The stink that still lingers at Newcastle and significant challenge facing Saudi owners

I get it - you can’t help but be frustrated with Newcastle United’s lack of first team signings this summer transfer window. I’m sure everyone is frustrated: the fans, the manager, the owners, local journalists and the players, especially since everyone wants the same thing: on-pitch success for Newcastle United.

What makes the frustration unique for us is the 14-year waking nightmare that was the Ashley era. As a fanbase we were conditioned for certain actions to appear during transfer windows: ‘we tried but we just couldn’t get them over the line’, make derisory offers that get rejected and claim we tried, or sell the crown jewels [Carroll, Cabaye] and not replace them. This is why we balk when the current incumbents appear to do similar.

Everything about United stagnated during that era, and it stank like scum on week-old rainwater in a pothole that smashes your car suspension when you drive over it. That’s my convoluted, hyperbolic way of saying it was an unmitigated disaster.

Three years removed from the takeover and *some* of that stink still lingers around the club – some players, deflated commercial revenue, sponsorships still a fair way off the ‘big six’, shabby facilities [despite investment our training ground is rudimentary compared to modern facilities] and a newly formed corporate structure still finding its feet.

Then consider these financials:

Last Season’s Revenue (in million GBP)	Last Season’s Highest Earner (est.)
Manchester City: £718m	Kevin De Bruyne £400,000 p.w
Manchester United: £650m	Casemiro/B.Fernandes £350,000 p.w
Liverpool: £594m	Mohamed Salah £350,000 p.w
Spurs: £549m	Heung-min Son £190,000 p.w
Chelsea: £512m	Raheem Sterling £325,000 p.w
Arsenal: £464m	Kai Havertz £280,000 p.w
Newcastle United: £250m	Bruno Guimaraes £160,000 p.w

These clearly highlight why Newcastle cannot afford to get a £40million transfer wrong – let alone a £70million transfer. Hence the initial consternation at Anthony Gordon’s performances during the second half of 2022/23.

Every year we are at a minimum £200million+ disadvantage against our ‘Top Six’ rivals. And this doesn’t even factor in teams like West Ham [sold Rice for £100mil+ and have a bigger stadium], Villa [sold Grealish for £100mil+ and have European football] and Brighton [sold £600mil+ worth of players allowing them to invest heavily this summer].

KDB earns more than double our highest paid player. Now KDB is a wonderful footballer but is he more than twice as good as Bruno? In fact, according to GiveMeSport.com the top 30 earners are all from the ‘Top Six’ sides and include such ‘stellar names’ as Ben Chilwell [£200,000 p.w] and Antony [£200,000 p.w] …

Financially, this highlights why 2022/23 was such a win for Eddie Howe’s coaching ability and why our upward trajectory appears to have stalled since that wonderful season. We simply cannot progress further until our revenues grow. Unfortunately, I think we have hit a manufactured glass ceiling [more on that to come] designed to maintain the status quo.

Pulling up the Drawbridge

Anthony King wrote in End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football that one of the reasons ‘big club’ owners pushed for the formation of the Premier League was “to prevent the top clubs from losing income to the lower leagues.”

An incredibly self-serving reason to start what has gone on to become one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world and how utterly inconceivable it was to have equitable distribution of TV rights money amongst all 92 league sides rather than a select few…

Add in the ‘need’ to shift a few outdated satellite dishes from a warehouse in North London or the ‘need’ to save a subscription TV service that was haemorrhaging £1.5million-a-week to save your media mogul blushes (a lot in 1992 terms), and you had all the ingredients for the ‘big five’, as it was then [Arsenal, L’pool, Man Utd, Spurs and Everton], to ‘seize’ the EFL First Division.

Since then, football’s law makers, supposed-tastemakers, owners, and governing bodies have done everything they can to maintain an iron grip on that income built on their historic successes. Here are some of the ‘initiatives’ they’ve implemented [or tried to] over the last few seasons:

• Co-efficient seedings in European draws and co-efficient qualification places for sides that fail to qualify through their league position
• UCL & UEL sides can’t play each other in the 3^rdround of League Cup
• FFP, PSR, and total loss values stationary at £115million despite rapid inflation of wages, transfer fees and agent’s fees
• Financial weighting and UEFA’s club cost control measures
• Manchester United getting exceptional allowancesfor Covid losses in 2022 and for the Radcliffe investment in 2023 [£40mil & £35mil] – when the most other clubs got was £1mil, apparently you just had to ask…
• Chelsea hoovering up billions of £’s worth of players, exploiting contract loopholes, selling their lady's team and hotels to themselves – all while money that was earmarked for Ukrainian refugees from the sale of the club languishes in a ‘lost’ bank account
• The league sitting on Manchester City’s 115 charges
• Capping related party sponsorship deals at £1mil, others above this value must be scrutinised [i.e. all of them] despite allowing them for years
• Banning loans between clubs in a multi-club model or under the same ownership despite allowing them for years
• The Snide [Super] League
• The reformatted Champions League, all at the behest of ECA lobbying [itself chaired by the PSG owner], to basically become a ‘Super League’ in all but name – it’s even in a league table format and the group stage runs until January to satisfy sponsors [who often insert break clauses for when a team fails to get to the latter stages of a competition]

Throw in PGMOL and its refusal to retrain its abysmal referees or make them explain their often-baffling decisions, laws that make no sense [handball] and a VAR process that appears to be deliberately murky for match going fans… Oh, and let’s not forget 4,096/1 coincidences like getting twelve successive home cup draws.

Again, it’s a feather in the cap of the recent ‘disrupter sides’ [the fact that we’re even called this should tell you all you need to know] coaches that they managed to temporarily break through this glass ceiling.

To sustain that breakthrough Newcastle will have to significantly increase their revenues and with the laws of the game as they are, and the seeming ability for them to be changed on a whim [that’s why the outcome of Man City’s separate related parties court case will be so interesting] this will take longer than we all expected, something Eddie Howe himself touched on in his recent press conference.

However, this is not to say Newcastle haven’t made any mistakes in trying to strengthen the squad this summer. Off the top of my head:

• Darren Eales calling this window transformative in an early summer interview setting expectations at a certain level
• The PSR scramble in June that cost us two young talents in Minteh and Anderson
• The optics of parting company with Amanda and Mehrdad
• Not signing anyone in January 2024
• Not selling deadwood – although I appreciate this is not easy

Despite these mistakes, in the overall football playing field, Newcastle are warming up in pissing rain against vested interests, shifting rules, 14 years in which clubs motored past us whilst we went backwards, and perilously bad luck with injuries (hopefully Buncey will change this).

Add in the clubs own internal restructuring issues [twice] and the mixed messaging coming out, and it’s completely understandable that frustration is the overriding emotion associated with this transfer window.