Jump to content
Newcastle-Online

Mike Ashley

Christmas Tree

by Christmas Tree
in Football

 Share

Recommended Posts

Beren

Beren

Posted
Posted

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
Wallace

Wallace

Posted
Posted

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
Guest Phillipealbert

Guest Phillipealbert

Posted
Posted

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
Unbelievable

Unbelievable

Posted
Posted

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.

 

Absolutely. That's a great (and very depressing) article about the calamitous consequences of having had to endure almost nine years of parasitic abuse by its owner. Makes you wonder if the club is salvageable at all at this point or of too much damage has already been done to it.

Link to post
Share on other sites
merlin

merlin

Posted
Posted

A great article by Hayward - who is not always keen on NUFC - which hits the nail squarely on the head...Ashley is the root cause of all the problems ; it was HE who appointed Jiminez and Wise causing KK to walk ; HE who appointed JFK ; HE who gave Shearer 8 games to save the club then treated him like dirt afterwards ; HE who fired Hughton when the club was in a safe PL place in its first season after promotion ; HE who appointed Pardew on the advice of his loud-mouthed associate Llambias ; HE who sold the naming rights to one of Britain's greatest stadiums and cost the club millions in Ad revenue ; HE who appointed an out-of-his-depth Office boy to run one of the largest clubs in England who then proceeded to employ Carver and McClaren(who had already refused the job once), managers in name only who then proceeded to complete the destruction job started by Pardew, Carr(on the jolly of his life), Moncur, Beardsley and their useless associates.

 

Even after all this and with the evidence of his growing commercial failure mounting by the day, Ashley STILL continues down the same path like a runaway road-roller destroying everything in its path.

As Hayward says, he is responsible for destroying the faith of a generation of fans and worse than this, probably another as well because it is going to take YEARS to sort the club out after he is gone and it may never be the same again.

 

The final straw for me was that when faced with the overwhelming evidence that the club was diving head-long into the Championship after the Chelsea hammering, they all ducked the issue when they had 18 days for a new manager to try to stem the disastrous fall and it took a hammering by a side in the old 3rd Div not long ago, at SJP, to force ANY acknowledgement that there was a problem.

Even now, you wouldn't be surprised if they ducked firing McClaren once again because these people are either desperate to protect their own ghastly necks or scared witless of ballsing it up once more, as is their default setting.

 

Many years ago, during KKs successful first spell, an associate asked me what I though about having Beardsley as manager later on....I laughed him out of court, saying Shearer maybe, but NOT Beardsley because he simply isn't manager material. I was right, but it wouldn't surprise me to see this happen in some sort of botched arrangement in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the myopic idiots that will still support this failed regime.

 

Heaven help the club if they get this wrong now...Shearer AND Hayward are spot on.

Link to post
Share on other sites
bulivye

bulivye

Posted
Posted

would it be possible/allowed for NUFC to be publicly owned?  i mean, if i had won the 1.5 billion dollar lottery a few weeks back & then bought NUFC from ashley (assuming he'd sell) could i then sell shares of stock in NUFC to the general public? or however it would work... does the premiere league allow it?

Link to post
Share on other sites
nufcjmc

nufcjmc

Posted
Posted

How much ££ Ashley lose if NU relegate? (Parachute ££ versus PL TV ££)

 

radio said last place club this season would receive 60 million in prize money minimum depending on how many times shown on tele plus parachute payments however next season they estimate that the last place prize money may be closer to 90/100 million plus how many times on tele.

 

factor in that with trying to trim costs or maintain a higher wage bill it may be close to 50/70 million plus no guarantee of a first season bounce back.

 

obviously I am no financial wiz so just my own guess.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Parky

Parky

Posted
Posted

would it be possible/allowed for NUFC to be publicly owned?  i mean, if i had won the 1.5 billion dollar lottery a few weeks back & then bought NUFC from ashley (assuming he'd sell) could i then sell shares of stock in NUFC to the general public? or however it would work... does the premiere league allow it?

 

You could organize the club as a trust (there are various models) and give 51% of the voting rights to the supporters (season ticket holders and so on). The supporters would elect a president once every 3 years who would be accountable to the supporters/trust. The board would also be electable and them and the president would preside over the appointment of the manager. There would be an EGM at the end of every season and a vote for president every 3 years. There is nothing the PL can do about it. They only have say over the fitness of new owners and can block people buying clubs if it is proven they are coming from a history of dodgy dealings etc....

Spurs for instance are a Ltd company but they don't have the fan involvement and voting rights a trust would have.

Link to post
Share on other sites
bulivye

bulivye

Posted
Posted

would it be possible/allowed for NUFC to be publicly owned?  i mean, if i had won the 1.5 billion dollar lottery a few weeks back & then bought NUFC from ashley (assuming he'd sell) could i then sell shares of stock in NUFC to the general public? or however it would work... does the premiere league allow it?

 

You could organize the club as a trust (there are various models) and give 51% of the voting rights to the supporters (season ticket holders and so on). The supporters would elect a president once every 3 years who would be accountable to the supporters/trust. The board would also be electable and them and the president would preside over the appointment of the manager. There would be an EGM at the end of every season and a vote for president every 3 years. There is nothing the PL can do about it. They only have say over the fitness of new owners and can block people buying clubs if it is proven they are coming from a history of dodgy dealings etc....

 

i see.  thanks.  would toon fans want such an arrangement?  it seems to work well for the NFL's green bay packers...

Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...