WHY CORBYN GOT ASHLEY ALL WRONG
IF HE was any good, Jeremy Corbyn would be where Jurgen Klopp is now. A whopping eight points clear, his followers feverishly imagining the triumph ahead.
In fact, Klopp has it a lot harder than Corbyn. He has to see off Manchester City, who are rather good. Corbyn, meanwhile, is up against politics’ equivalent of Manchester United under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
The Conservatives used to be winners, they regard the big prizes as theirs by right but they are a shambles. Senior players have quit, what is left is mediocre, and the leaders have failed to deliver a coherent, workable strategy on a problem entirely of their making.
Yet still Corbyn trails them in the polls. It’s a two-horse race, the other jockey is facing backwards, and he’s coming third.
That’s why he travels the country trying out populist tropes. He hasn’t managed to formulate an opinion on the most important political issue since appeasement, but he’ll head to Newcastle and preach to the converted.
He’ll meet a pressure group called Ashley Out and then have a pop at Mike Ashley. Not exactly taking chances, is he? And he’s hardly smart enough to get that right. Corbyn’s attack on Ashley showed only the shallowest intellect or economic understanding.
He targeted the Newcastle owner’s point of greatest strength, his sole trump card. It would be like ignoring Brexit and meeting Boris Johnson on the battleground of classical philosophy.
After the usual entry-level cliches about football and community that could have been sketched on the back of a fag packet by the lowest-grade policy wonk, Corbyn accused Ashley (right) of putting Newcastle’s financial security at risk. Actually, that’s the one thing he hasn’t done. Marginalised the fans, yes. Placed business interests first, certainly. Yet Newcastle are financially stable under Ashley’s stewardship. He runs a tight ship.
It had been going so well, too. Corbyn had singled out Ashley as a bad owner before an appreciative audience. So far, so tame. But when it became necessary to know something of his subject, to have bothered with detail beyond populist banalities, his argument fell apart.
Far from risking Newcastle’s financial security, the club under Ashley has made a profit before tax in seven of the last eight financial years.
In 2017-18 total staff costs as a percentage of turnover were 52 per cent when the Premier League average is 60 per cent. At the end of 2017-18 Newcastle had net assets of £8.3m and a £34m surplus in the bank. Non-interest bearing loans owed to Ashley totalled £144m, mostly dating from the beginning of his ownership.
Although £33m was repaid in 2018-19 — making £111m the current balance — those loans mean Newcastle have rarely relied on external interest bearing debt, due to Ashley’s cashflow. In other words, he might be unpopular, he might have Sports Direct branding everywhere, he might have lost good players and better managers, but Newcastle are financially secure.
Labour’s problem has always been convincing the public the budget is safe in their hands and by failing to understand simple facts — such as wage-to-turnover ratio being a key financial health indicator in the assessment of football clubs — Corbyn came across as something of an economic ignoramus. It’s probably why he isn’t where Klopp is now.
Given that he’s trailing Jo Swinson, too, he might be even nearer the end than Solskjaer.