Now Nick Woltemade is heading to Tyneside, we can read out the summer final scores. Premier League 2 Bayern Munich 0, after Florian Wirtz recently described his decision to choose Liverpool ahead of Bayern – which profoundly shocked many in Germany, not least the perennial champions themselves – as “taking the more difficult option” in order to best develop his talents.
Woltemade, rather than waiting for a move to Munich next summer, has followed his international colleague in taking the plunge. The Germany No 9 shirt beckons at next summer’s World Cup and the man who will presumably be wearing that number at St James’ Park is prepared to seize his opportunity.
The summer is not ending how Newcastle or Woltemade had envisaged, with the former having imagined Alexander Isak leading them back into the Champions League and the latter having pictured himself in Bayern red. Yet there is no feeling of this being a consolation prize for either in this (until recently) unlikely partnership.
Eddie Howe is receiving a rapidly developing talent, a unicorn, a 6ft 6in striker with an uncommonly graceful flow who is difficult to compare to any player out there in his position. Woltemade gets a crack at English football and at the Champions League knowing that he has a chance to really thrive in both should he continue his current rate of progression. It is a transfer that has come out of leftfield in a sense, with Newcastle’s recruiters putting together a deal on the down-low (and necessarily so, given the number of gazumpings to which they have been subject in the recent past), but it makes perfect sense.
Replacing Isak directly is clearly impossible, but there is much in Woltemade’s game to make him a logical substitute. Despite his size he is at ease with the ball at his feet, a prolific dribbler with the deft touch to bring others into play. His 17 goals last season, helping Stuttgart to DfB Pokal victory (a first major trophy in 18 years), look even better when one considers his slow start to the campaign. Then in the European Under-21 Championship he was the six-goal top scorer, which included a hat-trick against Slovenia to kick off the tournament and an absolute bullying of France’s next big things in the semi-final, before Germany lost to England in a thrilling final.
It is a stratospheric rise. When he joined Stuttgart from Werder Bremen in May 2024, it wasn’t big news. He had started to get some Bundesliga minutes at Werder but he was seen as a low-risk, high-reward budget (free transfer) pick-up for Sebastian Hoeness and company, as they sought to cover the loss of Serhou Guirassy and beef up the squad for Champions League participation.
The talent had been clear from when Woltemade became Werder’s youngest Bundesliga debutant in 2020 a few weeks before his 18th birthday, but he was a slow burner. The former Bayern and Chelsea forward Claudio Pizarro, who was in his fourth spell at Bremen and the final season of his career at the time, described him as “quiet and shy”. His modesty is clear. During Stuttgart’s Pokal celebrations immediately after the full-time whistle he was nowhere to be seen – he was off comforting Arminia Bielefeld’s losing players. But he is a phenomenon. He is no longer just Woltemade, as one German journalist put it, but Big Nick.
When a player takes the high-speed elevator in the Bundesliga, it is usually stopping at only one destination. Bayern weren’t just looking at him as cover for (and an eventual successor to) Harry Kane. There was real belief among the club’s hierarchy that Woltemade had the tools to complement the England captain, playing just off him and helping – in the short term – to cover for the absence of Jamal Musiala, who could be out until Christmas after the serious injury he sustained at the Club World Cup. Their vision for him is a huge compliment to his talent.
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Bayern could not get their heads around Stuttgart’s demands. They began the summer quoting Bayern €100m (£86.5m) but even when it felt as if they might accept around €70m, Bayern never got close. Their final offer is thought to have been around the €50m mark. Either way, nowhere near what Newcastle were prepared to pay, after which “football in Germany is left breathless”, as Mario Krischel wrote in Kicker.
It is a calculated gamble for Newcastle but even if they are paying the higher figure widely quoted in the German media – a guaranteed €85m rising to €90m with bonuses – it feels like money better spent than it would have been on Jørgen Strand Larsen, with Woltemade two years younger and with clearly a higher ceiling. Stuttgart’s sporting director, Fabian Wohlgemuth, and chief executive, Alexander Wehrle, who have played this smartly, had their position strengthened by Woltemade’s demeanour. He had made plain that he wanted to join Bayern, agreed on the parameters of a contract with the Bundesliga champions and even instructed his agent to tell other potentially interested clubs – including Napoli and Real Madrid – that he wasn’t interested in talking to them.
Yet unlike the man he is likely to replace at his new club, Woltemade never came close to downing tools. “He has to learn still,” Pizarro told a group of international journalists on the afternoon of the Super Cup, “because he is really big but sometimes he doesn’t use his body like he could, nor score many goals with the head.” (Only one of Woltemade’s 12 Bundesliga goals last season was headed.) A few hours later, as he ploughed a lone furrow with Stuttgart under Bayern’s thumb, it was clear just how hard Woltemade had been working on his back-to-goal game, to considerable success. That attitude, and his state of grace, suggest Newcastle may have a new darling in their midst.
