Debate: should Newcastle fans take action and buy the club themselves?

Newcastle United supporters suffer more than most from the crocodile-tears technique of journalism, which purports to speak for “loyal fans” who “deserve better” than to spend their “hard-earned money” on an underachieving institution. All the journalist has to do is fill in the name of the club and often, down the years (most recently during the regimes of Freddy Shepherd and Mike Ashley), it has been Newcastle.

Why? Because Newcastle are a big and significant club with a lot of fans who, congregated in grief, can be photogenic: helpfully garbed in the club’s distinctive stripes, burly, male and incongruously sobbing. The picture with which we are all familiar — and not least since Newcastle’s latest relegation a few weeks ago — can be worth an extra thousand words. And what does the reader get out of it? A comforting sense that they are poor fools, I imagine. A reflection that not since Monty Python and The Life of Brian have so many people been so amusingly misled by the notion of a messiah.

But it is all a caricature, of course. Many Newcastle supporters are sensible. They know that there is only one Kevin Keegan, that the extraordinary personal qualities that enabled Keegan, with the support of Sir John Hall, to raise Newcastle into the Premier League in 1993 and produce football of such quality and adventure as to be a factor in the popularity of the League as a whole cannot be assumed to reside in others who have happened also to be inspirational players for the club, even Alan Shearer.

These people were not among the 20,000 nitwits who, when Shepherd signed Michael Owen in 2005, packed the Gallowgate End to provide a backdrop for the striker’s first photograph in the black-and-white shirt that he was to wear thereafter with such frustrating (though not surprising) infrequency. The intelligent ones knew a mistake when they saw one and, when Ashley waddled along two years ago and started giving key posts to little-known Londoners (and, even worse, undermining Keegan with Dennis Wise), they were even more embarrassed. If the erstwhile Loadsamoney had offered them a drink, they would have politely declined and moved to another bar.

They expected relegation and now, I hope, are ready to seize the opportunity that began to knock when desperation induced Ashley to test Shearer’s messianic properties. Of the eight matches that could have kept Newcastle in the Barclays Premier League, one was won and the inadequacy of this was good news for sensible fans, especially the hundreds whom I mentioned a few weeks ago as having formed an association with the intention of getting involved in the club’s next ownership.

Ashley, who once hoped to make a quick profit, has little choice but to watch his losses mount. The latest leaks are that he would accept £100 million for something that has already cost him at least £250 million.

Let us assume that the true price is £75 million. This verges on the realistic. If we further assume that there are 100,000 Newcastle supporters in the United Kingdom and as many in the rest of the world, the price works out at £375 a head, or considerably less than the cost of a season ticket, or half a pint of beer a day for a year.

All they have to do is stop moaning, get together and do something about the way their club have been run for as long (the Hall era apart) as any of us can remember. The examples of supporter involvement in Spanish clubs such as Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao are there to be followed. If clever, the supporters could get all their money back or even make a profit out of the club (an old Shepherd trick that, on reflection, they may prefer to eschew) because economic conditions will eventually improve and so, if the club are sensitively operated, will Newcastle’s fortunes on the field, attracting overseas or even native investment.

So now is the time. The price is right. Let these people google Supporters Direct, an organisation set up for the purpose and already experienced in reviving smaller clubs, and get on with it. Let them put their “hard-earned money” where their mouth is. Otherwise, though unquestionably “loyal fans”, they will not “deserve better”.

Admirable Milner one to watch

The trouble with today’s young players is that they get too much, too soon. Try telling that to James Milner, whose next England Under-21 cap will be his 43rd. At this rate he is more likely to be granted a testimonial than permanent promotion to the senior squad. But you never know; if virtue brings its own reward, Milner should eventually achieve the distinction at which his entry to the Premier League in 2002 hinted.