Newcastle: So bad even limitless wealth offers no guarantees

Newcastle are genuinely so terrible that even being the richest club on earth might not save them. This is not the Manchester City of 2008.

Newcastle United may now be extraordinarily rich, but they are a very, very poor football team.

Neither of those are remotely controversial observations, but there does appear to be a widespread assumption that point A inevitably means the end of point B. While levels of improvement are all but certain, I’m less convinced that a Manchester City-style endpoint is assured.

It’s certainly possible that five years from now Newcastle are Premier League champions with a team of megastars, but they have such a very long way to go to get there.

The Manchester City comparison is obvious and unavoidable. They were a ‘big club’ that nevertheless never actually won anything any more and were something of a running joke and then Abu Dhabi came along and bang, we are where we are. And Newcastle now have far greater financial muscle behind them than even City then.

But the comparison still falls away when you look at where City were in 2008 and where Newcastle are in 2021. City had just finished ninth in the Premier League. Their starting XI in the first game after the takeover included Joe Hart, Pablo Zabaleta, Micah Richards and Vincent Kompany, who would all still be around when the Premier League titles started rolling in. They also had solid top-flight citizens like Richard Dunne and Dietmar Hamann, as well as the opportunistic gloss and sparkle provided by the snaffling of Robinho.

Newcastle have no such sparkle and still have another 13 Premier League games to negotiate before they can add some. They have pretty much no solid top-flight citizens in a squad that screams Championship and in terms of players who could potentially still feature in a title-winning team there really is hardly anything. Callum Wilson as a squad player, maybe. Allan Saint-Maximin potentially if he can add the consistency that a title-chasing Newcastle would require rather than the in many ways easier role he’s fulfilled recently of shining diamond among a sea of churning shod.

Manchester City had been to darker and lower places than Newcastle but were in a far better place by the time of the takeover. City were a solid Premier League mid-table side at the time of their lottery win; Newcastle are busily making Nuno’s Spurs look like Pochettino’s Spurs.

Yet even after their windfall in 2008, City needed a very decent January 2009, bringing in Craig Bellamy, Nigel De Jong, Shay Given and Wayne Bridge, to ultimately finish 10th.

And the Premier League is a far more competitive place now than it was then. City only had a Big Four and an upstart Spurs to worry about. Newcastle have an admittedly fracturing Big Six but also Leicester and West Ham and Everton. Aston Villa, too. The ‘smaller’ Premier League clubs are far wealthier now than when City started down this road and it’s hard to imagine any of them being of a mind to make life easy for Newcastle over any potential transfers in January or the summer. Even if Newcastle do spend £200m in January, it might need to stretch to four or five players and while, say, a Gareth Bale or Philippe Coutinho might carry the requisite Robinho-style Galactico gloss, it’s notable how sensible and workmanlike those January 2009 arrivals were. And that’s for a City side that was already solid enough.

Newcastle, to reiterate, are not that. There are so very many things wrong about this takeover, but there’s also this one: Newcastle might be just so Newcastle that it doesn’t even succeed on its own terms, at least not for a while.