Newcastle United's favorite missing man has no intention of staying

There will be surprising news stories surrounding Newcastle United this summer and there will be news stories that will make you smack your forehead with your palm and say "Of course this is the situation".  Today's "big" story is quite certainly one of the latter.  French media outlet L'equipe has published a profile of their Euro 2016 squad, which is something that they should do as a matter of course.  A significant number of players in the squad could be on the move in their club lives.  Moussa Sissoko, of course, is in that squad and things to say regarding his Newcastle United future.

If you were to make a short list of players who will not stay with the club for their exile to the Championship, earned through the honest (lack of) efforts from these same players, and then you were to cut that list down to a single player that would 100% for sure not stick around, you would get down to Moussa Sissoko.  No way he sticks around to play in the Championship.  He is Champions League Quality™, after all.  Can you imagine him trying to muster the gumption to play matches in that competition?  He couldn't even be bothered in four out of five matches (conservatively) in the Premier League, a competition in which he would reportedly like to stay.  Anyway, the L'equipe report seems to clarify the player's feelings about his career at St. James' Park.

French sports ‘paper L’Equipe today lists every single player in the France squad in a piece intended to showcase how they’re all in the shop window. It claims the player has "absolutely no intention" of staying on in the Championship in spite of Rafa Benitez’s likely appointment and the faith shown in him by the Spaniard.

--The Chron

Many of the moves that will be made this summer will be informed by Mike Ashley's personal PR guru (I guess he's doing an alright job... there haven't been any hour-long exposés about Sports Direct in the last year), but this does not seem at all likely to be one.  Many Newcastle United fans are as done with him as he is with the club.  This may not be entirely fair... it probably discounts a stretch of a handful of games in which Sissoko led us to being so close to being relegated on goal differential instead of points outright.

Newcastle United will be able to cash in on the Frenchman in large fashion.  He was purchased for £1.8m and it will take double-digits of millions (potentially over 20m) for us to see the backside of him.  The money will likely form a large chunk of our transfer kitty for the upcoming season.  Unless, of course, Mike Ashley disappears it to make up for lost broadcast revenues...

Perhaps we did get our value for money from Sissoko.  He scored 11 goals over three years and did create goals at times (although in the grandest 2015-16 NUFC style out of 7 assists this year more than half (4) came in one match (Norwich 6-2), but if you were to figure him in a negative accrual situation where sub-par or non-existent performances counted against his bottom line, it would probably be a close contest.  Anyway... Moussa is out the door.  His lasting legacy will be as a player that will fill Newcastle United fans with a regrettable feeling of "what if?"