On the weekend Manchester United won their last English trophy to date, the 2017 League Cup, Dan Burn was facing up to a relegation battle.
It was taking place several tiers below the level he anticipated where his career should be going in his mid-20s. The towering defender was at Wigan Athletic. They were heading towards League One, English football’s third division.
At around the same time, Miguel Almiron was making a new home for himself in Georgia, USA. Almiron had just turned 23. He had been strongly linked with a move to Inter Milan in Italy that winter.
Where he ended up instead, after impressing in Argentinian football, was a backwater by comparison. He joined Atlanta United, a franchise only just brought into being in the American MLS. It was hardly an obvious launch pad to stardom.
Back in February 2017, Loris Karius, similar in age to Burn and Almiron, had just lost his place in Liverpool’s first-team. It would take the German goalkeeper the best part of a year to climb back up the hierarchy. And Karius would have good reasons, later, to wish his return to the first XI had followed a very different trajectory.
Burn, Almiron and Karius are just three of the Newcastle United players who bring mazy backstories to a major Wembley occasion this weekend, a League Cup final that, although it will gather tens of thousands from two clubs with huge support-bases, looks a modern novelty.
Since Manchester United won the competition six years ago, it has been monopolised by the dominant forces of recent Premier Leagues. Manchester City have taken home the trophy four times, Liverpool once, the same ratio as the league titles those clubs have shared in the period.
For whichever United wins on Sunday, lifting the League Cup will feel like a watershed moment, a tangible sign of ongoing revival. The victorious coach will be clutching a first major trophy in English football. If that coach is Newcastle’s Eddie Howe, he can look around his squad and congratulate himself on the uplift he has overseen in several players.
Burn was one of three defenders signed in Howe’s first transfer window, in January 2022. Newcastle were in the relegation zone and shipping goals.
Burn arrived from Brighton, and knew how to handle himself in a dogfight at the lower end of a division. He’d been relegated from the Premier League while at Fulham, and from the Championship while at Wigan.
At a soaring 2.02m tall, he is sometimes mistaken for a footballer who relies on one dominant physical asset, his height. Howe recognised in Burn, a Newcastle fan as a boy, a big heart and that he is as talented and composed on the ball playing as a left-back as in the centre of defence.
Almiron, signed by Newcastle from Atlanta in the summer of 2018, has never known a season with the club like this, his fifth.
Famously, he was once derided by Jack Grealish, the Manchester City winger, as a symbol of what would most kindly be called inconsistency. Grealish used the word ‘Almiron’ as a shorthand to describe somebody having a poor game. The Paraguayan now breaks into one of his wide smiles when he is reminded of that.
He can point to his 10 goals so far this season, including some spectacular ones, and the creative contributions that helped Newcastle to Sunday’s final; under Howe, the word ‘Almiron’ has become a recommendation to pay attention and watch out for a moment of rare, audacious skill.
As for Karius, an extraordinary journey pushes him towards a Newcastle debut in the club’s first major final since 1999. He joined Newcastle as back-up keeper last summer, returning to a Premier League where his reputation is marked overwhelmingly by the last of his 49 matches for Liverpool.
It was the 2018 Champions League final: Real Madrid scored two goals directly attributable to Karius errors and won 3-1. It emerged that Karius may have been suffering a concussion for part of the final.
He never played for Liverpool again, loaned out to Besiktas, and then to Union Berlin, where he played his last senior match just under a year ago. He is technically third choice at Newcastle. But a combination of first-choice Nick Pope’s red card last weekend – an immediate suspension – and second-choice Martin Dubravka being ineligible in the League Cup has put Karius in the frame for Wembley.
“He’s in a good place and ready,” insists Howe, who can look around his squad and see plenty of others who have put significant setbacks behind them and so trust Karius to do the same.
“We’ve all got stuff that’s happened in our careers and our histories that you learn from. He’s no different in that respect.”