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Various: N-O has lost the plot over potential end of Mike Ashley's tenure

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The full article from The Athletic is incredible. https://theathletic.com/1745144/2020/04/15/mike-ashley-newcastle-united-takeover/

 

It's the Mike Ashley deep dive we've deserved for years

Any chance you could paste the article?

 

 

 

 

Along came Mike Ashley

George Caulkin, Chris Waugh, Matt Slater, Oliver Kay and David Ornstein Apr 15, 2020 262

 

“Some of it was definitely bordering on madness. Although I think Mike would prefer to think of himself as a trailblazer.”

 

This is the story of the instinctive businessman who bought a football club and got it wrong. This is a story of difference, of informality and quirkiness. This is a story of wasted opportunities, contentious decisions, bizarre appointments and a long, slow severing of relationships, to the point where, in the words of one senior employee of Newcastle United, it became “completely broken.” This is Mike Ashley.

 

Over the past few weeks and months, as Ashley’s third official attempt to sell the club has edged towards a conclusion, The Athletic has spoken to colleagues, peers, rivals, staff members and fans about Newcastle’s owner, a man who bought the club in 2007 without completing due diligence and with the self-professed ambition “to have some fun”. Ashley loves to gamble, but the fun stopped a long time ago.

 

Many of the people we talked to describe Ashley as entertaining company. A lot have mentioned the financial acumen which, so the legend goes, saw him leave school at 16 and convert a £10,000 loan from his parents into a fortune measured by the billion. “When he looked at numbers, it was like watching ‘Rain Man’ — he could pick figures out and immediately see where an issue needed fixing,” one associate says.

 

Almost all of them acknowledge his one glaring failure. “My feeling is he doesn’t care about Newcastle or football,” someone who coached under him says. “It’s just about the margins.”

 

“The football thing, he should never have done,” says one man who has done business with Ashley. “He made a mistake and he knows it. If you said to him, ‘Owning Newcastle has brought you heartache, pain and no success,’ he’d agree with you. It’s been horrendous.”

 

At Sports Direct headquarters, Rafa Benitez was in full flow. In typical style, this most meticulous of managers had studied Newcastle’s last published accounts, their commercial and match-day income, and had married them with his first-hand knowledge of the club. He was now making a presentation to Ashley. The gist: this is how we can succeed as a football team and this is how you can turn a profit.

 

Ashley’s place of business, in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, is not grand. As one person who has held meetings there says: “It’s more like a police station or a local authority building than a plush office. There’s a load of security and barriers. But Mike is very easy to talk to and very sociable. You go in there, get a cup of tea in a Sports Direct mug and a bacon sandwich.”

 

Ashley could not be further removed from the City cliche of pinstripe and bowler. “He’d be in jeans and a shirt. He’s real. What he was brilliant at was logistics; mapping new shoes coming in, stuff like that. But he’s also good fun. He laughs and he jokes; he’d bet you that the next person who walks through the door is a Manchester United fan. You can have a good conversation with him.”

 

Benitez was trying. He is not a naturally clubbable man, but he is pretty decent at his job. A year on from relegation, Newcastle had been promoted to the Premier League as champions for the 2017-18 season. There had been some tension in January when Benitez’s attempts to strengthen his squad hit a buffer, but he remained convinced that progress — namely, the top eight — was possible “if we do things right”. Those five words became an anguished mantra.

 

This was early summer, 2017. “Rafa had all the details,” one person familiar with the conversation tells The Athletic. “He talked at length about the balance between making money and competing as a team, about how you make a difference in the transfer market. He said you can’t have a chief scout in Graham Carr who was 72 and supposedly didn’t use a computer when you pay all these companies to furnish you with sophisticated statistics about players.

 

“He talked about creating a structure, a proper scouting department that follows players, collates all the information. He talked about how difficult it was in the Premier League, so you have to work quicker, work smarter, but you can still be profitable. You could tell Ashley was impressed because he turned to Lee Charnley, Newcastle’s managing director, and told him: ‘He’s right — the numbers are right’.”

 

They got down to the nitty-gritty of budgets. Benitez would be furnished with £70 million over two years, plus whatever he could generate himself. They spoke about details. If Benitez wanted to use that budget to buy one player for £50 million, did he need to consult with Ashley? Yeah, for a transfer that big. But if it’s five players for £10 million each, “then you and Lee can do it,” he was told.

 

That June, Carr left Newcastle by “mutual consent”. As well as identifying signings like Yohan Cabaye and Moussa Sissoko, the Geordie was close to Ashley, but the power base was shifting. Newcastle’s model — young players of value but often “rascals,” according to one ex-manager — had contributed to their demotion and Benitez was now in charge. His first target: Willy Caballero, the goalkeeper, available on a free from Manchester City.

 

Newcastle already had four senior keepers on their books. The club did nothing. Benitez, who didn’t just want another body but someone who would change the way his side played, waited and fumed. Caballero joined Chelsea. Trust was cracked and that crack became a schism, the starting point for the manager’s departure at the end of his contract last summer, when he complained in a column for The Athletic of “three years of unfulfilled promises”.

 

The meeting at Shirebrook is a small anecdote, but in many ways it characterises Ashley’s 13 years at St James’ Park. His ownership has not taken Newcastle to the brink of financial oblivion. They are in the Premier League, which leads some observers to point out that things could be worse, yet his tenure has been peppered with sliding-door moments and toxic outcomes. Benitez was a Champions League winner, a garlanded coach and a genuine chance for the club to kick on. When it mattered most, he was ignored.

 

Those moments and outcomes have chipped away at Newcastle’s prestige and many are still hard to fathom: Kevin Keegan being told to look up new signings on YouTube and then resigning; the subsequent employment tribunal when Newcastle officials admitted to misleading fans; the hiring of Joe Kinnear, twice; renaming an historic stadium after Sports Direct; a payday loan company sponsoring the club; two relegations.

 

The sour treatment of so many people who adore Newcastle: Keegan, who had played for the club and then took them to within an ace of the title; Alan Shearer, the club’s record goalscorer, who was brought back for a brief spell as manager, described by Ashley as “the best decision I have made,” and then discarded; Chris Hughton, who dragged the team back into the Premier League but was sacked when they were 11th; Jonas Gutierrez, a popular player who won a disability discrimination case against the club after being diagnosed with cancer.

 

The list goes on: cups not being “a priority;” a failure to significantly improve the training ground or stadium; a club stripped back to its sinews when it could be a beacon for its city and the region. A decade before Ashley’s arrival, Keegan’s Newcastle had been wrestling with Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. In 2003, they beat Juventus at St James’ Park to reach the second group stage of the Champions League. In 2004, they reached the UEFA Cup semi-finals. Now, they are a byword for mediocrity and sporting austerity.

 

The transformation was exemplified when Newcastle became the first Premier League club to furlough the majority of their staff in response to the coronavirus crisis, using taxpayers’ money to top-up salaries. When Liverpool and Spurs did the same, fans and former players rebelled and the decision was reversed, but at Newcastle it felt like a weary theme; Sports Direct stores had already attempted to stay open when the lockdown first started. Ashley apologised for that. There have been a lot of apologies.

 

A fresh direction is way overdue. This season, up to 10,000 half-season tickets were given away; for such a ruthless businessman, it was the ultimate fail, albeit one that masked so many disenchanted Newcastle supporters walking away. As Ian Mearns, a local Labour MP and Newcastle fan puts it, Ashley has “been a disaster, pretty much”. And: “I’ve always just had this feeling he saw the club and its fans as an asset to be milked.”

 

Ashley would demur. “What he would say is, ‘Hey, I bought it — you didn’t. I spent my money on it,’” an associate says. “The thing that really annoys him, really pisses him off, is that he’s spent his own money on Newcastle and hasn’t made a penny out of it. And the last lot, Freddy Shepherd and Sir John Hall, made a load of money from the club and people loved them, but they hate him. If you’re going to be fair, you have to point that out.”

 

Michael James Wallace Ashley was born on September 9, 1964, and was raised in Burnham, a Buckinghamshire village 30 miles west of London.

 

Hard facts are often difficult to establish — as well as “maverick” and “billionaire,” “reclusive” is another word pinned firmly to Ashley, who has never given an interview to the “Chronicle”, Newcastle’s paper of record — but he is said to have left Burnham Grammar School with one O-level, a C in economics.

 

He had been a talented squash player who, some claim, had desires to turn professional. When injury ended those hopes, he qualified as a county-level coach, only for his business interests to take prominence.

 

At the age of 18, he started his first sports and ski shop in Maidenhead in 1982 — Mike Ashley Sports — aided by that £10,000 loan from his parents, before opening further stores around London, including Preston Sports Shop. With Keith and Barbara, his mum and dad, helping to run Sports Direct, the company expanded rapidly throughout the 1990s after the injection of private funds.

 

In 1988, Linda Jerlmyr, a Swedish national who studied in the UK, married Ashley, with whom she has three children — Oliver, Anna (who is engaged to Michael Murray, “head of elevation” at Sports Direct) and Matilda. Although the pair divorced in 2003, reportedly for a £50 million settlement figure, they have reunited in recent years. In February, when a Swedish supporter officially changed his middle name to “Newcastle”, Ashley spoke to him by telephone, with Linda calling ahead to check if contact would be welcomed.

 

In Buckinghamshire, where the family are still based, Ashley’s generosity towards his parents is renowned. They regularly go on lavish holidays with between four and 10 friends, and attend major charity events where tickets cost more than £1,000 a head.

 

Ashley has poured money into properties across the world. His portfolio is said to include a mansion in Totteridge, north London, a winter home in Verbier, Switzerland, and four villas in Spain. He also has a luxurious house in Miami, Florida, in a gated community on La Gorce Island, where he regularly spends his holidays.

 

Ashley is a keen gambler, and not only when it comes to business. Famously, he was filmed pulling out a wad of £50 notes when passing through security at Shirebrook, saying, “I’ve been to the casino.”

 

In May 2008, he reportedly won £1.3 million after spending just 15 minutes at a roulette table in Mayfair’s private-member Fifty Club. It is claimed that when he saw the ball nestle on No 17, he said to the croupier, “That’ll do me, thanks very much,” and walked out to applause. (It was a favoured number; in the early days at Newcastle he wore Alan Smith’s No 17 shirt to matches.)

Ashley wearing his lucky No 17 (Photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images/Getty Images)

 

He would later appoint the casino’s managing director, Derek Llambias, to the same position at Newcastle and then as a non-executive director role at Rangers — another chequered football experiment — but Ashley is a man who keeps his friends close.

 

As well as boasting a fleet of expensive cars — including an Aston Martin and a Bentley — Ashley commutes to Shirebrook in his navy helicopter. His parents, who are retired and in their 80s, travel by air to Newcastle games, home and away. Ashley admitted last year that even if he sold the club, “I’ll keep a box (at St James’), because my parents will demand it.”

 

There is a lingering misconception that Ashley is a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but he grew up as a Chelsea fan because of “the geographical influence (of living near Slough) and the Peter Osgood influence”.

 

“Who was my team?” he said 12 years ago, in one of his rare forays into the limelight. “England. I’ve been to every World Cup since Spain in 1982 and to every European Championship. I’d been all over the world following England since I was a young lad.” He has also said, “I’m a football fan and a bit of an excitable bloke.”

 

“Mike has never broken the law. He might have come close a few times but he is no crook. He is ruthless, though. Vicious, actually.”

 

David Hughes is almost smiling when he says this, and it is hard to work out if he hates the man who helped destroy a high-street empire he created or if he cannot help but be impressed by him.

 

Time is the great healer, of course, and Hughes is speaking to The Athletic in the TV room of his beautiful house in the Cheshire countryside, so he clearly bounced back from the collapse of his Allsports retail chain in 2005. But he and Ashley have history.

 

“I met him at a couple of games in the mid-1990s, when one or another of the big sports brands invited us to their box, and it was very evident to me that he knew sweet FA about football,” he explains. “I don’t think he could tell you which team was in red and which one was in blue. It might be different now, but he wouldn’t have known the offside rule then.”

 

By then, the two were business rivals: Ashley with his Sports Soccer stores, Hughes with his more established Allsports chain. While Hughes had made his money on the back of youngsters wanting to wear lambswool golf jumpers and premium-brand trainers, Ashley was more your “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” kind of guy.

 

But he was not selling any old crap, not quite, anyway, because the secret to Ashley’s extraordinary success as a retailer — and nobody disputes that — is his extraordinary eye for a distressed asset.

 

Donnay, Slazenger, Kangol, Karrimor and Lonsdale were not the coolest brands in the world when he bought them for peanuts, but at least people had heard of them. So when he put their badges on products manufactured for even less in the Far East, they appeared to be better value than the own-brand offerings of his rivals.

 

This gave him the buffer he needed to aggressively discount the few bits of decent stuff he could get his hands on, destroying everyone’s margins but growing his market share as each rival chucked the towel in.

 

If they went with Adidas’ recommended retail price of £119.99 for the new Predator boot, he sold it for £79.99. Hughes had a price-matching policy at the time and his store managers told him they were inundated with customers who had seen Ashley’s price but could not get their size in his shops. “He didn’t have the stock but he knew it would kill us,” he explains, the bee returning to his bonnet.

 

Having elbowed his way past Allsports and JD Sports, Ashley was vying with JJB Sports to be the UK’s biggest sports retailer in 2000 when England and Manchester United were about to release new shirts. This would ordinarily have been a cause for celebration in the industry, as they were guaranteed blockbusters, but Ashley’s price-cutting was killing the mood.

 

Hughes invited Ashley to come to his house for a powwow, along with one of Umbro’s bosses and JJB owner Dave Whelan, the former footballer who went on to bankroll Wigan Athletic for decades. He did not, however, tell Whelan that Ashley would be there, hoping that the two men would see sense if he could get them in the same room. It did not go to plan.

 

“There’s a club in the north, son, and you’re not part of it,” is the line Whelan is alleged to have delivered as he got back in his helicopter.

 

It is a great line. But there is nothing in Ashley’s past or present that suggests he is remotely interested in being part of anyone else’s club. If Hughes, Whelan and Umbro execs were not sure about the type of man with whom they were tangling before that meeting, they soon found out when he shopped them to the Office of Fair Trading for price-fixing. The eventual fines pushed Allsports over the edge and badly wounded JJB.

 

By that stage, Ashley had bought the failing Lillywhites chain, rebranded Sports Soccer as Sports World, opened stores in Belgium and Ireland, and floated the whole business on the stock market as Sports Direct. And just to remind his rivals where he keeps his tanks, he also bought stakes in Blacks Leisure Group and JD Sports. He even picked up JJB’s brand name, stock and 20 stores when it went bust in 2012.

 

But in among his all-conquering run on the high street, Ashley also bought Newcastle. It was a surprising move for a bloke who had previously avoided publicity and lived in north London. A surprise was lurking for Ashley, too; the club had debts to pay.

 

“He bought Newcastle as a marketing vehicle and for its investment potential,” says Hughes. “Remember, this was just when club valuations were exploding and American investors were paying millions for clubs. And if he had got it right, it would have worked fabulously for him.”

 

There is certainly some logic to this argument, as club values were climbing prior to the 2008 financial crash, and Ashley enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the Newcastle fanbase.

Ashley stands with supporters at Old Trafford in 2008 but his relationship with supporters soon turned sour (Photo: Ian Horrocks/Newcastle United via Getty Images)

 

It did not last, though, with club and owner trapped in a loveless and financially sound marriage ever since; their latest accounts recorded post-tax profits of £18.6 million, but the commercial department is making less money (£26.7 million) than in 2006-07 (£27.6 million). Much of the club is outsourced.

 

It has become an extension of his other businesses. The relationship between the official club shop and Sports Direct has become blurred beyond distinction, to the point where Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah even wrote to the government to ask them to investigate the financial connections between the club and Ashley’s firm (she received a reply from the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport saying they were “not aware of any failure” to comply with the rules).

 

Over the years, more and more billboards emblazoned with his company’s name have appeared around the stadium — there were more than 130 at one stage — with Newcastle paid little or nothing until Ashley doubled the fee to £2 million for the 2019-20 campaign. This public defacing of St James’ has become a permanent source of anger for Newcastle fans, as has the decision to sell the lease on the land at Strawberry Place — previously owned by the club — potentially restricting future expansion of the Gallowgate End.

 

If he had treated the club like he has treated his core business in recent years — dragging it upmarket with the purchase of Flannels, Mulberry and House of Fraser, which he vowed to turn into the “Harrods of the high street” — perhaps he could have begun to heal old wounds. Perhaps.

 

For many, Ashley will always be the man who made his money — £2 billion, according to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List — selling disposable sports gear, made by underpaid factory workers in Asia, processed by hard-pressed staff on zero-hours contracts in his giant Derbyshire warehouse and sold in big baskets in his generic retail sheds.

 

That is not how everyone sees him, though. For some, he is the saviour of the British high street: a clear-thinking straight-talker who puts his money where his mouth is, creates jobs, pays his taxes and tries to give consumers what they want. His investors have grown wealthy from his ability to spot bargains and trends.

 

But that ability was being called into question even before the coronavirus pandemic hit. Online retailers are eating into his share of the market, and he has staked his reputation on a hunch that giving customers quality products and a superior shopping experience is the only way to beat them.

 

His sprawling company, now called Frasers Group to reflect its loftier ambitions, confounded doubters last year, with its share price almost doubling. But that growth has vanished in the past few weeks, wiping £1.25 billion off the company’s value since February 20 and about £800 million off his personal wealth. This is the backdrop to his ill-judged attempt to keep his sports stores and bike shops open during the lockdown, as well as Newcastle’s use of the furlough scheme.

 

Maybe it is as simple as Ashley preferring his first love: selling stuff. “Football is about heart, emotion, history, community — Ashley doesn’t know anything about any of that,” says Hughes. “You can’t criticise his business acumen — he is a great retailer — but he has fucked up at Newcastle because he doesn’t understand running a football club is different.”

 

It was in May 2007, seemingly on a whim, that Ashley first became involved with football and Newcastle.

 

Sir John Hall, the Newcastle fan and businessman who helped to drive Keegan’s “Entertainers” era during the 1990s, had decided to sell his majority stake in the club after determining that he was unable to compete with billionaires such as Roman Abramovich at Chelsea.

 

Sir John had travelled Europe to speak with brokers and intermediaries, expressing his willingness to listen to offers. He received tentative interest but, for the best part of two years, struggled to find a serious buyer.

 

“Out of the blue on a Friday, I received a phone call from a lawyer,” Sir John tells The Athletic. “He asked if I was still interested in selling because he had a client who wanted to discuss the possibility of buying the club. I was going to London the following Monday so we agreed to meet up and talk in person. I had never heard of Mike Ashley but I checked his name out with some of my business associates and I was intrigued.”

 

After arriving at London King’s Cross via train, Sir John was greeted by a private car and driven straight to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s law offices on Fleet Street. He expected a short meeting, given that he was primarily in London to meet with surveyors about a property deal, but was “taken aback” as he stepped out of the lift and into a room full of lawyers and accountants.

 

“There were around a dozen of Ashley’s team in the room,” Sir John recalls. “They were all sat around with mountains of paperwork and were entirely prepped to do a business transaction. I just thought we were having an initial chat but they wanted the deal done straightaway. I asked, ‘Which one is Mike?’ And they told me he wasn’t here but they were doing the deal on his behalf. I recognised straight away this was a serious businessman.”

 

Having arrived unprepared, Sir John called a lawyer and then found himself engaging in three days’ worth of intensive talks with the representative of a 42-year-old who had raised £929 million by floating Sports Direct on the Stock Exchange. “I didn’t have any pyjamas with me, only the clothes I had brought down,” he says. “I asked them about doing due diligence, as is normal business practice, but the response was, ‘we just want this done as quickly as possible’.

 

“I asked why he wanted to buy Newcastle and they said he wanted to use the club’s brand in order to help his business grow in East Asia. His team explained to me that his idea was to take Newcastle to a level we hadn’t been able to, particularly in a global marketing sense, and that would also benefit his business.”

 

Sir John asked for 100p a share for his 41.6 per cent stake and that equated to £55,342,223. “His team didn’t haggle; they thought it was a good price,” he says. Ashley’s company, St James Holdings Ltd, then purchased Shepherd’s 28 per cent stake for 1p-per-share more — while the then-chairman was in hospital with pneumonia — before completing his £134 million takeover by the end of July.

 

To Ashley, the opportunity was as a “no-brainer,” although he might have thought differently had he gone through Newcastle’s books and spotted the £57 million of stadium debt which needed to be repaid within 60 days. That £134 million led to another £111 million in interest-free loans.

 

“It was only on the third day of negotiations that I finally met Mike and he wasn’t involved in the details,” Sir John says. “He walked into the lawyer’s office when the deal was almost complete, bounded across with a big smile on his face, stuck out his hand, smiled and said, ‘Thank you’.

 

“We spoke about his business, how he was a self-made man and I told him I was impressed he’d built up his company. He didn’t gloat. He was good company — a normal bloke, not your stereotypical uptight businessman — and we didn’t discuss any of the intricacies of the deal. He just said how excited he was to be buying a football club.”

 

Despite giving Sir John a box for life and the title of life president, the pair have only met around half-a-dozen times since at St James’ Park, exchanging pleasantries.

 

“I’ve been criticised by some fans for selling to Mike and others have told me I should have offered him guidance,” Sir John says. “But he never sought my advice and so I have never felt it was my place to give it. As a businessman, I would never want a previous owner telling me how to run a business once I had bought it off them. It would have been wrong of me to interfere.”

 

“The first time I met Mike was in the old Chairman’s Suite at the stadium. He’d had a few.” Ashley’s relish for a tipple is well-established — he has described himself as a “power drinker“ and someone who likes “to get drunk” — and this was an era when he was still a regular visitor to Newcastle, wearing replica shirts and downing pints in the city. “He was larger than life,” one person who worked closely with him says. “Everybody wanted a piece of him.”

 

Ashley, they say, was “very laddish and bawdy, but as long as you could tolerate that, he was the life and soul.” Again, the informality; jeans, white shirt. “He’s very engaging,” says the work associate. “Certainly after a drink. He could be disarming; he would chat to the serving staff and ask about their jobs and salaries and working conditions.

 

“He was probably more comfortable speaking to people who didn’t have a huge football knowledge. He’d gravitate towards people he could have general banter with. Maybe he was professionally intimidated by speaking to his counterparts at other clubs. I think that’s why he didn’t really want any face time with Rafa.

 

“He has quite an unusual personality. I wondered whether some of that bluff was a mask for someone who is a bit socially insecure. Possibly because he thinks everybody is trying to get money from him or persuade him of something. Fans used to ask me, ‘What’s he really like? He must be a tosser.’ But I’d always say, ‘Honestly, if you met him one-to-one, you’d enjoy yourself and he’d agree with a lot of what you said’.”

 

Ashley was quizzical and curious, but usually elsewhere. He had ideas, but they seemed half thought-out. “I remember Mike and the people around him saying that if Newcastle takes up more than a certain percentage of his time then it was a poor use of it because that’s not where his profits lie,” a former senior employee says. “The club just couldn’t command that much of his time, so he couldn’t give it the attention it deserved.” One Newcastle player describes him as “an absentee landlord.”

 

“That was part of the problem and so was his frustration with the machinery of football,” the employee continues. “He wanted to smash through the norm of paying agents for every deal. He wanted to pay for players up front rather than buying them on the never-never. That made a lot of sense, but unless every club had the same view, nothing would change. At Sports Direct, he was used to being fleet-footed.

 

“There were certain things he got right, like the 10-year fixed-price season ticket. He would talk about how people in the North East needed to be able to afford to go to the football because that was what they lived for. He wasn’t being patronising. It was passionate. He wanted to see the stadium full. I think it could have worked for Mike if someone had been able to keep him in check, but there was always something lurking round the corner.”

 

Ashley has always surrounded himself with loyal lieutenants, a trait which has not served him well at Newcastle. “Something like changing the name of the stadium just came out of thin air as far as we could see,” one former colleague says. “I still think that was Mike having a social chat with colleagues or friends and someone suggesting it and him saying, ‘Yeah, fuck it, to hell with the consequences because I shake things up, I’m a disrupter.’

 

“I don’t think he’s concerned about his reputation in that sense. He’s thick-skinned like that. A lot of those decisions felt very knee-jerk, but he put a lot of stock in the advice of friends, even if some didn’t have a clue, whether about football, Newcastle, the fans. You can put Joe Kinnear in that camp of close advisers. Justin Barnes is another. Derek Llambias. Keith Bishop, his PR man. He has a small group of trusted allies and once he trusts you, it’s with everything.

 

“It felt like he took some of those big decisions over a night out in Soho, people telling him who the club needed to sign or whatever. It was really odd. He seemed just to grasp at any little pockets of advice he’d get from people he trusted. That’s been his downfall.”

Ashley shares a joke with Kinnear, whom he appointed twice at Newcastle (Photo: Getty Images)

 

Three years ago, when he was being sued by Jeffrey Blue, an investment banker, over a disputed business claim, the High Court was told that Ashley once held a Sports Direct management meeting in a pub, where he drank 12 pints with vodka chasers and then threw up into a fireplace. (Ashley won the case.)

 

“I wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised by that,” the colleague says. “I’ve never seen him vomit, but he liked to do business in the pub. Rafa was never going to do that. He’d say, ‘That’s not where we need to discuss this.’ Rafa was a serious man. You could see Steve Bruce getting on well with him over a beer because he’s good fun, but that’s not really the point.”

 

There were too many strained relationships. Ashley described his first relegation at Newcastle as “a catastrophe,” but hailed Shearer’s impact over his eight games as a firefighter. When the pair met at the training ground to discuss what happened next, Ashley brought a supermarket carrier bag with his own sandwiches in it. Shearer never heard from him again.

 

Alan Pardew and Steve McClaren were both disciplined for discussing Ashley or the club’s transfer policy in public — the latter earning an official written warning — while Benitez expressed bemusement when it was put to him he should invite his employer to Newcastle’s training ground to smooth things over, saying “do you have to be invited into your own house?”

 

There are contradictions everywhere. Some players, including Joey Barton, have felt able to call the owner directly. Jamaal Lascelles, the current captain, has described him as “a nice guy.” At an awkward, staged meeting between Benitez, the first-team squad and Ashley at an Italian restaurant in Ponteland, Northumberland, the latter floated the prospect of a trip to Las Vegas if they stayed up. It never happened.

 

The things that did happen — like Kinnear (who called journalists “cunts” and “slimy bastards” at his introductory press conference) being appointed manager before returning as director of football; or the £40 million club-record signing of Joelinton, the Brazilian striker who for some reason fired Ashley’s imagination (he offered to pay £20 million from his own pocket when Benitez said he did not want him) — often made no more sense.

 

None of it was conventional. “It wasn’t easy to work for the club,” the employee says. “At the same time, Mike would listen to feedback. He doesn’t just want you to say, ‘Yes Mike, no Mike.’ He wants you to challenge him.”

 

When Llambias was Newcastle’s managing director, running the club on Ashley’s behalf, there was plenty of that and, for a little while, it worked, taking the team to fifth in the Premier League when Pardew was manager. “There would be ding-dong arguments. It seemed to be the nature of their relationship and, in many ways, it worked for the club. Derek wasn’t a pushover, he would fight some difficult battles on behalf of his team.

Charnley has been Ashley’s managing director at Newcastle since 2014 (Photo: Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)

 

“In Lee Charnley, Derek’s successor, I feel you’ve pretty much got a yes man trying to predict what Mike would want him to say and then saying it. Derek could at least give it back a bit. If he can, Lee will deflect a decision until the next day and he has to go via Justin or Keith to get anywhere close to Mike. Derek took a lot of punches, but it felt more dynamic.”

 

It made for dysfunction. “You could see flashes of Mike’s genius, but it was flawed genius,” the employee says.

 

Whether in business or football, Ashley has devised his own rules, which is not to say that he does not inspire some empathy. One Premier League chairman, whose dealings with Ashley date back to his early days at St James’, talks about a “very sociable, gregarious,” man who, initially at least, “was clearly excited by it all, in much same way you would expect a wealthy person to be excited when they buy a racehorse.

 

“I don’t think for a minute that he was prepared for all the pressures and all the scrutiny that comes with owning a football club. I can’t claim to know him well, but I’m sure that has taken him by surprise. He very rarely goes to matches these days. I think the novelty and the fun aspect wore off a long time ago. That seems to happen with a lot of owners.

 

“He doesn’t give you the impression his life revolves around his club. He has his other business interests. He’s very successful elsewhere. I’m sure he would say he has put a lot of money into Newcastle. A lot of other owners and chairmen put their heart and soul into a club and, from the fans’ point of view, you probably need to do both.

 

“He got involved at a time when the amount of money you need to put in, in order to make a club competitive, was going up and up. At one time you needed to be a multimillionaire. Now you probably need to be a billionaire. He’s a very wealthy man, but does he want to spend hundreds of millions trying to turn Newcastle into a top-six club?

 

“I don’t know this, but I don’t think that was ever his intention. I would imagine he thought it was going to be a lot of fun. The reality is that, a lot of the time, it isn’t fun. It can be a nightmare — especially when you make bad decisions and get stick for it, as he has.”

 

Aside from those brief, peculiar spasms of interest (like Joelinton) Ashley has retreated into one corner as fans move into the other, with the club ticking over in the middle. There have been protests and boycotts, supporter-led campaigns like The Magpie Group who say on their website that Ashley “has proven to be a catastrophic owner, making mistake after mistake in his running of our club”.

 

In a recent poll on Twitter, 96 per cent of 3,383 respondents agreed with the statement that Newcastle “need a new owner to progress as a football club in any meaningful sense”. At away games or moments of distress, songs are routinely sung imploring a “fat cockney bastard” to “get out of our club”.

Protests calling for Ashley to leave began as early as 2008 (Photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)

 

In that column back in August, Benitez said, “They told me they didn’t want to invest in the academy or the training ground — if they like, I can explain the reason why Mike Ashley refused,” which The Athletic understands may have been a reference to supporters abusing the owner from the stands.

 

That would fit with the club’s penchant for self-defeat. It symbolises Ashley’s Newcastle, as did Charnley’s statement four months earlier that, “No player has turned around and said they will not sign because of the training ground.”

 

You invest in your facilities to improve players, you improve players to improve the team, you improve the team to strive for something and you strive for something because this is the essence of football, of sport, representing a place or a people, and being something bigger and better than yourself. Do all that and you reap the rewards, the dividend for getting it right. Do all that and you might just have some fun. But it is far too late for that.

 

 

 

 

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NUFCDoog

NUFCDoog

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I mean I imagine he will for a bit. It’s very rare with any takeover that the manager is just sacked straight away. Ashley kept Allardyce for a bit, City had Mark Hughes, Chelsea with Ranieri, it’ll be one of those where we all know he’s going to be sacked but it’ll be dragged out initially and he’ll get another season out of it before being let go

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Superior Acuña

Superior Acuña

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He might not feel like it, but perfect end for Bruce if he goes at the end of the season. He'd have inevitably ended up being hated and leaving in disgrace at some point - instead he gets a full season to say he managed Newcastle, did better than expected and raised his reputation outside the club no doubt, not hated by Newcastle fans, big pay off.

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Strawberry

Strawberry

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Bringing Rafa now will give him enough time to judge the likes of Joelinton to know if he needs him for next season or not. Also the other new players. We can’t be sentimental to Bruce like the sources to this story (daily mail) or the journalist who wrote. He needs to leave as soon as possible.

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STM

STM

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I mean I imagine he will for a bit. It’s very rare with any takeover that the manager is just sacked straight away. Ashley kept Allardyce for a bit, City had Mark Hughes, Chelsea with Ranieri, it’ll be one of those where we all know he’s going to be sacked but it’ll be dragged out initially and he’ll get another season out of it before being let go

 

He might get a few games but hes not getting a transfer window under new owners. That would be a quick way to burn money.

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