calls “a deal born out of desperation” and the flawed system that makes these deals possible in the first place.

(Top photo: Vlachodimos departs on Newcastle’s pre-season tour in Japan; Harriet Massey/Newcastle United via Getty Images)