Former Newcastle manager Chris Hughton believes £35m man Andy Carroll will be ‘worth every penny’ to Liverpool

Chris Hughton and Andy Carroll, Newcastle United (Getty Images)

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Former Newcastle manager Chris Hughton believes Liverpool will come to find a bargain on their hands despite shelling out £35 million on former Magpies star Andy Carroll.

Carroll moved to Anfield in the January transfer window for a transfer fee that has been much talked about, but Hughton believes it will have been worth it if he can continue his recent purple patch.

“The fee was always going to be about the future. With the money that they got for Fernando Torres and what they paid out for Carroll and Luis Suarez, at the moment it looks like good business. Only time will tell, regarding the actual figure that they paid for him,” he told Yahoo.

“If Andy continues to make really good progress for Liverpool and England over the next few years then everybody will look at that fee and say it was worth every penny of it, because we now have a player who is possibly worth more. It is a big fee, and I think most people at the time felt that, but these are the market values these days.”

Hughton was in charge of Newcastle when they won promotion in 2010 and Carroll was a big part of that side, with his former manager adding that the striker benefited from Newcastle getting relegated a year previously.

“First and foremost, he is definitely one player who benefited from the club being relegated. We had lost Michael Owen, Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins,” he added.

“There is perhaps the train of thought that says if we had stayed in the Premier League we probably would have looked to replace those players with other centre-forwards. The fact that we didn’t gave Andy the opportunity to play.

“I think the fact that he got to play on that regular a basis no doubt fast-tracked the qualities that he is now showing.

“He showed that by the end of that Championship season, he was a much better player than when he started it.”

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