Burn baby Burn! Newcastle’s local hero is just the story football needs more of…

Dan Burn is living his and every Geordie’s dream, playing and scoring for Newcastle United in the Champions League. The modern game, cold and brutal that it is, needs more fairytales like Big Dan’s…

Here’s John Nicholson on ‘What’s So Great About…’ the towering Toon defender.

Who’s this then?
Daniel Johnson Burn is a mighty 6’7” Blyth-born defender with a no-nonsense haircut, currently playing for Newcastle United, who won their first Champions League game for 20 years with Burn bagging in a 4-1 thrashing of PSG.

As a Newcastle fan when a boy, he joined their academy but was let go aged 11. He went on to play youth football in his hometown area and joined Blyth Spartans. It was while playing for them when only 16 that a Darlington scout spotted him. He signed pro forms for them in the summer of 2009. The club was in financial trouble, though, and was relegated that season. Burn played 19 times for them across two seasons.

His dominant performances attracted a lot of interest and it was Premier League side Fulham who finally signed him on a five-year-contract for just £350,000 in 2011. Still in his teens, the next season he was sent on loan to Yeovil Town to get some experience. He played 41 times in League One, then went on loan to Birmingham City for 2013-14, turning out 28 times. Because Fulham were relegated in 2014, he was brought into the first-team for two Championship seasons. By 2016, he’d had five years on the Cottagers’ books and he signed on at Wigan, got relegated and then went back up from the third tier in 2017-18 winning the club’s Player Of The Season award.

He played 97 times for Wigan and chipped in with seven goals. Brighton paid the Latics a mere £3million for his services in 2018 and took him into the Premier League, then sent him on loan back to Wigan to finish the season. He actually only played 84 games for them across four seasons, scoring a couple of times.

Now in his late 20s, it looked like he was destined to be a journeyman, respected but unexceptional. But in January 2022, Newcastle bought him for £15million and he’s been a fixture ever since, now having played 68 games for them scoring four goals.

It’s been a long and winding road back to the North-East for big Dan but now in his 30s, he’s become a fixture in a side that is looking upwards.

Why the love?
Dan’s is a bit of a ‘Boys Own’ story. After plying his trade in lower-league football, he finds himself on a massively upward curve at the peak of the game, playing and scoring in the Champions League. His is the sort of story that football fans love, the late career uplift for the local club is all the more sweet when you’ve spent most of your time one or two levels lower. In a game which seems full of ego stroking and aggrandising small things like they’re big things, Dan seems a bit of a throwback to a different, more humble era where players were frequently locally sourced and were rarely the grandstanding sort. The fact he’s a very tall defender only adds to that throwback quality where if you were tall you were a no.5 or a no.9 and no questions were asked.

In a way he plays like he’s not a professional footballer. There is a touch of the giraffe on a frozen pond about his play but he’s learned to use that in his favour. Usually playing on the left of the defence or centrally, he’s required to carry the ball out and not just win headers.

He does the muck and nettles aspects of the game well, as you’d expect for a player whose play was shaped by life in the lower leagues. So he’s a good blocker, a good tackler and can get between a player on the ball to dispossess them. You couldn’t say the boy is a dancer or silky in any way, but the fact he’s got to the peak of the game all the same is rather heartwarming. His biggest assets are physicality and positioning but he’s now an excellent ball carrier as well. He runs with the sort of gait which suggests he may fall over very soon, but he rarely actually does, there is something delightful about that.

It’s also worth saying in these more rootless days that a kid from Blyth playing for Newcastle, the club he supported as a kid, is very heart-warming and football needs that romantic element to it to stop it becoming all about cold economics.

Three great moments
The former Blyth Spartans lad goes back to his roots…

He only scored seven goals for Wigan which is probably why he looks as surprised as he is delighted by each…

This week’s historic win over PSG…

Future days?
With all the (evil) money washing around the club, it’s easy to think they will buy an upgrade sooner than later and at 31, he’s hardly got a long career ahead of him. However, he clearly has the backing of his manager and he’s become such a fixture in the Newcastle side that there doesn’t appear to be any prospect of that any time soon.

From an economic point of view, as a local lad from just up the coast, the club doesn’t have to sell itself to him and it doesn’t have to overpay wages to convince him to play for the club. These are all very much in his favour. And clearly his manager likes him. Playing for the Toon must be the pinnacle of his ambitions, so there’s nowhere else for Dan to go when his contract expires in 2025. And I suspect that if he can extend his contract by a couple of years, he’d like to see his time out as a player at the Magpies. That or return to Blyth Spartans for a couple of seasons to complete the circle.

He also looks like good coaching material and it’d be easy to see him going into that side of the business. His is that most old fashioned of stories: a local boy made good. And we all need to see and to hear stories like that, perhaps especially in an era where people and clubs just buy their way to success.

Read more: Wor Sandro: The new Geordie icon pulling Toon strings and scoffing in ‘Spoons