Deserving of some respect at Newcastle?

Mike Ashley’s involvement with Newcastle United has been turbulent to say the least. Having to settle for Premier League mediocrity is a hard enough pill to swallow, but to have the heart and soul of the club ripped out by the interventions of the ‘cockney mafia’ as well is tortuous.

Newcastle are a hugely successful club  historically, and you don’t stop being a footballing institution like this overnight. Clubs always go through cyclical changes for better and for worse, but the big clubs always seem to maintain the same level of ambition that made them great; sadly Ashley’s Newcastle fall well short of the mark.

As an outsider looking in it is perhaps easier to sympathise with someone like Ashley, devoid of the personal attachment to the club it is easier to be rational about it. Even so the actions of Ashley are still unforgivable and the anger of fans quite understandable.

Ashley may well be the owner of a £1.5bn retail empire, but that doesn’t make him a footballing genius, rather a footballing clown. Lack of investment, managerial sackings, rebranding and staff appointment; he has made so many amateurish mistakes down the years. Whilst some learn, Ashley basking in his own self-importance has just compounded things.

Ashley treats the club like his play thing, the only difference between him and Abramovich is the fact the Russian actually invests significant funds in a targeted manner.

The Keegan resignation and stadium renaming are all significant issues, but for me the concern that has dogged the whole Ashley reign has been a lack of ambition.

For too long Newcastle have settled for second best. This season the club have revised their ambitions up to a 10th placed finish and are offering significant bonuses as an incentive to achieving this. I am all for financial prudence and realism, but surely Newcastle can aim higher?

It isn’t as if this is a stepping-stone to something better, under in the last 8 seasons they have only finished in the top 10 twice and their recent Europa League run resulted in a league relegation battle for much of the season. There doesn’t appear to be any co-ordinated strategy for making a gradual climb back to the top, more a series of scatterbomb approaches to achieving mediocrity. The panicked French acquisitions last January shouldn’t really have come as a surprise, Ashley is always willing to dip into his pocket when he needs to save face. But this just seeks to highlight the point, the purchases last season weren’t part of any grand strategy but more as a means for papering over the cracks. Ashley has the means to maintain Newcastle as a second rate side, but is this really good enough?

With a published wage bill of £64m, Newcastle are on a par with clubs like Everton and are actually ahead of many of their mid-table challengers. Money doesn’t always buy success but it is a decent barometer for the kind of players you can attract to your club. Newcastle may not have the spending power of a top 4 club, but they have the means to compete for Europa at least.

Ashley’s attempts to sell the club probably illustrates why the clubs plans are so unambitious, a current state of flux between Ashley’s tenure and someone that will meet his valuation for the club.

I personally don’t think Newcastle fans owe Mike Ashley anything. A man that is obsessed with his own self-importance and cares little about the muddying of a footballing institution, the sooner they are rid of him the better in my opinion.

Wins over Chelsea and Spurs have shown the potential of the club, but until new and ambitious owners are found these will just be anomalies amongst a sea of mediocrity.

[ad_pod id=’fbn-ldb’ align=’center’]