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Opinion

Mike Ashley not approaching the question of Rafa’s future in good faith

6 years ago
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The football season was rounded off with a thrilling 3-0 win for Newcastle United.

Who knows, or cares, whether the Chelsea players were trying, but the ones in black and white certainly were.

A great way to send the fans away happy, able now to enjoy a relaxing summer break, thinking positive thoughts ahead of next season.

Which lasted all of…45 minutes.

A statement was issued by Mike Ashley, saying (claiming!) that Rafa Benitez had the owner’s ‘full support’ and would be once again given ‘every penny’.

Five days later and another piece of paper was (figuratively) being waved by Mr Ashley.

This time it was the headline figures from the 2016/17 Newcastle United Accounts, which were over seven weeks late to be filed at Companies House. This attracts a fine as punishment but is peanuts to somebody like the Sports Direct supremo.

Very quickly, it was easy to join the dots between the Sunday and Friday statements.

We went from the manager being given ‘every penny’, to the club having seemingly enjoyed a financial disaster of epic/Titanic-like proportions.

The club’s headlines of the 2016/17 Newcastle United Accounts, seemingly an attempt to make things look as bad as possible.

Funny how these were made public only 24 hours after the Summer Transfer Window opened and in the middle of a stand-off between Mike Ashley and Rafa Benitez, over money…

The creative accounting, which included the club choosing to include future wages of out of favour players, did its job. Pretty much every newspaper just slavishly repeating the Mike Ashley official storyline.

Dropping into the Championship is always going to be a setback but the real financial harm to the club was in reality a fraction of what these Accounts headlines are trying to portray.

Whilst there was an ‘accountancy’ loss of over £90m, Mike Ashley only had to put an additional extra £15m into the club to see it through the one year holiday in the second tier.

If we have learnt nothing else this past week, we have certainly learnt that Mike Ashley is not approaching the question of Rafa’s future in good faith.

Fans would love (transparent) new owners and they already love Rafa Benitez. However, love will only get you so far, especially if Mike Ashley is involved.

Only once there is mutual love and/or respect between Newcastle United’s manager, supporters and owner(s), will there be any chance of tangible success.

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