The First 90 Minutes.com

Monday regular on TF90M, Tim Sansom, looks at the mass hysteria directed at such fallen clubs as Newcastle, and questions could it be your team that plays the butt of the joke next.

There was a little bit of time to spare so I took a look at the Newcastle United Football Club website. I have to admit that I was typing out the web address with a certain amount of freakish fascination. I was half expecting an error message to appear on the screen. I would be abruptly told that the internet could “not find the page that I was looking for” and I would be invited to send an error message to Bill Gates at Microsoft that my search for the Tyneside’s new Championship outfit was invalid.

With Middlesbrough joining Newcastle in the 2009/2010 Championship, and Sunderland struggling in the lower half of the Premiership, earnest socio-economic discussions have been made about the decline of football in the North East and the general collapse of the region. Every single commentator suggests that everything is in meltdown at St James Park, so I did wonder whether a decent website was in operation.

Well, I can report that there is a website for Newcastle United Football Club on the World Wide Web and the site is pretty interesting too. On a jet-black background, I could find out about the pre season fixtures of the club, as well as book a hospitality package. I could buy the custard yellow and white away shirt and I could read about some charity work of a local TV news operative in Newcastle.  

There seems to be little sense of a club in crisis, as a result of reading this website.  Newcastle United Football Club is still a football club in the North East of England that plays in a black and white kit and the Gallowgate End is still standing over the city. Regardless of the division that Newcastle United find themselves in, St James’ Park remains one of the stadiums that I want to visit within the UK. I enjoy talking about Newcastle United with passionate fans from Tyneside and as a supporter of a Championship club I am not immediately dismissive of their chances to get back into the Premiership after only one season away from the top table because of the crisis on and off the pitch.  

Maybe, the story of Newcastle United is the latest episode in the national British sport of kicking people when they are down. It has been a miserable five years for this club, and the last months have been particularly painful. The club finances are looking like a credit-crunched balance sheet, and the manager’s chair still seems to be vacant with the commencement of training for the new season just days away. Is this the best way to run a football club? If you performed like that in a football management computer game, you would have been sacked before Christmas, or the computer could not take anymore and send you an error message.  

We would be kidding ourselves if we believed that Newcastle United were the only team to be in the financial mire without a sense of direction. There have been other clubs that veered off down the road to semi destruction. Leeds United and Nottingham Forest are two obvious examples, supported by Luton Town and recently joined by Southampton Football Club. It may not be that long till a separate league is formed of clubs that are in administration and suffering from the excess spending of past years. Each club will have an asterisk beside their name to tell us how many points have been deducted for financial irregularities.   

It is pretty obvious that the British public is enjoying their chance to kick the Magpies. To be fair, certain issues are not helping the club to improve relations. There is the small but vocal group of fans who believe that their club has no right to be in the Championship because “Newcastle United is a ‘massive’ club,” and Hull City should be playing Doncaster, Scunthorpe and Plymouth during the coming season. These fans pollute the various forums and phoneins and give the impression that Newcastle fans are all arrogant and deluded about the plight of their club. That is not the case. 

There is the shameful back history of the last ten years at St James’ Park, where managers have stumbled in and out the club like drunken women on a Friday night bender in the Bigg Market. There was the bizarre transfer policy of forking out millions on average players who ended up on the treatment table or disastrously underperforming on the pitch. ‘Consistency’ seems to have been a dirty word in this part of Tyneside, and for some fans, Newcastle United is shorthand for everything that has been dreadful and embarrassing about the excesses of the Premiership years.  

For many fans of clubs that have a financial story that would seem extreme, even on the Jeremy Kyle Show, there must be a certain amount of humble support. It is a weird experience to see your club at the edge of the financial cliff, with the real possibility that there will be no more football at your beloved ground. To be fair, the events at Newcastle United are extreme in nature, but you wonder whether some other well-known clubs may go the same way during the next couple of years. If you are laughing at these unfortunate clubs, be sure that your beloved club will not end up in the financial quagmire, and be the butt of mass hysteria from the great British public.