When Rafael Benitez arrived at Newcastle, the air of optimism was apparent. Despite relegation, effectively sealed when the Magpies failed to score and beat an abject Aston Villa, fans never lost faith in a new dawn for the club.
Perhaps, though, it wasn’t the penultimate game with the pressure on that points to the real Newcastle journey under Benitez, but the next game – the final one of the season – against Tottenham Hotspur. By then, the pressure had gone and the team had been relegated, but the 5-1 spanking of a team who had challenged for the title all season sent a message of “we’ll be back” to the Premier League.
And they were right. A year later, and Newcastle were back in the top division with a shiny Football League trophy under their belts. The problem now, though, is how they treat the experience.
Newcastle are a club the Premier League needs. The big north eastern city is a one club town, and after the relegations of Sunderland and Middlesbrough last year, the area feels underrepresented at the top level. A good season for the Magpies would change that, not that fans of any other side in the area would be cheering that.
But the question will be what is considered a good season. For as long as Benitez stays the manager, the club seem to be on a wave of optimism, and given the size of the club, the aim will always be to climb into the European places – though surely no-one expects that this season.
The problem will come with the potential for tension between the board and the manager. Although rumours that Benitez could be tempted to walk away from the club have died down, they did rear their heads at the start of the summer. Since then, the window has underwhelmed in some quarters, and the manager himself as even claimed he is unhappy with the club’s transfer business. Though it does beg the question of whether the manager would have been happy if he’d captured Tammy Abraham and Willy Caballero, or whether he’d have simply been less unhappy.
That doesn’t bode well, and under the circumstances, conflict looks inevitable, even if it doesn’t result in anything other than some heated discussions in the privacy of Mike Ashley’s office. But it does make you wonder whether this is a difference of opinion on the ambition of the club more than the actual signings themselves.
That may not be a good sign of things to come, but the fact remains that Newcastle have a top class manager and a squad which should be capable of surviving this season in the Premier League. In some ways, that’s not really good enough for a club whose manager’s previous gig was Real Madrid. In another sense, slow and sustained growth is probably the only way of climbing the Premier League ladder these days.
The issue is, everyone has money. When Crystal Palace can spend almost £30m on a striker in Christian Benteke, who was considered a flop at Liverpool just the season previously, you know that just splashing cash isn’t going to get you very far by itself. That presents two problems. One is that everyone now has to spend lavishly just in order to compete (worryingly, though, that’s where Newcastle may have fallen down this summer so far).
The second problem is that good signings alone won’t make for success – if everyone has exciting players, it’s now down to who gets the most out of them. With a manager like Benitez, that’s surely a strength that Newcastle have; something they have over most other clubs in between the relegation zone and the European spots.
The whole scenario plays into the prevailing narrative of a manager who feels as though he needs funds to compete with the other clubs who have splashed cash, and an owner who doesn’t seem to be giving him the proper backing. Whether that’s the whole story remains to be seen, but the optics certainly don’t look good.
But that’s not to say that Ashley and Benitez aren’t firmly on the right course of keeping Newcastle in the Premier League this season and building for an assault on the top seven next season instead.
