The future looks bleak for former England star.

Michael Owen has been a frustrated figure at Newcastle United for a very long time and his association with the club has now dented his future for the rest of his career. Owen has been plagued by injuries since he joined Newcastle and will now be forced to seek a move elsewhere that will be nowhere near the calibre of what he would have liked.

Owen has virtually no prospect of winning another England cap because of the fact he has played at Newcastle for the last couple of years and he will be hard pushed to find another side that will be willing to pay him the wages that he was earning at St James’ Park.

He still does display the old elements that turned him into a Liverpool legend and helped him form the reputation of one of the most feared strikers in the world. However, these days are long gone and these old elements are not produced on a consistent enough basis to have any dramatic impact on the shape his future will now take.

Doubtless he will get a move back to the Premier League. There will be a club that will be willing to take a risk on him, as he is clearly a very good player. However, the tussling is likely to come with the contract. Owen will want good money as he feels that he can justify it but a club signing him now would be much more likely to want to pay him on a game by game basis as opposed to giving him a large amount of cash each week.

He can wave goodbye to his chances of joining a top six club, which will also mean an end to any England aspirations he may have. It will be much more likely that a new team coming into the Premier League or a mid-table side would be interested in him. For him to have any hope of playing for his country again he would have to smack in 30 goals for the side he potentially joins which has been showed to be impossible from previous seasons.

Newcastle is a boat that is rocking from side to side at a pretty violent rate so Owen would be well advised to sacrifice a bit of wealth in order to join an established Premier League club. He may just have to take the fact that he will never get back to the level that he once played at but he appears a modest enough man to be able to join another side and play his heart out regardless.

In a respect he is guilty by association but the fact is that this should not prevent him finishing his career somewhere that he can hold his head high and show everyone that he will go out with style. He has a lot of hard work to do and needs to get his head down. Not many people would blame him for jumping ship at Newcastle if he did so but he needs to be careful and clever with his next move.