• Newcastle United will be one of the most compelling stories of the next season
• Mike Ashley allowed Rafa Benitez, Ayoze Perez and Salomon Rondon to leave
It is apparent already, even with the start of the new Premier League season still almost three weeks away, that Newcastle United will be one of the most compelling stories of the nine months that lie ahead.
Not in a good way, obviously. Compelling like one of those videos of a car on black ice, sliding down a hill towards traffic in a snowstorm. Bystanders watch. They know the crash is coming. Newcastle are already on that hill. They started rolling down it when the owner, Mike Ashley, allowed Rafa Benitez to leave the club.
And when he sold Ayoze Perez to Leicester City, who are the kind of team a club with Newcastle’s support base should be blowing out of the water.
Salomon Rondon, Newcastle’s best player last season when he was on loan from West Brom, was allowed to move too.
All the classic early signs of trouble are there: supporters refusing to renew their season tickets, lack of investment, a protracted and inept takeover bid, fans planning a stadium boycott, dissent surrounding the appointment of a new manager and players involved in a brawl after a pub crawl. In the grim game of relegation bingo, Newcastle’s numbers just came up.
It is hardly surprising they are one of the favourites to go down. Until now, Ashley’s stewardship of the club has merely been like a festering sore, the pustulating antithesis to the passion of the supporters.
In the last couple of months, the condition has deteriorated. Now he runs the club like he’s gangrene, gradually eating away everything it once stood for.
With the right owner, Newcastle could be Liverpool. They could be a club that uses its power-base in its region to challenge for honours.
It bestrides its city like few other clubs, its stadium dominating like a fortress on the hill, the focus of the Geordie nation, and yet its owner is allowing its power to fall away into impotence and stasis.
Ashley’s entire cursed reign at Newcastle has been an exercise in brinksmanship. Trying to do the bare minimum to keep the team in the top flight with access to all those television riches. Trying to do just enough and no more. Trying to spend just enough to stay up. Sometimes it has worked. Sometimes it hasn’t. Either way, there has never been any joy in it.
As an owner, Ashley has never been anything other than semi-detached. The club is a milch cow for him, a tool to help promote his true love, Sports Direct.
A club that was once everyone’s second favourite team has now become a byword for charmlessness, meanness, gracelessness, spite and lack of ambition.
In these circumstances, maybe it is not surprising that Newcastle fans greeted the appointment of Steve Bruce as their new manager last week with dismay.
There has been an acceptance for some time that the club need a miracle worker, not just a manager, to counter the malign influence of Ashley and Bruce does not conform to that description.
In the wake of the departure of Benitez, some supporters deluded themselves that men such as Jose Mourinho, Roberto Martinez, Eddie Howe or Steven Gerrard might be interested in the job. But why would anyone with self-respect or ambition or a reputation to uphold even toy with the idea of taking over at this version of Newcastle?
The truth is that Bruce is too good for Newcastle, not the other way round. He is too good for Ashley’s Newcastle anyway. He may or may not have been 11th If Bruce were not a Geordie whose late father loved the club, I doubt he would have gone anywhere near it, either. Newcastle is a great club but Ashley’s Newcastle is not. Ashley’s Newcastle is a club that is lucky to have a man and a manager like Bruce.
Ashley’s Newcastle is lucky to have a manager with an affinity for the club, a decent track record as a boss and someone who will be emotionally invested in trying to save it from its owner as well as the other 19 teams in the division. He might not be what Newcastle fans wanted but he’s as good as it’s going to get under Ashley.
If they direct their ire at the manager, they will be missing the target. This is not about Bruce, who has done a good job in difficult circumstances at other clubs. This is about an owner who is fiddling while Newcastle burns. To attack Bruce would be to do what Ashley wants because it would shift the focus away from him. To attack Bruce would be to divert attention from the real problem. To attack Bruce would be to ignore the root cause of what is going wrong.
To attack Bruce would be to undermine the best chance Newcastle supporters have got of salvaging something from this season. I don’t subscribe to the idea that Newcastle fans are over-entitled for complaining about their lot. Maybe they’ve had it easy compared to clubs such as Morecambe and Leyton Orient but it doesn’t change the fact that a club of their size and their potential deserves better than Ashley.
With a decent owner — an owner who is prepared to back his manager rather than ignore him — Newcastle could be a somebody in football again.
Instead of which, a crisis is upon St James’ Park that is of Ashley’s making and Newcastle are on the slide before a ball has been kicked.