Newcastle fans have been kicked by everyone in takeover war

Harry De Cosemo
Newcastle fans at Wolves

Life as a football fan is fundamentally about trust. Your weekend happiness is being placed in the care of 11 talented athletes and a coach, whose job it is to organise and guide them to the victory that makes all the nerves, stress and worry beforehand seem worth it, before the cycle begins again. It has been that way for generations and it’ll continue that way forever.

There are times, more for some than others depending on the team you have either chosen or had inflicted on you, that it doesn’t seem worth it. Fundamentally, we all like to have control, and this is the furthest thing from that. Managers and players are just by-products of the real guardians – chairmen and owners and their ambitions. Often faceless and commonly ruthless in a business sense, they are not the ideal people to put faith in, but that is the reality of modern football. As it merges with business more and more, and the barometers for success, namely promotion to the Premier League, become more enticing and expensive, the risks are higher and the falls much heavier.


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Accelerated by the pandemic, clubs are going out of business and facing financial hardship, all because existence is becoming more challenging in the new financial climate. Bury and Bolton Wanderers, a former Premier League stalwart, are the most obvious examples, while Derby County’s recent entrance into administration has been particularly harrowing given that they have previously been crowned English champions and were only one game away from the top flight, something their owner Mel Morris chased bordering on obsessively, just two years ago. That is the fine line being tread, and as clichéd as it may be to say, chairmen, players and managers come and go but fans pick up the pieces. There are so many who have had their trust abused.

This week, Newcastle United headed to their Competition Appeal Tribunal against the Premier League to finally see movement on the proposed Saudi Arabian-backed takeover of the club. It was the smallest of steps and, in the grand scheme of things, deal broker Amanda Staveley and her consortium, including the Saudi Public Investment Fund and the billionaire Reuben brothers, are no closer to getting the keys to St James’ Park than they were after initially agreeing a £305m deal with Mike Ashley back in April 2020.

It is a saga to end all sagas, in what seems like the longest-running dramatic sequence in an age. Ashley, who has placed Newcastle on the market intermittently for 13 years of his 14-year reign, has proven himself every bit as harmful to the club and fans as any of the owners of those above, but in a different sense. No Newcastle fan would say their predicament is worse than Bury, Bolton or Derby, but Ashley has somehow utilised the threat of those situations into underspending and conditioning parts of the media to spread a narrative that he runs a well-oiled machine.

Even the clearance of debt came in the form of a loan from Ashley which, in the event of a sale, will be paid back. Whatever mask there was before has slipped as the focus has turned to the legal case for the takeover; Newcastle, through the medium of their only public speaker, manager Steve Bruce, have admitted there is no desire to achieve anything beyond the bare minimum, the status quo, until something changes. Bruce called it ‘ticking along’ in the latest example of his sub-par communication skills; although nothing has really changed, there is something extremely alarming about the state of the club now Ashley has absolutely no interest in it, rather than just minimal. Saturday’s defeat at Wolves means the wait for a league win has now surpassed the second international break with no sign of when it will arrive.

We are where we are with the takeover because the Premier League would not wave the consortium past the Owners and Directors’ Test. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the bid and PIF in particular, namely claims of piracy and other, more heinous, moral issues; but it is hard to believe that Newcastle, the club or the fans, have been put first in any of this. Ashley and the Premier League are both more concerned with their own image and pockets than one of the biggest football institutions in the country, which is currently sleepwalking into yet another crisis precisely because this situation has been left to drag on for so long.

This is a collision course set to explode into disaster. The court heard last week that the Premier League had threatened to expel Newcastle. It is Ashley’s, and Staveley’s, claim that a ‘cartel’ of top clubs are working against the takeover. Given the seriousness of the accusation from the hearing, put into context by those same clubs getting a collectively very small fine for plotting a European Super League breakaway, it is hard to make a case for a fair and just system.

Bruce continues to make life tough for himself; his media handling has been found wanting, and he hasn’t stopped the rot on the pitch. A lot of Newcastle’s own problems are down to themselves, but if this takeover has made anything abundantly clear, it is that nobody is looking out for what and who really matters. Even a rejection of the proposal, forcing everybody to move on, would be better than waiting for something to happen, hiding behind empty platitudes of confidentiality.

An independent regulator has never been needed in football more. Ashley has never been fit and proper for Newcastle and his current actions of negligence could be the most damaging yet. Nobody in the past 18 months has thought about Newcastle fans, who have been used, judged and coerced in that time; they want to be free of Ashley and free of this tug of war nightmare, which has become more complicated by the day. Somebody needs to stand up and put them first.