I don’t think I’ve ignored anything and indeed I’ve defended Rafa. He has a very patchy transfer history at nearly all his clubs. It’s never prevented him winning trophies which tells you he ya a good coach and knows what works for him. I wasn’t comparing Joselu to Ben Arfa because of fees. That would be madness. However ability wise you could expect to pay 20m for Ben Arfa today at his peak. Even then we got a 10m player for half that. Perez and Ba too. It’s simply a case that Joselu was a mistake. The budgetary constraint excuse doesn’t stack and it’s one Rafa felt was a good move. Sure he’d rather have spent 40m on a striker but he spent his budget elsewhere. Same goes for Manquillo. They were just errors. The thing is contrary to popular belief clubs were not spending fortunes last summer and promoted clubs weren’t spending the 20m here there and everywhere! You had clubs like Burnley being smart with signings like Charlie Taylor to fatten out their squad. Brighton and Huddersfield probably maxed out on 12m for their record signings like we did. With Manquillo it’s quite simple, we should have kept the money and simply promoted Mbabu to the first team. He wanted to stay and is better than Manquillo in every department anyway. You could argue Joselu should have never been signed and we should have went with Mitro given he is a far superior player (to all but the blind). However Rafa doesn’t want Mitro so it’s a mute point for me. We simply didn’t do well enough in signing someone but it wouldn’t have been easy given our budget had gone elsewhere. Rafa clearly felt other positions were more important than strikers and he has been proved correct in a lot of ways bar maybe Murphy. However no manager is perfect in transfers. It’s the end result which counts and we stayed up. Obviously if you make too many errors over a longer period it does tend to catch up with you though as Rafa knows only too well.
Manquilo was a mistake, clearly. If we accept as a given that Mitro was not to be played, I would not call Joselu a mistake. He was a £5 million striker bough for £5 million. He can't score but he works hard and holds the ball up reasonably well. That is about what you expect for £5 million these days. He has a limited function, which he performed.
I agree with you, the article is ridiculous. To suggests that Mike Ashley deliberately sold players with staged payments and bought players outright so that the figures in one year looked bad is nonsensical. Exactly what was that supposed to achieve? Maybe, just maybe, staged payments was a way of getting the most amount of money in the long run and buying players with one payments upfront was the only way the selling clubs were going to part with the players we wanted. All limited company accounts have to be independently audited to make sure the comply with accounting rules and don't misrepresent their figures. Mike Ashley has made many mistakes but what he did during our Championship season (which is what these accounts represent) was not one of them. You could argue that he could have done more in the season just gone but considering he was trying to sell the club he was hardly likely to take risks. If the club isn't sold then this is the window you can judge Mike Ashley.
After 11 years THIS is the window we can judge Ashley by? There's patience and there's patience but that defies logic.
Each to their own. I see very little value in the lad. I don’t think he holds the ball up particularly well to be honest. He had a spell where he ran about a bit early on in the season. I’d probably have rather kept Daryl Murphy to be honest. We prob got about maybe £2m? We paid £5m for Joselu and paid extra wages but we didn’t improve for signing him. If we’d been getting a big fee for Murphy I’d understand as it would be the last chance you’d get to get that. But £2m? I’d have fancied Murphy to put a few of the chances that were put on the plate for Joselu away. As I say I think it’s very easy to judge managers after the event. They have to make a decision at the time and I’m sure Rafa replaced Mbabu and Murphy with Joselu and Manquillo thinking he had improved the squad marginally. I might disagree but I think he did it with the best intentions but in my opinion his judgement or those doing his scouting let him down. Maybe he thought once he exhausted the budget the owner would relent and release more money. Clearly looking at the accounts it maybe wasn’t possible.
You are right, 11 years is enough time to judge him. What I was trying to say was don't take the last 2 transfer windows as an indication of what he is going to do in this one as he was trying to sell the club. I know you could say the announced that the club was up for sale was made after the summer transfer window was over but I believe Mike Ashley had already made up his mind to sell before then.
Think this is a more considered article on the whole accounts scenario http://priceoffootball.com/newcastle-2017-lovely-jubbly/
Wow. I know there are other costs involved and we shouldn't expect Ashley to bankroll us but only spending (Net) £65M on transfers since buying us is even less than I thought he may have spent. £6m a year!! Surely the club are generating more than £6m a year??? Obviously not this year
Up until the relatively recent TV money boom I think we were running small losses or breakeven. Don't quote me on it though.
Quite big losses in some seasons. I'd not be surprised if our profit has been around £6m/year on average, possibly less.
For me, if he'd have been given just 3m more for that striker, we wouldn't have Joselu. It seems to be well documented Benitez draws up a list with price ranges. It goes without saying if it's the 5m bracket, you end up with a risk. Either surprises you or ends up as **** as the fee paid. Yeah, unless something comes good for him next season, Murphy's in the miss pile. On reflection though we lost Gouff and Aarons wasn't up to it so we had just Ritchie and Atsu. I get why more money was spent on a guy that could fill in for both and even AM. As it happened he wasn't needed as much as he could have been. Ben Arfa, by today's ridiculous fees, would have been over 20 me thinks. He was 24, well-known and had already played for France. Behaviour record acknowledged, but you can't mug French teams off now like we did for two glorious seasons. It's irrelevant, but I'd put him closer to 30
I know I'd like Rafa to have an extra 3m. Hell I'd like an extra 35m. However if he has a budget which he expends, its unlikely they'll just find more money. Other owners would probably dip into their pocket but Mike won't. Yes he will cover shortfalls of 15m to fund the necessity to get back into the top division but he won't keep chucking money at it. That is simply the boat we are in. Rafa knew this and has to manipulate as best he can. In my opinion he could have done that by retaining Mbabu and spending the Manquillo money on a striker. He probably knew however that 5m or 9.5m he wasn't getting a striker he needed. The budget was tight and we now know why. I did keep saying that the money ballooned in the Championship was dangerous. It cam back to haunt us last summer. Luckily it didn't harm us with relegation due to good work by Rafa.
Quite simply you need a owner who wants to throw his money away if you want to get anywhere. Mike thought he did, then realised how big a hole he could end up in and sacked it off.
Not really. As I’ve said a hundred times, you just need a competent owner and exec team who can maximise commercial revenues, whilst recognising the need to invest that increased revenue in good scouting and youth facilities. We got Mike and chums.
Not really, our commercial value is not likely to hit the levels required without attachments to certain individuals. We're not big fish. We can get all the execs we want. Football doesn't really work like that. Execs might generate you an extra 10m or so max.
Say we're ambitious and competently run in 2007. Are we as likely to have been relegated? No. The rest kind of follows. Incompetence and a lack of ambition has hurt this football club deeply. It will continue to do so until the guy responsible for those failings moves on. I actually think even Mike would agree with this comment. His ambition is for Sports Direct alone.
The window licking Micky Quinn spouting his usual rubbish. "Rafa should be given £100m" - https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rafa-benitez-should-given-100-14701469 I mean seriously does anyone listen to this toss-pot and take anything he says seriously? Get he's a bit of an icon locally and loves the club but he's so out of touch its not even funny and it just whips the fans up in to a deluded frenzy. Get back to licking windows Quinny
We are big enough fish to generate more commercial revenue than we currently are, which is less than we were bring in in 2008. That has not been handled well.
