Wallace

Honest question: Bearing in mind that we've heard that some teams like Inter and Barca have been linked with Thauvin in the past, does that beg the question of whether his poor show for us was possibly down to having a rubbish manager and perhaps in some part being thrown in at the deep end at a young age (by deep end I mean with the extra pressure and poor squad around him)? Personally I'm not convinced but just a thought that crossed my mind. Plus the fact that he never wanted to come here in the first place and was pushed into the move because Marseilles needed the money.

There's generally compensation due to the club. Traditionally the manager's new club pays this, presumably agreed as a formality in their contract talks with the manager. That's what happened with Pardew. Palace paid us compensation because he was under contract to us.

West Ham seem to be bidding for a lot of players.

I refuse to get excited until the contract is signed. But if any other club are interested, then they will have to make a move fairly promptly.

Can you imagine what he would be like if they win on Saturday? He never misses the opportunity to mention he won Manager of the Year once so we would never hear the end of it. And it would always be "when I won" not "when we won".

And they say West Ham want Gini and Townsend as well. If they are seriously interested in all those players, it sounds more like a supermarket trolley dash.

Rafa likes to rotate the team anyway. The next thing we will hear is that he doesn't have Championship experience That one's been done to death already as well.

One of the things that I keep hearing said by "experts" doubting Rafa's ability to manage in the Championship is that it is such a slog playing two games most weeks. Why do they think it is so much more difficult than playing two games every week when you are playing in Europe each season.

It depends who we sell to. They should get more with Premier League clubs because the TV money will inflate prices but European clubs wouldn't be able to afford the same prices. I can imagine some still being here at the begininning of the season, as clubs might wait until nearer the window closing to try and push down the price.

Not in the Championship. They will only get about £3m I think.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/may/14/rafael-benitez-everton-newcastle-talks? Some really positive quotes in the interview - slightly different (I think) to what we have heard already. The written press usually have separate interviews don't they to the broadcast interviews.

Well yes, but I'm not saying we should necessarily have a geordie spine. The game today (in most clubs' cases), and more so our club can't do that anymore. There just aren't enough out there that would cut it. I'd easily settle for eleven foreign players if they were of the right character, but it seems that every successful team still has at least a British spine, bar Man City (though they do have Hart at least). They're almost at a point of needing to rebuild though so it should be interesting to see if they look to bring more in. Ultimately it comes down to character regardless of nationality but I also think it is about educating and encouraging the players to engage with the football club and the local area regardless of whether they are English or foreign. The have been sold the club as a stepping stone and see themselves as passing through. Why should they care about the football club and their teammates if they don't think they will be around for very long? Do any of them do anything other than go to the football ground, training ground, the airport and a few shops? Any time off, and they are on a plane back home. They live in a cocooned world and rarely engage with fans - the life of the modern footballer seems to be VIP lounges and personnel on tap to do the simplest of tasks for them. Look at how often players like Albert, Dabizas, Solano and Tino come back to name a few. All foreign lads? A more recent example would be Jonas. All bought into the club and the area and made friends here. OK we were a relatively successful club most of the time but other foreign lads have been here when we were less successful and still retain an affection for the club. How many of the current lot, once they leave, will come back to visit the city. Very few, if any.

We'd better f***ing not win now like. Go down by one point, get annoyed by that offside Aguero goal all over again. Maybe if it had been the equalising goal ... you never know how the game would have panned out if it had been disallowed or if we would have gone on to score ourselves.

He had his lawyers go over his current contract to make sure it was watertight so even if they were at the stage where there was a tacit agreement between both parties, it will take time once lawyers are involved to get to the stage where an announcement could be made.

Seen the fuller interview with him where he said that the local media drove a wedge between him and the fans. I don't think he needed any help with that.

I think you should always respect the views of a club's fans- after all they are on the ones who watch the team every week and can see developing trends. Too many (especially the media) are quick to made judgements based on league positions, reputations and personal relationships with said manager but scarcely watch a team other than the 5 minute highlight. We know that better than anyone.

I want Rafa to say but even if he does, I am convinced that the club will do something at some point in the future to make him walk.

If Rafa stays, it would improve the quality of player we can attract. I don't know how knowledgeable he would be of players from that level though.

What was the situation then with Watford with their owners owning multiple clubs across Europe? Also didn't Charlton's owner used to own Standard Liege as well.

Ando said that Charnley did not approach us but that Rafa's people did. So if true, it probably means that left to Charnley, he would never have been under consideration in the first place.

Fair enough if they don't want promotion and to continue on their downward spiral. Even they must realise it is not working and there needs to be radical changes.

Not going anywhere according to Luke Edwards. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/05/12/newcastle-owner-mike-ashley-will-keep-faith-with-lee-charnley-de/?

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/sport/football/514869/Newcastle-Mike-Ashley-Premier-League-relegation-inquest-Sunderland-Lee-Charnley EXCLUSIVE: Newcastle are a basket case, Charney won’t resign and Ashley’s created a cancer By Ian Murtagh / Published 12th May 2016 Who’s to blame? Why does one of England’s biggest football institutions find itself facing Championship football for the second time in eight years? How can a club splash out £80m in nine months and win just eight games out of 37? The guilty men are many. Perhaps only Rafa Benitez, a handful of players and the Toon Army escape ridicule for the mess Newcastle find themselves in today. Let’s start with Lee Charnley, long-serving office boy, promoted to a position of power to which he is so clearly ill-equipped. The word is the managing director won’t resign because he believes he’s the best man for the job. Just like he felt Steve McClaren was the best man to manage Newcastle. Too arrogant to admit his mistake or paralysed into inaction, he scoffed at suggestions the club was in crisis. When he eventually acted, Charnley orchestrated one of the most bungled sackings in Premier League history, hanging the hapless McClaren out to dry while painstakingly conducting negotiations with representatives of his successor. McClaren’s execution was as public as his appointment had been private, smuggled into the ground last June for exclusive interviews with the club’s preferred media partners. He never looked a comfortable fit for the job and his optimistic musings became as laughable as they were misplaced. McClaren had little input into last summer’s recruitment drive and was soon telling pals the squad he took over was ill-balanced and lacking characters. At least the man got that one right. January’s transfer window was meant to correct so many wrongs but proved an exercise in vanity rather than surgery. Newcastle were Europe’s biggest spenders. McClaren was even allowed to bring in players he actually wanted in Andros Townsend and Jonjo Shelvey. But what the Magpies really needed was a reliable centre half, a proven goalscorer and a fit left-back. They got none of them. Charnley, McClaren, chief scout Graham Carr and players such as Fabricio Coloccini, Moussa Sissoko, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Shelvey must all shoulder some of the blame for this seasons’ disaster. But the buck stops with Ashley. The retail magnate has stayed out of footballing matters this season, passing the buck to Charnley but everything that is wrong with Newcastle lies at his door. He has created the cancer that has eaten away at a once-proud institution. Just look around the stadium. More than 150 advertising logos for Sports Direct, plastered here, there and everywhere in garish red and blue. Similar hoardings dominate the training ground. A trivial fact maybe but it says everything about the flawed ethos which has dragged Newcastle down. Newcastle does not feel like a football club but a convenient showcase for Ashley’s premier business. He didn’t get away with renaming St James’ Park but succeeded in stripping Newcastle of its soul. Players don’t identify with a club steeped in history and part of the fabric of the Tyneside community. They’re accessories to a brand far removed from the black and white tradition. Economic assets using Newcastle as a staging post for somewhere better. We all suspected as much. Yohan Cabaye confirmed it when he left for Paris St Germain, revealing he’d been told on signing for Newcastle that the club would not stand in his way, providing a suitable offer was tabled. Profit not prizes became the watchword under Ashley. The criteria for signing a player wasn’t “what can he give us,” more a case of “how much can we sell him on for.” How ironic Sunderland fans are today toasting 33-year-old Jermain Defoe, a player who arrived with little resale value. A balance sheet disaster in the eyes of Newcastle, a fully-fledged Mackem hero 14 miles down the road. If Benitez stays on, Toon fans will at least console themselves in the fact the Magpies have a quality manager in charge to mastermind a promotion bid. But he’d be staying on at a club with a flawed business model that is rotten to the core.

Newcastle have become a shell of a club overseen by pygmies Demotion had not only been coming, but was practically inevitable given failed strategies, says George Caulkin George Caulkin | Northern Sports Correspondent May 12 2016, 12:01am, The Times Mike Ashley blinked awkwardly into the camera and made a promise. “From this day forward, we will definitely be making our own luck,” the Newcastle United owner said, and although this was never how he imagined it, the prophesy was uncanny. They have spent big and badly, entrusted inadequate people with too much power, played with fear and acted too late. Now, for the second time under Ashley’s stewardship, they are relegated after Sunderland’s victory over Everton lasy night. Twelve months ago, Ashley squirmed for a rare interview on the final day of the season, when Newcastle would beat West Ham United to retain their place in the Barclays Premier League, and said that he was “shocked by where we find ourselves”. He made reference to the club’s “very sound financial footing” but admitted: “It’s no good having the horse-and-cart scenario. And we may have the cart, financially, but we need to bolt the horse on.” An uneasy, flawed policy — young players, usually from abroad, often with a chequered history — has now blossomed into calamity And yet here they are again, reluctant to shake themselves free of mediocrity and unable to arrest a decline that stretches back for years and which, as Ashley conceded, leads to “my door”. In his determination to do things differently, he has never learned that a club is about people, whether the living, breathing souls inside a stadium, or those entrusted to make decisions. Newcastle have become a shell, overseen by pygmies. In a season when Leicester City have shown the value of sound recruitment, Newcastle wasted £80 million. There is a thread that trails from Steve McClaren’s miserable spell as head coach — which should never have begun, let alone limped on for as long as it did — to Kevin Keegan’s resignation as manager in the autumn of 2008, when he argued that “clubs should not impose upon any manager any player that he does not want”. In the early days of Ashley’s ownership, one of his subordinates said that he viewed the manager as “just another employee”, whose task was to improve footballers on the training pitch and yet, until Rafa Benítez’s belated appointment in March, there was little ambition or innovation. McClaren, John Carver and Alan Pardew all struggled along under the same restrictions as Keegan, without the authority to impose their own will. An uneasy, flawed policy — young players, usually from abroad, often with a chequered history — has now blossomed into calamity. Florian Thauvin arrived from Marseille for £15 million and proved utterly unequipped to cope with the Premier League (he has since returned to his former club, on loan). In January, they signed Henri Saivet for £5 million from Bordeaux. He has started two games. Seydou Doumbia, on loan from CSKA Moscow, has not started any. Worse, is the utter neglect of team-building. Above all else, Leicester are a team. To a lesser extent, so are Sunderland. Newcastle’s players, targeted by Graham Carr, the chief scout, have looked baffled and disparate, only showing any kind of cohesion under Benítez, left, when he was already wrestling with fate. They lost 22 league matches in 2015 and it was 20, when Pardew was manager, the year before. This has been coming. In private, Lee Charnley, the managing director, said that he would never have sacked Pardew, even though the manager’s relationship with supporters had collapsed. Carver filled a role that he was never suited to while Charnley waited for McClaren’s implosion at Derby County, before his arrival at St James’ Park with no ceremony aside from a meeting with “preferred” media partners. It was so small-time for a club that looms above the city. “It’s doubtful whether anyone in a position of power on Barrack Road will do the decent thing but one person above all others should resign — the one who courted, chased and appointed Steve McClaren,” nufc.com, the influential independent website, said. “There is a culture of failure at Newcastle United that runs through the club,” Michael Martin, editor of true faith fanzine, said. “It has been a toxic culture that has infected every nook and cranny. This relegation has been years in the post.” Everybody remembers the season Newcastle finished fifth, when Pardew and Carr were lauded, but that was an exception. Other league placings since Ashley bought the club in 2007 are 12th, 18th, first (in the Championship), 12th, 16th, 10th and 15th, and they have never progressed beyond the fourth round of the FA Cup. But then, until Ashley spoke publicly last May, cups were not a “priority”, on Tyneside. The arrogance of that is still astounding. If Benítez stays — he has been swayed by the warmth of supporters — the bitterness of relegation would be tempered, but Newcastle needs fumigating. Blinded by the poverty of their own talent, with no relegation clauses for players, they have, to return to Ashley’s interview, made their own luck. “Definitely to win something,” the billionaire replied when asked to detail his ambition, but they could not even win against Aston Villa this season. Perhaps he meant the Championship. Fancy the Championship? Moussa Sissoko Repeatedly spoken of his desire to play in the Champions League, but until Benítez’s arrival consistently failed to impose himself Georginio Wijnaldum Scored nine goals for Newcastle this season, but all of them at home. The Dutchman has disappeared when it matters Fabricio Coloccini Steve McClaren wanted a no-nonsense centre half, so Newcastle gave Coloccini a new contract, which typifies everything wrong at the club Jonjo Shelvey Has found himself out of the team since Benitez’s appointment, but the January signing has said he wants to stay Daryl Janmaat Once hailed as a future captain, Janmaat’s performances at full back have suffered and he has appeared disinterested Jamaal Lascelles One of few outfield players to emerge with credit, the young English centre half has proven to be an outspoken and honest performer Numbers that tell the story 8 Top-flight campaigns out of past nine seasons when Newcastle have failed to reach 50 points 4 Position in Premier League’s average attendance table (49,619) 8 Managerial changes in past nine years 3 Times Newcastle have conceded at least five goals in a Premier League match this season, more than any other team

Wouldn't be surprised if the first item on the agenda was how much to charge for season tickets for next season.