Amanda Staveley says that £50million-rated defender Sven Botman is still keen to join the club in the summer from Lille.
Chronicle Live reported on February 17 that the Ripon financier was still eager to bring the talented Dutch star to Tyneside despite being rejected in the January window.
Speaking to the Athletic, Staveley said: "We were 19th going into the window.
"So we had that, an illiquid market, and the complexity of COVID-19, which meant clubs didn’t want to sell because they didn’t know where their squads would end up.
"We had to encourage players – ‘we’ll be a safe place for you, we’ll deliver and grow’.
"Some desperately wanted to come to us, like Sven (Botman), who still does very much and has talked very openly about that.
"Coming through all that showed us we can do it, that we can stick to our plan and if we get criticised on the last day for ‘oh, you’re going after Jesse (Lingard)’, well, Jesse wanted to come to us.
"We did everything. We never stopped. From the start to the finish, we did not stop working."
And speaking about the summer Staveley's husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi said: "Only in the sense of FFP. This summer is going to be important for us.
"Are we going to bring in five players, two players, one? We don’t know.
"We’ll look at what the squad requires, we’ll look at the market and act accordingly.
"We don’t have any limitations in terms of what we can do until we hit FFP. We want to create a sustainable club."
