There are a great many reasons why Newcastle United supporters hate on their club’s owner Mike Ashley but while his consistently uncouth behaviour, embarrassing comments and decision to plaster St James’ Park in Sports Direct logos are hardly minor indiscretions it always ultimately comes down to his parsimony.
Since taking control of the North-East giants in June 2007 Ashley has implemented a transfer mandate that makes Ebenezer Scrooge appear profligate and this from a club that was revealed to be the 16th richest in the world in 2016. Their record transfer fee of £16m for Michael Owen in 2006 remains to this day and they are yet to spend more than £20m on a player despite their top flight peers doing so on 134 occasions.
During ten Premier League transfer windows Newcastle have only twice spent more than the average and in one particular summer committed themselves to a meagre £3.8m as their total outlay. Indeed since Ashley’s arrival the Magpies ‘boast’ a net spend of £95m which equates to just under £8m expenditure per year.
Considering this frugality has taken place in an era where major clubs have been festooned with mind-boggling sums of television money – Premier League clubs each earned £228m this past year alone – this is not sensible and certainly not laudable: it is handicapping your own club while your rivals buy and strengthen and build around you.
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In recent seasons what has afforded Ashley his cheapness is his good fortune to have Rafa Benitez in the dug-out, a coach of elite standing who has managed to steer Newcastle into the Premier League and keep them there against the odds. This summer, with Benitez once again threatening to walk unless his Championship-standard squad was refurbished, Ashley publicly promised to finally invest in personnel. Instead the club have once again made a profit following the closing of the transfer window, spending £22.5m and recouping £43.5m.
In five windows the most the Spanish master at team-building has been allowed to spend on a single player is £12m.
All of this explains why Newcastle fans protested en masse in the city centre last weekend ahead of their club’s opening fixture with Spurs; a continuation of a campaign to usurp Ashley from his cheaply-assembled throne that has persisted almost from the time he came to prominence.
Yet there is far more to it than the figures laid out above and indeed the whole reality of the situation. Because for every reality there is an alternative that could so easily have played out instead, a Sliding Doors scenario had Sir John Hall told Ashley to do one back in 2007 with his offer to buy an initial 41.6% stake. And imagining this paradoxical world is even more reason for supporters to feel downright cheated.
Not that much imagination is required. We know for example that St James’ Park’s 52,354 capacity stadium is sold out at least 20 times per season. We know the club brings in more revenue than all but a select cluster of their peers across the globe.
We know too that in the past decade Newcastle has been overwhelmed with television, sponsorship and match-day funding and in the two years when that wasn’t the case they were blessed with generous parachute payments. Furthermore, we know that the club has the ability attract all but the absolute top level of players because who wouldn’t want to play every week in front of those fans, for such a prestigious club, and for top whack wages?
Therefore we don’t need to conjure up a multi-billionaire benefactor. We only need to erase Mike Ashley from the picture.
If it can also reasonably be argued that Newcastle are a ‘bigger’ club than most of those who have inhabited the Premier League these past ten years – with all of their considerable investments – then we can definitely surmise that United and Benitez would be going into this season with a significantly better squad than they presently have.
In the past 24 months alone Benitez has wanted Fulham’s Tom Cairney, Jordan Pickford (following Sunderland’s relegation) and were in the driving seat to snap up Harry Maguire before Leicester offered the hard cash that Ashley was so reluctant to.
This summer the veteran coach prioritised a top class striker and coveted Sevilla’s exciting young midfielder Alejandro Viedma. Enquiries were also reportedly made about the availability of Manchester United’s Luke Shaw, a player who would have upgraded a defence so reliant on the callow leadership of Jamaal Lascelles.
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This though starts from the baseline of Benitez’s reign and if we go back much further and imagine that Ashley had never got his grubby paws on the club at all then it’s entirely reasonable to project a club stationed in the top ten; stocked to the brim with internationals. From that platform who would Newcastle have gone in for this summer? Martial? Batshuayi? Ajax’s Matthijs De Ligt?
These admittedly are names plucked from the ether but are included here to illustrate the calibre of talent a club of Newcastle’s standing would be in the reckoning for had they not been so unfortunate as to endure ten years of Mike Ashley. And with such talent comes the prospect of silverware.
What Newcastle fans have had to put up with under their deeply unpopular owner is bad enough. It only gets worse when you consider what they could have been.
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