Newcastle fans don’t care about the size of their club as long as they get it back
THE one thing guaranteed to boil a fan’s blood is outsiders questioning the size of their club.
So tin hats should have been donned at talkSPORT, when Danny Murphy argued Newcastle aren’t big because they yo-yo between the Championship and the Premier League.
And possibly that fella from The Bodyguard hired when presenter Ian Abrahams said the only reason 52,000 fans turn up every game to support a team that hasn’t won anything since colour TV was invented is there’s nothing else going on in the city.
The barbs failed to make much of an impact with Geordies, though.
An apathy summed up by a writer on Newcastle fanzine The Mag, who argued that mounting a defence was redundant “when you have an owner that not only has no interest in the health and success of his football club but actually works against it being successful”. Like everything at Newcastle
United, all roads lead back to Mike Ashley, who has sucked so much out of this great football club over the past decade, it’s no wonder it seems diminished in size.
Take Kevin Keegan, who has a book out in which he says that, when he managed there, he was “treated like dirt” by Ashley & Co and was appalled at their “disregard for people”.
I’m sure current manager Rafa Benitez, after 30 months of being treated with similar contempt, would agree. But the fact that he is still there, and fighting to turn things around, should answer questions about the size of Newcastle. A manager of his calibre doesn’t hang around small or medium-sized clubs.
The Champions League and double La Liga winner knows more than most what it’s like to be asked by owners to overperform while being underfunded, so they can flog the club for a profit.
He had that with Tom Hicks and George Gillett at Liverpool. Sadly for him, he was sacked a few months before the club was sold in 2010 for £300million. Since then, under decent owners with a vision, Forbes now value the club at £1.5billion.
Informed sources say that £300m is probably £50m short of what Ashley would settle for now if the offer came with no clauses attached.
It’s doubtful any new owners could grow Newcastle’s value fivefold in eight years, as Liverpool have a far bigger global fan base. However, it’s worth remembering that in that time Fenway Sports Group have won only a solitary League Cup.
But they have hired good decision-makers, bought good players, invested in the infrastructure and developed the club commercially.
Imagine if Newcastle had done that this past decade? If they’d been free to grow commercial revenues outside being exclusively a Sports Direct advertising hoarding? Or invested in the academy and training ground? Or bought a player
Fans know the club is being shrunk like a cheap replica kit
for more than the £16.8m they paid for Michael Owen in 2005? Or if Ashley hadn’t chosen to make a £21m profit on transfers this summer and kept his promise to Benitez that “every penny” the club raised he could spend on players.
If Benitez was given the backing most bosses with 50,000-plus gates receive, he’d have Newcastle challenging for the top six instead of battling out of the drop zone.
The truth is we don’t now how big a club Newcastle are in the current context as they’ve deliberately been downsized by a man consumed with motives nobody understands.
Any visitor, though, will tell you there’s plenty going on in the city. But, sadly, the one thing that’s not going on is businessmen working out how to buy the club from Ashley and help it fulfil its potential.
While that’s not happening, fans aren’t worried if their club doesn’t look big to outsiders. They know it’s been shrunk like a cheap replica shirt put on the wrong wash.
They don’t care what size it appears, so long as they get it back.