Do Newcastle need to spend big this summer?

As the season reaches it's climax it is perhaps understandable that much of the attention will turn towards any potential summer transfers at NUFC.

In a way, the fact that we are pretty comfortable in terms of Premier League safety at the moment is allowing us the luxury of being able to look forward and debate our summer plans at this early juncture, and it's those transfer plans that I want to focus on in this article.

With a load of money sitting in the bank from the sale of Andy Carroll it is quite understandable that fans will want to see signs of action in the summer. This is fair enough and I firmly believe that we will see players brought into the club during the close season. I keep hearing one thing though, and that is that we have to spend big in the summer. I'm going to question why though?

I guess much of that depends on the definition of spending big. Does spending big mean spending a lot of cash on one player? Or does spending big refer to our total spend?

We've been here before with the first option though, which is why I think that will lead to us seeing more of the second option.

We've had big signings in the past, on big wages, with big reputations. Very few of them worked. Michael Owen, Albert Luque, Mark Viduka, Damien Duff were all on big money and cost us a lot of money. None of them worked out, and three of them conspired to help get us relegated when teams with lesser known stars survived quite comfortably.

It didn't work then, so who is to say that it would work if we tried it again this time around?

Realistically, how much money is spent is actually irrelevant though. What needs to be done is an awful lot of scouting, with an awful lot of homework being done on any potential new signings. I'm confident that the club are doing that at the moment and the signings of Cheik Tiote and Hatem Ben Arfa - both exceptional players bought for reasonable fees - seem to back that up. Graham Carr and company seem to be doing their job.

I'm not saying that we should never buy a superstar player ever again, but I think a bit of perspective is needed. People need to work out what they want. If it's Ashley they want rid of then they will need to understand that the only way that is going to happen is either by Ashley balancing the books or by a queue of rich Arab's forming up Barrack Road.

I failed to see the latter at the weekend.......