Mattoon Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 We all know it I suppose hence the brutal apathy. Just a joyless husk. Without trying to be condescending you'd have to be deluded or thick to not see otherwise. The spending seems to have placated or impassioned a lot of fans but to me it's the equivalent of Terry Waite being given a birthday cake after spending the rest of the year chained to the radiator. Sending an Ethiopian to an all-you-can-eat and expecting to get your money's worth. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foluwashola Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Naming rights Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Naming rights I'd rather it didn't exist in the first place, but it's just another example of how we're being taken for a ride by this cunt and his tat emporium. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
r0cafella Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Naming rights I'd rather it didn't exist in the first place, but it's just another example of how we're being taken for a ride by this cunt and his tat emporium. As If it was in any doubt, "showcase" Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ExiledGeordie Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 He should.............. Sack McClaren Hire Moyes or someone else competent Get rid of Charnley, appoint someone who knows what they're doing ........none of that will happen because this is Ashley who is clueless and stubborn and he's failed year on year with the same bullshit Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
NG32 Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Sports Direct naming rights for St James' Park: £0 Be grateful. He put his hand deep into his pocket in January. Remember when knackers on here were justifying it or backing it. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
nufcjb Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Hope he gets his way around to watching the friendly match and gets pissed with the money spent sending McClaren for holiday there. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobbydazzla Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 Sports Direct in the BBC headlines for negative reasons again today. They're being blamed for overcrowded slum housing and people shitting on footpaths in Shirebrook. Constant negative press and a tumbling share price is likely to be giving investors the hump. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wallsendmag Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 Sports Direct in the BBC headlines for negative reasons again today. They're being blamed for overcrowded slum housing and people shitting on footpaths in Shirebrook. Constant negative press and a tumbling share price is likely to be giving investors the hump. Our impending relegation will round off a pretty miserable year for our owner. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
prefabtoon Posted February 27, 2016 Share Posted February 27, 2016 Sports Direct will no longer use Mike Ashley as its piggy bank http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/02/26/sports-direct-will-no-longer-use-mike-ashley-as-its-piggy-bank/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Varadi Posted February 29, 2016 Share Posted February 29, 2016 So many parallels with SD and NUFC: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/investors-criticise-the-way-sports-direct-is-run-2016-2? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Disco Posted March 1, 2016 Share Posted March 1, 2016 Lovely old job - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/02/26/sports-direct-faces-ftse-expulsion-after-share-plunge/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
AyeDubbleYoo Posted March 1, 2016 Share Posted March 1, 2016 Need another relegationometer IMO. I'm on an 8. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Suck it, fatman. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyn davies Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Not a good week for him, dumped out of the FTSE 100, and relegation probability,and all that money lost that comes next season Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
B-more Mag Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 He's got to realize he's shit at this, right? RIGHT? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sempuki Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Not a good week for him, dumped out of the FTSE 100, and relegation probability,and all that money lost that comes next season Not all bad news then. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wyn davies Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Not a good week for him, dumped out of the FTSE 100, and relegation probability,and all that money lost that comes next season Not all bad news then. very good bit of spin that, lol lol Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skeletor Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Fat cunt. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Posted March 5, 2016 Share Posted March 5, 2016 Delighted. Sports Direct lost massive share value, he finally spent on NUFC (in a typically stupid way that didn't address the footballing needs of the squad/fit into a managerial plan [which would, of course, require a managerial plan]) and now he's lost his TV money. Mint. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wallace Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/newcastle-united/12186714/Newcastle-are-no-longer-a-football-club-in-the-conventional-sense-but-a-mutation-of-Sports-Direct.html Newcastle are no longer a football club in the conventional sense but a mutation of Sports Direct Mike Ashley's catalogue of farces has conspired with a downturn in recruitment to rip the heart out of the club By Paul Hayward, Chief Sports Writer7:11PM GMT 07 Mar 2016 Nobody who believes the soul of a football club is un-killable could attach that claim to Newcastle. In this age of red-hot globalisation at the top of the English game, there is no guarantee of eternal life for a tradition that still just about glows on the map. Alan Shearer, the greatest of all Geordie No 9s, recalled the other day that Newcastle used to be everyone’s favourite second team. The cauldron of St James’ Park united a community behind a vision of buccaneering football that would make visitors reach for earplugs and smelling salts. Shearer’s point was that those golden days belong now in a museum as other, better-managed clubs stake their claim on the future. As an experiment, try watching Leicester at home one day and Newcastle the next. Nothing could illustrate more starkly the lottery of billionaire ownership. Leicester’s story is a tickertape parade of good decisions. Newcastle’s is a grim procession of bad moves by an owner who has torched a lot of his own money by mistaking a football club for a retail warehouse. Newcastle’s turbulence goes back a long way: in the current era, to the sacking of Sir Bobby Robson in 2004. The revolving doors have spun since for Graeme Souness, Glenn Roeder, Sam Allardyce, Kevin Keegan (in his second stint), Joe Kinnear, Shearer, Chris Hughton, Alan Pardew, John Carver and now, possibly, Steve McClaren. But managerial chaos is a symptom, not the cause, of Newcastle’s dismal showing, which has exhausted the bounds of schadenfreude and is now just plain distressing. In the Premier League era, Newcastle have challenged for the title and been to the Champions League. The real dead weight since Mike Ashley stuffed sale profits into the trousers of the Hall and Shepherd families in 2007 has been one of culture. Newcastle are no longer a football club in the conventional sense but a mutation of Sports Direct; an exercise in low-cost retailing, with no space for emotion, glory, allegiance or tradition. And the players can smell it, which is why their away record is so abysmal and the team is so short of fight. Newcastle are a stepping stone for players lifted from smaller clubs in less wealthy leagues who probably harbour hopes of playing for a proper club one day but then get sucked into the mire of indifference and mediocrity. In his book, Up There - The North-East Football Boom & Bust, Michael Walker quotes Sir John Hall on the sale of the club to Ashley. “His team told me they were going to use Newcastle United to brand Sports Direct in the Far East,” Sir John said. “I thought that was ideal – globalise Newcastle, which we hadn’t done though we tried. Basically that was it.” Ashley is not the only plutocrat to apply a strategic business motive to buying a club. Both Manchester City and United fall into that category. But Ashley is one of the few to believe that driving down costs and turning a great stadium into an advert for cheap sports gear is in tune with the mega-money mood of England’s highest tier. In his book, Walker counts “137 Sports Direct signs and logos from one side of the pitch.” With energetic management, good scouting and ambition on the playing side, Ashley might have been able to justify picking a club off the menu to boost tracksuit and squash racket sales in the Far East. But the catalogue of farces, from Kinnear’s surreal appointment as director of football to Pardew’s anger management failures, has conspired with a downturn in recruitment to leave Newcastle at risk of their second relegation in Ashley’s nine years. That word, culture again. As Shearer wrote in his Sun column: “They [the players] simply do not care. They have betrayed a club, a city, a community, with their lacklustre and totally heartless performances. They may even be responsible for losing a generation of fans. “When I joined this club in 1996, it was everyone’s second-favourite team. Fans from outside of Newcastle loved the passion around the club, the feeling and the way we played football.” Which modern footballer, you might ask, would “care” for very long about representing a club with such a heavily branded soul: a team without a sporting aim or a spiritual identity? Some of this pre-dates Ashley’s ownership. Other players who walked through the gates of Newcastle’s training ground concluded swiftly that this was not a club of serious endeavour. So now another relegation battle has been added to those of 2013 and 2015 as Newcastle fester with the fewest points of any Magpie side in the Premier League era. Ashley’s Moneyball trick meanwhile is in ruins, with the local Chronicle noting: “[Graham] Carr [the chief scout] got off to a great start when bringing in Yohan Cabaye, Mathieu Debuchy and Cheik Tiote. Since then, though, Newcastle fans have paid money to watch Yoan Gouffran, Emmanuel Rivière, Florian Thauvin, Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa, Rémy Cabella, Massadio Haïdara, Sylvain Marveaux and Siem de Jong all fail to cut it at St James.” From Sir Bobby Robson to Keegan to Shearer and all points Geordie in between, Newcastle have been a repository for the idea that football is a sacred union between a team and fans who measure out their lives in that fortress at the core of a great north-eastern city. But how long can a soul survive such ravages? Newcastle are now their supporters – and very little else Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wullie Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 It's rare a mainstream media piece captures the root of the problem when it's not written by George Caulkin but that one does. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frazzle Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 Seems pretty much everyone in the media is agreed on the fact that Ashley is poison now. Just got to wait for the fans to do something about it... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
NG32 Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 Shame it's taken so long. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Phillipealbert Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 Seems pretty much everyone in the media is agreed on the fact that Ashley is poison now. Just got to wait for the fans to do something about it... Won't happen as long as 40,000+ retards put money into his pocket every week. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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