A potted history... Mike Ashley arrives buying NUFC for £134m. He does not undertake due dilligence and is staggered to find £100m worth of debt in the club. Realising he's an idiot, he quickly backtracks and tries to sell the club...for around £400m. No takers. He takes it off the market, then puts it back up for sale. At £300m. The club is still only really worth the £134m he paid, but he's had to saddle the debt. No-one tells him that debt doesn't ADD value to an asset. No takers. Club is relegated following series of bafflingly weird decisions mainly involving jobs for the boys. Pause. He thinks a bit. If I couldn't get £300m in the Premier League, I suppose I won't get even my money back in the Championship. If I invest another £30m I should be able to get them back up, then work on these books. So he does. NUFC get promoted - now comes the tricky bit; establishing the club as risk free, with all visibility of debt and a clear balance sheet showing sustainability. In Mike Ashley's world, that's what makes a business worth investing in. What he had turned Newcastle into was the kind of business he usually takes over - in trouble and for a song. So he know all about this. Look at every decision he has ever made at NUFC - ask yourself how many have been for the good of the fans or even the playing side, for that matter? I'd challenge you to find one. He gives Carr a long term contract because he makes his business more attractive - buy cheap, sell high, consistently. He retains Pardew, because any other manager would have ambition; Pardew's achieved his simply being employed in the top flight. Success came too early; he didn't want to invest any capital in more success, it wasn't worth it to him, it wouldn't make the club saleable. He was looking at Man City and Chelsea, both of whom don't have even the majority of the local support, the former hadn't won a thing for almost as long as NUFC yet were still bought up. Mike Ashley is here for one reason only -to get his money back plus a bit more on the club. He isn't going to do it employing ambition-seeking people, he needs HIS people around him. Kinnear is there as he's cheap, one of HIS people and might even bring a diamond or two to the club for polishing. It puts Pardew in his place and suitable dulls the senses of the masses, for two reasons - gone are our expectations, for one. But two, he offers a prospective buyer the added incentive of being the knight in shining armour. Things may be bleak now, but they will not always be so. Never mind Pardew/Kinnear - I'd be surprised if Ashley were still at the club come Sept 1st. Keep the faith.
If Ashley was determined to bring in a director for whatever reason he should have looked at the likes of Glenn Hoddle not this current muppet. As you say he surrounds himself with friends regardless of their football knowledge. One gaff follows another dragging our great club through the mud and making us a laughing stock again and again. One despairs at what will happen next.
A little bit about Mike Ashley.... From the Daily Mail 2007 "Before Christmas, he held a 15-minute conference call with journalists, which ended with the words: "Got to go. Mum wants me home." He said: "I prefer to stay out of the limelight and have no desire for a public profile." At the time, the release of a photograph was the first time that anybody had ever seen what Mr Ashley looked like. He was compared to "a geezer who likes a pint or three", rather than a billionaire businessman. Yesterday Mr Ashley, who will be executive deputy chairman of the business, stuck to his aim to keep his public profile to a minimum. Asked what he plans to do with his new fortune, he mumbled that he has "no plans." Hmm. Grudges held, from the Guardianl, 2006: "He has caused big problems for his main rivals, JJB Sports and JD Sports. His discounting formula means that "every time a Sports World opens near a JJB, the JJB gets killed", said one analyst. It was Ashley who turned whistleblower to report his rivals to the Office of Fair Trading for fixing the price of replica football shirts. This eventually led to dawn raids and multimillion-pound fines. The Sports World boss acted after being summoned to the Cheshire home of David Hughes, the chairman of the now-defunct Allsports chain, in 2000 to discuss the pricing of a new Manchester United kit. It was, by all accounts, not an easy meeting. Another northern businessman there, Dave Whelan, the chairman of Wigan Athletic football club and the JJB chain, first mistook the casual Ashley for a gardener and then reportedly told him: "There's a club in the north son, and you're not part of it." Try and read this, if you can - Ashley saying he's been advised he would be "assaulted", and so on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/n/newcastle_united/7615618.stm Finally, a long article from a BBC investigation, which follows a similar theme to NUFC - in that, Ashley seems able and willing to do whatever the fck he wants and no-one can hold him accountable. A BBC investigation has followed the supply chain of multi-millionaire Mike Ashley's sports retailing business all the way back to one of the world's poorest countries where workers are paid around £1 per day for a 12 hour shift. A special Inside Out programme about the controversial owner of Newcastle United football club filmed workers in Laos making clothes for his Sports Direct stores. The factory had one sealed air conditioned room to keep cool a computerised sewing machine which was embroidering dozens of Lonsdale logos. Elsewhere on the site hundreds of people were in long production lines in the heat sewing clothes together ready to be shipped to Mike Ashley’s UK stores. They were bagged up - and amazingly even had a 70% discount sticker already added before they left the factory. The manager told the undercover reporters that his factory did not meet the internationally accepted standards for all garment workers – known as the AS 8000 standard. It guarantees no child labour is used, and the workers get a living wage without excessive overtime - in a safe and decent environment. The factory manager admitted, to meet the standard he would have to improve conditions in the factory - and pay staff more. Many other major sports retailers - such as Nike publically list all their suppliers who all have all passed this test. Sports Direct doesn't list its suppliers. A spokesman for Mike Ashley told the BBC that the neither the company nor the club would be commenting. They did say that some of the questions the programme makers had written to them about were "inaccurate and misleading" – although they haven’t said in what way."
