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Thousands of empty seats as Newcastle United play biggest match of season on Saturday – Sad reflection of Mike Ashley impact

5 years ago
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There will be thousands of empty seats at St James Park despite Rafa Benitez and the players facing their biggest match of the season so far.

The Mike Ashley effect meaning many fans now refusing to attend, despite such an important game.

Ticket price rises all around the stadium, demanding tens of millions of pounds profit in the summer transfer window rather than investment in the squad, undermining Rafa Benitez, a refusal to back the manager in this January transfer window, playing games with the fans by pretending a sale of the club was imminent, really poor football thanks to the lack of investment….Mike Ashley really couldn’t do more to discourage supporters from turning up and handing over their money.

It took until the Man Utd game two weeks ago before Newcastle United had their first sold out game of the season but that is unlikely to be repeated for the foreseeable future.

This game against Cardiff City couldn’t be bigger, a game they really must win.

Even a draw would condemn the team to be at best out of the relegation zoneĀ  on goal difference ahead of playing Man City at home and then Spurs and Wolves away.

A defeat would ensure staying in the bottom three and potentially being four points off safety with Man City up next.

The official Newcastle United ticketing site is showing around one and a half thousand tickets still unsold but it has the full away allocation areas shown as sold out.

However, Cardiff only took 1,700 tickets and at the start of this week had only sold 1,400 of them.

So we are looking at around three thousand empty seats at the moment and a crowd of under fifty thousand on Saturday.

At one time the club would have went on a major offensive of asking the Newcastle fans to rally to the cause for such an important match.

However, even they are clearly appreciating the poisonous effect Mike Ashley is having on the club and fanbase, with the push to try and sell the thousands of unsold tickets being minimal.

The crowds so far at St James Park this season have been:

51,749 v Tottenham

51,791 v Chelsea

52,165 v Arsenal

51,523 v Leicester

50,329 v Brighton

49,157 v Watford

49,266 v Bournemouth

51,853 v West Ham

50,223 v Wolves

51,237 v Fulham

52,217 v Man Utd

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