Rewind the clock back one year. There were crazy scenes of celebration outside St James’ Park as the Mike Ashley era of Newcastle United came to an end. Amanda Staveley was heralded as the new messiah as the Geordies celebrated with tea-towels on their heads by the Sir Bobby Robson statue.
12 months later, the party has died down and the hangover has receded. But the progress has begun, on and off the pitch. When Saudi Arabia’s PIF fund took ownership of the club, everybody got a little bit giddy. Newcastle had gone from a giant advertising board for the owner Sports Direct, to the richest club in the world overnight.
Amid his contract dispute with PSG, Newcastle briefly became the bookies’ favourites to sign Kylian Mbappe. It was thrilling and exciting, but also a false dawn of what Newcastle had become. When Manchester City were taken over in 2008, they immediately made a statement by signing Robinho. After all the hype and talk about major names and ‘how they could line-up’, Newcastle kept relatively quiet.
Well, sort of.
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Their first move, one that immediately won fans over, was to sack the much-maligned manager Steve Bruce. The local lad was never going to be a success at St James’ Park and it was best for both himself and the club that they parted company. Eddie Howe’s appointment dictated how the club would be run moving forward.
This was no flash in the pan that would see the new ownership cycle through big name managers and throw money at the problems. Instead we saw a club with long-term ambitions slowly improve, build and invest. Howe has avoided any talk about the owners in his press conference, but that paid off in his first transfer window as the club spent big.
£117m was spent in total, a level of investment this city hadn’t seen in quite some time. Bruno Guimares was the big arrival from Lyon but even he wasn’t a household name to fans. Instead it was smart arrivals with Premier League experience. Chris Wood, Kieran Trippier and Dan Burn. They came in and instantly improved a beleaguered squad, as Howe led his side to an 11th place finish.
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This summer, another £122m was spent. Nick Pope, Matt Targett and Sven Botman all arrived, but it was the late £63m signing of Alexander Isak that really caught the eye. A 6ft 4in Swedish international that had been on the radar of several top clubs in Europe, he was Newcastle’s statement signing that they could compete with some of the big boys.
Now they are a side snuggled in the top half of the Premier League table, with genuine hopes of breaking into that top seven this term. This level of incremental improvement is only set to continue, especially if PIF continues to spend over £100m on new players every single transfer window.
The mood has completely changed around the club and the football on the pitch is the best they have seen in many a year at St James’ Park. Bruce-ball has been long-forgotten and now they have genuine hopes of getting back into Europe. But this whole saga is being played out upon a backdrop of interrogation.
You can’t sweep under the rug the Saudi Arabian regime and the issues that country faces. But in today’s modern sporting world you also cannot single out Newcastle for being the only perpetrators of sportswashing. Formula One and major boxing fights are now regular visitors to that part of the world. UAE-owned Manchester City have spent billions to become the dominant force in English football and we have a World Cup in Qatar coming up in a month’s time. We all wish that our clubs were owned by a local businessman with a good heart, but the Premier League has become an immensely lucrative global game, and that’s now an impossible dream.
Newcastle are now a force in English football again. Rightly or wrongly, a year since the takeover, a city so reliant on its football club has been inspired. Fast forward five years and they could be partying for a different reason outside St James’ Park.
