Der Prozess

Things are about to get a whole lot worse for Newcastle United...

I’m writing this on the Tuesday before Newcastle’s 2026/2027 begins in earnest with our annual scheduled home trouncing by Liverpool. Without assuming the critical Cassandra role, my earnestly held belief is that NUFC will do well to avoid relegation in the campaign we’re about to endure. Last time around, we veered from mediocre to abysmal, with only the occasional, fleeting glimpse of anything resembling attractive, attacking football. Since then, the squad has been annihilated by the loss of Gordon, Tonali, Guimarães and Trippier. Three of them have been sold for vast sums of money, though in the case of Guimarães perhaps for far less than his actual worth to the club, while the latter may have left for free after his contract expired, but like the aforementioned Guimarães, Trippier’s true worth as a natural leader cannot be counted in monetary terms alone. Nice bloke though Dan Burn is, the stone cold reality is that we have lost the only two natural leaders with a winning mentality the squad possessed and the club is heading into the new season, thankfully without the distraction of European football, with a considerably weaker roster than the one that served up an unconvincing 12^th place finish last year. Sure we’ve made half a dozen signings at the moment of writing, none of whom have played Premier League football before, but I’ve absolutely no idea if they’ll be any good or not. Crucially, Murphy, Pope and Willock remain on the books, with no imminent signs that anyone is prepared to show some sympathy and take them off our hands. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lewis Hall is sold and have misgivings about the level of commitment Joelinton has for our club.

At the moment, I’m desperately casting around to find a team worse than Newcastle, as I can only see Hull, Ipswich and Coventry finishing below us next May, unless something dramatic happens in the transfer market before September 1^st or, and this seems unlikely, Matthias Jaissle is able to polish a turd. Hence I’m predicting a 17^th place finish. At best.

Ah yes; our new head coach. From the Saudi league, unsurprisingly. Will he be any good? I’ve no idea. I’ve never heard of him before. While he is untested at this level, he comes well recommended. At least he’s under no pressure from the higher-ups at SJP, whoever they are, as the PIF have shown their complete uninterest in Newcastle United as a project for most of the time they’ve been in charge. Yes, money has been thrown at the club, in terms of the unwise acquisitions of several seemingly ill-judged expensive flops (certainly in their first season on Tyneside), but almost 5 years after the takeover, there is still no clarity about progress relating to a new training ground, or stadium redevelopment, while meaningful communication with supporters remains at the level we were used to when the likes of Lee Charnley and Jeff Vettere were in post. Interesting the annual NUST survey identified the number 1 issue of concern among fans as the utter lack of real communication from the owners. The notable exception to this corporate wall of silence is the ever more unhinged babble that issues forth whenever the immaculately attired David “Hoppy” Hopkinson opens his mouth. Remember his pronouncement that NUFC were going to be a bigger club than Real Madrid by 2030? Well, Hoppy remains the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently we are now Newcastle United 2.0; a lean, mean fighting machine of young tyros about to tear up the Premier League. How we’re supposed to do this with a team shorn of the best players and only natural leaders we possessed is frankly beyond me. Perhaps the whole PIF masterplan is to be so shit nobody will want to watch us, thus rendering all questions about stadium expansion utterly academic.

The true nature of PIF’s attitude to Newcastle United can be seen in their supine willingness to accept just shy of £230 million for our best players, with only vague mentions of financial fair play regulations forcing our hand. What balderdash. They’re now engaged in a process of extracting as much money from Newcastle United as they can. Remember Ashley’s announcement of “no capital investment.” Well, history is repeating itself and it’ll probably get worse as each, and every saleable asset is moved on with indecent haste. I don’t believe PIF should have been allowed to acquire Newcastle United in the first place. Yes I’m grateful we finally ended the trophy hoodoo less than 18 months ago, but it seems as if we’ve entered some kind of sporting Faustian pact, whereby the price of that moment in the sun has been the comprehensively filleting of our club’s soul. I’m not like the NUFC Against Sportswashing vanity project run by former House of Saud employee Denver Hird; I don’t blame the support for swallowing the whole Saudi shtick, in the way that a load of the on-line merchandising operatives were anxious to get their grids all over social media snaps with Chris Mort and Ashley himself almost two decades ago. However, I ask those who dolled themselves up in cheap sunglasses, bath robes and tea towels, how do you feel about the whole takeover five years on? Do you still entreat us to trust the process from your sunny and sandy exile while stroking your watch collection? Or are you now aware that we’ve simply exchanged Tsar Nikolas for Stalin’s Five Year Plans? Except, in the case of PIF, there isn’t any discernible plan. This is why Gordon, Tonali and Guimaraes have jumped ship, as well as the chance to double their wages. This is why we’ve reverted to doing things on the cheap, by investing in young overseas players with potential, in the hope of turning a trick and moving them on for vast profits in a couple of seasons. PIF are no longer remotely interested in sportswashing. Cash is what they are all about. Real Madrid? I’d much rather we were trying to emulate Raya Vallecano.

At least Gordon moved rapidly out the door with a modicum of dignity. Tonali to Spurs just makes me laugh. Fair play to them; they’ve got a bloody good player, but if they think he’s there for the long haul, they are deluded. The Guimaraes transfer did sting, partly because of Ross Wilson’s pitiful claims that the deal was brokered by “very sophisticated actors” on both sides. Is he talking about Nigel Havers I wonder. What a preposterous tissue of horseshit. No, the pain of the Guimaraes deal was occasioned not because I unquestioningly believed all his relentless missives of uxorious flannel about the joy and honour of living and playing up here, but because he was our talisman, on and off the pitch. Someone to believe in, because he always delivered the goods. The one player who never chucked it, whatever the circumstances. And now he’s gone. I’d like to think that Ramsey and Miley, who are currently our only viable midfield pairing, can do just half of his job between them, but I really can’t see that happening.

I didn’t catch the Everton game at Murrayfield, as I was at Gateshead Borough 1 North East Sporting Club 6, when Jaissle said a lot of honest things after we’d been stuffed, or the Bayer Leverkusen home tie, as Percy Main 3 Haltwhistle Jubilee 0 obviously took precedence, but I did watch the Valencia friendly. Albeit on a stream that buffered so often it was like enduring a series of transient ischemic attacks for the opening half. Being honest and acknowledging we were up against 10 men for more than half the contest, it wasn’t a bad performance. Wissa took his goals well and we seemed to be displaying the kind of high press that used to suit us when we had good players. Always nice to win a trophy as well. That said, Willock, Woltemade and Murphy (did you see that attempted back heel? Shit heel more like) offered absolutely nothing and I wonder whether there is any point in keeping them. As the first and last mentioned have deals that expire next summer, we should be looking to offload them now. Big Nick remains a conundrum. If Jaissle can’t get a tune out of him, we may have to kiss and say farewell, because it hasn’t worked out for either party. I’ll confess to not being optimistic for a happy ending.

 

I actually went to the Strasbourg game, originally because I wanted to give a standing ovation to Valentin Barco who had so got under Jude Bellingham’s skin after the England v Argentina World Cup semi-final, but he’d been sold to Chelsea (now there’s a surprise). In fact, I wish I’d waited and not bought tickets but nabbed a couple of freebies from the Blue Lights Foundation. Instead, I paid my £25 and actually quite enjoyed most of it. Osula and Ramsey were our two best players by a mile, even if they both missed during the baffling penalty shoot out that was needlessly appended to the contest, and Ramsey got in a muddle that led to their equaliser. Until the mass changes by Strasbourg at the unnecessary in 19 degrees, hydration break after 67 minutes, we’d looked in control. That changed the pace of the game, and they could have won it in normal time. Still, I made the most of what may be my only visit to SJP this year, getting to see a few of the new signings. Ewen Jaouen did well, Bazoumana Toure was full of running, but offered little concrete threat and Aladji Bamba, who may be a starter next weekend, was fairly anonymous, other than missing his penalty. I haven’t seen the other new signings: Sean Steur (very promising apparently), Lukas Hornicek (better than Pope) and Amar Dedic (just through the door, but we trounced his Benfica side last season). Where does this leave us in terms of a starting XI. I’ve no idea, but with Livramento about to spend another 9 months on the treatment table and Joelinton mysteriously absent, it could look something like this: Hornicek, Dedic, Hall, Botman, Thiaw, Ramsey, Bamba, Elanga, Barnes, Wissa, Osula. Well, that’s eleven names at least, with Steur, Miley and Toure options off the bench.

You do realise I’m over 1.5k words in and I haven’t mentioned the departure of Howe or the death of Kevin Keegan. That is remiss of me, but it just shows what a basket case of a club Newcastle United has defaulted to. Of course, Kevin Keegan arrived on three occasions when were in considerably worse shape than we are now. In 1982 he came as a player and in 78 league games transformed a team of anonymous trundlers into an attacking, exciting side who deservedly clinched promotion. That was a wonderful time, but it was eclipsed by the joyous, beautiful era of his first managerial appointment. From the Bristol City game in February 1992 until the successive demolitions of Spurs and Leeds in December 1996 and January 1997, St James Park was a cathedral of love. Those days will never return. The modern game isn’t played that way. Even his, in hindsight, ill-judged return in January 2008 to replace the appalling Allardyce saw a visible improvement in the team’s performances. It was tragic how it ended and so sad he never returned to the ground before he passed. The outpouring of emotion his passing engendered shows just what he meant to this club, this region and football as a whole. There will never be another Kevin Keegan.

In the same way as KK looked broken, exhausted and spent when he walked away in January 1997, Eddie Howe seemed to have reached the end of his tether in his press conference after the Bristol City friendly hammering. His departure seemed inevitable, as his haunted expression showed a man who had given his all. Yes, last season wasn’t good enough, but he should have been moved on in May or given this season to turn things round. In the end, he was fatally undermined by those behind the scenes. In many ways, the whole Howe saga it reminded me of The Trial (Der Prozess) by Franz Kafka. It tells the terrifying and surreal story of Josef K, a bank clerk who is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority for a crime that is never revealed to him. The book stands as one of the definitive literary works of the 20th century, giving rise to the term "Kafkaesque" to describe needlessly complex, bizarre, and oppressive bureaucratic systems. Systems that PIF seem to base their business model on. Still, trust the process eh? PIF OUT!!