For one of the strangest top-flight seasons in the recent history of British football, two of the three relegated sides have taken a disappointingly straightforward path to the drop. Norwich City have turned in a classic newly promoted, not-quite-managed-the-jump campaign, while Aston Villa’s seems shocking in the abstract -- it is, after all, Villa, who are quite large as these things go -- but had about it a kind of dreadful inevitability, a miserable logic, following as it did several long and disappointing seasons spent rotting from the inside out. It was no real surprise when what was left folded in on itself with a sigh and a clatter and a cloud of shisha smoke.
We’d be sad for Newcastle United if they were a real football club
What went wrong with Newcastle United this season? Well ... everything, basically.
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Thank heavens, then, for Newcastle United, who despite not being a football club have contrived to get themselves relegated in deeply peculiar fashion. It has become something of an overriding theme of the sport at the moment that a club’s expenditure determines, more or less, a club’s achievements, and so it’s almost refreshing to see a club spend as much money as Newcastle have and fall flat on their faces. Have some of that, modern football.
There's more to this than transfers, of course, but that's a decent place to start. Over the course of this season Newcastle have spent getting on for £80m in fees -- second only to Manchester City -- on Georginio Wijnaldum, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Chancel Mbemba and Florian Thauvin over the summer, then Jonjo Shelvey, Henri Saivet and Andros Townsend in January. Comparing those names to those that departed -- the biggest names being Davide Santon, Gabriel Obertan and Jonas Gutierrez, who is now suing the club -- and it's reasonable to assume that this splurge was accompanied by a marked inflation in wages. (Wages that, if the rumours concerning the lack of relegation clauses are true, will look even sillier in the Championship.)
Now, if Newcastle were a football club, then we might wonder: What was the plan? As Newcastle slipped closer and closer to relegation last season, eventually finishing just four points above the drop, how did the decision makers arrive at the conclusion that what the team needed was, essentially, four punts; four young-ish, expensive-ish players with varying amounts of pedigree but no Premier League experience at all? And how did they fit into a weirdly unbalanced squad that was simultaneously bloated and thin, and in desperate need of reliable reinforcement at both ends of the pitch?
Flipping players -- buying them low then selling them high, which is what Newcastle would have been trying to do were they a football club -- only works when those players play well. So we might also wonder what lay behind the decision to appoint Steve McClaren to take charge. A generally well-respected coach (in the cones on the pitch sense) but a deeply flawed manager (in the actually running a team sense), McClaren arrived at Newcastle having pulled off the uneasy trick of failing upwards, having blown the Championship title with (and then been sacked by) Derby County. Speculation about the Newcastle job may have been a contributing factor there; he proved equally unable to cope with it the second time around.
Newcastle's away form was particularly wretched -- they have the home form of a lower mid-table side, but with one game to go, only Aston Villa have managed fewer than their nine points on the road -- which suggests that McClaren never quite managed to get his team organised (and losing Tim Krul for the season won't have helped). But there were several moments throughout the season when a good result appeared, as if from nowhere. The 6-2 thumping of Norwich, say, or the back-to-back wins over Liverpool and Tottenham. Perhaps it was these moments that persuaded Newcastle's board to delay McClaren's dismissal, thinking that he was on the edge of something; perhaps, with hindsight, they should have taken it as a sign that another, better manager might well have been able to work something out.
Or, since they’re not a football club, perhaps it was just that the man responsible for appointing McClaren, Lee Charnley, didn’t want to make himself look bad by extension. By that point in the season they’d added the aforementioned four January signings. Shelvey’s been OK and Townsend intermittently excellent; Saviet and Doumbia have managed seven appearances between them, only two of them starts. For a manager as notoriously risk-averse as Rafa Benitez, coming in with 10 games to go must have given him a nosebleed. He now joins Brian Clough as the second manager to have won a European Cup and been relegated from England’s top flight.
It was true when they went down six years ago and it’s true again today: If they were a football club, there would be something odd about the top flight without Newcastle. Perhaps that’s because they were such an integral part of the Premier League’s early years, as it swelled from ‘the First Division, but louder and with a lion’ into the world-spanning, money-vomiting monstrosity we know and wincingly tolerate today. As were Villa, and it’s been a little strange to watch these theoretically bigger clubs get outflanked and outthought over the last couple of seasons by Bournemouth, by Swansea and most notably by Leicester. Smaller clubs, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things. But smarter.
Well, it would have been strange, if Newcastle were a football club. But they’re not. They’re a temple to corporate vanity built over the ruins of what was once, and hopefully will be again, a football club. They’re an investment designed to enhance the prospects of Mike Ashley’s considerable portfolio. They’re an advert for Sports Direct. And the Premier League may be lacking many things -- taste, restraint, an adequate drug testing regimen -- but it’s doing just fine for adverts. Ashley’s business plan may need the Premier League’s television money, but the Premier League really isn’t going to miss this sad, strange parody of the real Newcastle United.
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