Former Newcastle United manager Steve McClaren has claimed that the club's players had the wrong mentality when it came to playing lesser-heralded teams in the Premier League.

The Magpies suffered relegation to the Championship at the end of the 2015-16 season with just nine wins from their 38 games, which included defeats to Bournemouth, Norwich City, Crystal Palace and Sunderland.

McClaren, who was sacked by the North-East club in March, told BBC Sport: "They've gone down because we conceded too many goals and didn't recruit centre-backs, and we didn't recruit enough strikers, we had injuries and bad luck and the main thing is the mentality.

"The mentality of the team was that they would play well against top teams, but they couldn't win the games they should have won against the lower teams."

Rafael Benitez is currently in charge of Newcastle going into the 2016-17 Championship season.