Benitez managed to turn Magpies around by getting fans back on board

RAFA’S ARRIVAL HERALDED NEW OPEN ERA AT ST JAMES’ PARK

NEWCASTLE United was a club on its knees when Rafa Benitez arrived in March 2016 – and changed everything.

New book Inside the Rafalution is the story of a football club which had lost touch with its community and sense of purpose – and how one man was able to inspire a city to fall in love with its team again.

It looks at how Benitez changed everything – from the lighting in the canteen to the team’s losing mentality, bringing you right to the heart of why his burning, obsessional drive to find solutions makes him the perfect fit for one of English football’s most bewildering clubs.

Benitez signed 12 players in the summer of 2016 and sold six decades of experience. He overhauled the way the club operated and inspired a staff. This is a story of how to manage – not just the corners, the free-kicks and team but an organisation which had been shelled out by years of frustration and underachievement.

In the third part of our serialisation, this is how Benitez’s impact ensured United would never go back to the days of head coaches. A FEW days before the 2016/17 season – this long, marathon campaign – concluded, Rafa Benitez was asked what he made of the term ‘Rafalution.’

It is a shorthand phrase for the huge changes made on his watch but it is not a Newcastle original. It was swiped from Liverpool, where Benitez turned Gerard Houllier’s underachievers into a club which secured Europe’s biggest prize in his first season in charge.

In six years at Anfield, his personnel, policy and philosophy turned around the Reds.

At Newcastle, he was required to do so much more than just make the club competitive. He had to recalibrate a club which had lost its purpose. The ‘Rafalution’ was about much more than the things which went on at the training ground alone.

The club liked the phrase, too. From a marketing perspective, it certainly gave them the opportunity to draw a line under what had gone before.

He said: “I’m really pleased with the support of the fans but I think I don’t like to talk about the ‘Rafalution,’ I think it has been more an evolution of everything.

“By that I mean in terms of the approach because sometimes when you have a shock it’s how you react. Relegation meant we had to react. We had to start doing things in another way and that’s what we have done in almost every department of the club.

It has been good in the end because we have been successful.”

Benitez has always shied away from the idea it was he who was responsible for everything good at the club.

In his eyes, he was an enabler and facilitator for a lot of the changes that happened. He set the tone from the top but it was the kit man, the analysts, the secretaries, the security guards and the ground staff who responded to the changes that he brought in. This was partly true, although it was Benitez who added the substance to the rhetoric. Previous managers had spoken about engaging the fans - it was Benitez who turned up at supporter meetings, unexpectedly, or at community events. It was the manager, too, who proved that he cared about the Academy side by watching both of their end-of-season play-off games when other bosses might have been forgiven for rewarding the efforts of the campaign with a well-earned break. His actions did help the club. For a long time they had felt cowed by the mistrust. Good initiatives club staff pioneered or came up with were shelved or flew under the radar because of