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https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/newcastle-fans-dont-really-care-13313742
Newcastle fans don't really care if their club counts as big or not — they just want it back
Mike Ashley has been deliberately, bafflingly downsizing this great institution for a decade so no wonder it seems diminished
The one thing guaranteed to boil a fan’s blood is outsiders questioning the size of their club.
So tin hats should have been donned at talkSPORT, when Danny Murphy argued Newcastle aren’t big because they yo-yo between the Championship and the Premier League.
And possibly that fella from The Bodyguard hired when presenter Ian Abrahams also said the only reason 52,000 fans turn up every home game to support a team that hasn’t won anything since colour TV was invented is there’s nothing else going on in their city.
The barbs failed to make much of an impact with Geordies though.
An apathy summed up by a writer on Newcastle fanzine The Mag , who argued that mounting a defence was redundant “when you have an owner that not only has no interest in the health and success of his football club but actually works against it being successful.”
Like everything at Newcastle United, all roads lead back to Mike Ashley, who has sucked so much out of this great football club over the past decade it’s no wonder it seems diminished in size.
Take Kevin Keegan, who has a book out in which he says that when he managed there he was “treated like dirt” by Ashley and co and was appalled at their “disregard for people.”
I’m sure current manager Rafa Benitez, after 30 months of being treated with similar contempt would agree. But the fact that he is still there, and fighting to turn things around, should answer questions about the size of Newcastle.
A manager of his calibre doesn’t hang round small or medium-sized clubs.
The Champions League and double La Liga winner knows more than most what it’s like to be asked by owners to over-perform while being under-funded, so they can flog the club for a profit.
He had that with Tom Hicks and George Gillett at Anfield.
Sadly for him he was sacked a few months before the club was sold in 2010 for £300million. Since then, under decent owners with a vision, Forbes now value the club at £1.5 billion.
Informed sources say that £300m is probably £50m short of what Ashley would settle for now if the offer came with no clauses attached
It’s doubtful any new owners could grow Newcastle’s value five-fold in eight years, as Liverpool have a far bigger global fan base. However it’s worth remembering that in that time Fenway Sports Group have only won a solitary League Cup.
But they have hired good decision-makers, bought good players, invested in the infrastructure and developed the club commercially.
Imagine if Newcastle had done that for the past decade.
If they’d been free to grow commercial revenues outside being exclusively a Sports Direct advertising hoarding.
Or invested in the academy and training ground. Or bought a player for more than the £16.8m they paid for Michael Owen in 2005.
Or if Ashley hadn’t chosen to make a £21m profit on transfers this summer and instead kept his promise to Benitez that “every penny” the club raised he would get to spend on players.
If Benitez was given the backing most managers with 50,000-plus gates receive, he’d have Newcastle challenging for a top-six place instead of fighting to get out of the relegation zone.
The truth is, we don’t know how big a club Newcastle are in the current context, because they’ve deliberately been down-sized by a man consumed with motives nobody understands.
Any visitor will tell you there is plenty going on in the city. But sadly the one thing that’s NOT going on is businessmen working out how to buy the club from Ashley and help it fulfill its potential.
While that’s not happening, fans aren’t too worried if their club doesn’t look big to outsiders.
They, more than anyone, know it’s been shrunk like a cheap replica shirt put on the wrong wash cycle.
They don’t care what size it appears, so long as they get it back.
