Monday night, St James’ Park: in the glass foyer opposite the Milburn entrance a handful of Newcastle United fans are gathered. There is a reserve team game against Wolves to see, friends to meet, teamsheets to collect, all in the hope that, just maybe, someone new and exciting will emerge on the pitch.
They could do with some uplift, but any hope goes unspoken. The mood is subdued. It is a stadium that once hosted 25,000 for a reserve team game, but Monday night’s attendance could be measured in dozens rather than thousands. The fare was meagre.
This is a setting and a club that not so long ago quickened the step. Now it has a banner in the foyer advertising stadium tours that take in sweeping views of the city from the top of the stands.
The banner claims that these tours can be exhilarating, which is true, it’s just the banner spells exhilarating wrong.
Anyone can make a spulling mistake, but such is the joylessness cloaking Newcastle United, the fact that it cannot spell exhilarating sums up so much of what has been lost. Or, nore accurately, so much of what has been cut.
The thrill is gone, that’s for sure. From Newcastle United: the club that once brought us “The Entertainers”, to Newcastle United: the club that forgot how to spell exhilarating.
Those Entertainers, Kevin Keegan’s team of Lee, Ginola, Beardsley and Ferdinand, did not win any silverware ultimately, but they left memories and a warm glow. And this was not just on Tyneside, Keegan’s team attracted the nation, sparked a swell of affection. They weren’t great defenders, but, boy, they could go forward.
Sporting concept
Winning, it turned out, was not everything. You could affect people with style. That applied in the mid 1990s as a sporting concept developed by this team. By 2014, however, that winning is not everything applies as Premier League football’s new economic rule. Mid-table mediocrity is so lucrative – last season Newcastle took home £77.4 million (€98m) in TV and prize money for finishing 10th and losing precisely half of their 38 games – that entertainment can wait. Winning, just enough, is everything.
The £77.4m was a leap from the previous season when Newcastle earned £45.2m from the same sources.
This is the benefit of the new Premier League TV deals. Adding those two figures brings £132.6m and to give that some context, when Mike Ashley bought the club in 2007, he paid £134m for it. So in two seasons, revenue from TV and place money alone is nearly equivalent to Ashley's initial outlay.
Obviously the full accounts are more complex than that, but these are the sort of broad mathematics that have so irritated the Newcastle fanbase.
Beyond Tyneside a lot has been made of Newcastle acquiring nine new players over the summer for an outlay close to £40m. On Tyneside, it is immediately said that two of those nine – Karl Darlow and Jamaal Lascelles – were loaned back to Nottingham Forest, from whence they came, and that the sales of Yohan Cabaye and Mathieu Debuchy in January and July brought in £31m.
Furthermore, including the transfer window in which Cabaye was sold to Paris St-Germain, Newcastle’s net spend over the last three windows is around £2.5m. This at a time when TV revenue has soared.
The undisclosed nature of many transfer fees means some ballpark figures are used but, in the same period, the net spend of Newcastle’s opponents today, Hull City, is £49m.
It sounds a large sum but it’s around £16m per window and Hull earned £67m in TV and prize money last season.
The investment has given Hull City a squad capable of securing Premier League status after promotion – not easy – reaching an FA Cup final and playing in Europe. They have broken their transfer record, buying Abel Hernandez for £10m from Palermo three weeks ago.
Weakened team
This is called ambition. That is another word Newcastle United appear to have forgotten how to spell.
With 2015 marking the 60th anniversary of Newcastle’s last major domestic trophy – the 1955 FA Cup – the club announced at the end of last season that Premier League status was and will remain its priority.
That policy means that it is likely Newcastle will field a weakened team in the League Cup at Crystal Palace next Wednesday. Should Newcastle exit the competition at Selhurst Park, the fury engulfing manager Alan Pardew will only grow.
That is if Pardew makes it to next Wednesday. There have been some uncomfortable days at St James’ Park this year already and today promises to be another. A fan campaign called SackPardew.com has printed no less than 30,000 A4 leaflets with “Sack Pardew’ written across them - in the livery of Ashley’s Sports Direct company. These will be held aloft in the fifth minute – to stress that only five games have been won in 2014.
Rancour has replaced joy. Pardew will be unable to leave the dugout, perhaps even if the unexpected occurs and Newcastle recover from last Saturday’s 4-0 embarrassment at Southampton to win.
It can be argued the situation is beyond that. Since Pardew jutted his head into the face of David Meyler at Hull in March, Newcastle have played 14 games and taken eight points – 8/42. Any would-be Pardew replacement needs to look at that record and what the club has done in the last three windows.
The fans have and their view from the seats is far from exhilarating. It is realistic: make no mistake, the third-best supported club in the Premier League can be in the Championship next season.
