This is supposed to be fun

YOUSEF HATEM looks ahead to 2026/27, and gets some things off his chest.

I’m excited for the new season.

Matthias Jaissle (incidentally, I’ve found the easiest way to learn the pronunciation is to rhyme it with the word “nicely” as voiced with the broadest of Yorkshire accents) isn’t one I saw coming. I’d never heard of him. Looks like a cross between Duncan Ferguson and Danny Dyer. So we’ll either be hard as nails or we’ll pretend we are. Either way, it beats being soft as shite, which is what we’d become, especially away from home. Not sure what vertical football is supposed to be. Is it just a canny rebrand of “hoofing it”? Let’s see. Anyway, in the short term if it means we plan to boot Alex Isak’s arse so high into the Tyneside air that he is impaled on the lantern spire of St Nick’s, then I’m here for it.

I don’t know anything about the five lads who’ve joined us, besides what I’ve been told since we signed them. Puts me in a club of hundreds of thousands. Maybe they’ll be more than adequate replacements for the ones we’ve sold. More likely, they won’t be. They’ll wear black and white so I’ll support them, will make up my own mind whether they’re mint or dogshit or somewhere in between, and then will keep on supporting them anyway. It’s exciting. It’s going to be fun finding out. And this is supposed to be fun, right?

Right?

Yes, right.

Actually, I was asked to pull together an article offering a legal perspective on why Chelsea have escaped a points deduction for improper payments to agents, whereas Everton and Forest got points deductions for failing to comply with FFP, PSR, SCR, QVC, PMS or whatever three-letter acronym it was. Long-time readers may know I’m a lawyer and I have written for True Faith about legal matters before, hence the request. So here goes.

The FA and Premier League have free rein to decide what sanction they want to impose in each specific case (complete discretion, unlike - say - criminal courts, who have to comply with sentencing guidelines, or civil courts, who are required to act on a compensatory basis). And, in any case, decisions of the various FA and Premier League panels and appeal boards do not set legally binding precedents, nor can they be appealed to the courts, and nor can they be the subject of judicial review, as the FA and Premier League are not public authorities. We can, of course, point to inconsistencies between decisions, but nothing that legally goes anywhere.

The Chelsea decision is - pardon the legal jargon - utter bollocks. Chelsea were spared a points deduction by the FA Appeal Board on the basis that the improper payments to agents happened under Abramovich not Boehly (irrelevant: a football club, like any company, ought to be regarded as distinct from the individuals running it), and it was not clear that Chelsea had in fact benefited from the payments (absurd: why bother making them?), whereas points deductions were seen, by the Premier League, as essential for both Everton and Forest due to their breaches conferring a clear sporting advantage.

One might well point to the fact Chelsea have been inordinately successful during a period in which Everton have been a running joke, and Forest have won nothing since the Zenith Data Systems Cup in 1992. One might also tentatively suggest that routinely paying wads of cash to shyster agents is more egregious behaviour than failing to add stuff up on a calculator properly. But why bother? I mean why fucking bother? Who cares? What’s any of it got to do with why we support a football club?

I’ve switched off. I may be able to understand and explain some of this stuff - so I hope the above is of some use to those who care - but I’m losing the inclination to do either. I’m done treating Big Football with a degree of grave, forensic seriousness it does not warrant. In fact, I can no longer be arsed with Big Football at all, besides watching the sport itself, and taking an interest in what Newcastle United actually do on the pitch.

I don’t care what our crest looks like, and I am absolutely not going to analyse anything attributed to David Hopkinson in order to determine whether he vomited it out, or shat it. (I’m not aware of a third option). It has been blissful not to have been on social media for the Bruno G “saga”. I am old enough to remember when we knew nothing of a transfer until it rocked up on Ceefax, then it was back to playing Bamboozle. We wouldn’t even have known of the machinations, counter-machinations and adjacent horseshit preceding an actual transfer, until a forgettable autobiography fifteen years later. It was better. It is better.

For what it’s worth, I adored Bruno G. Inspired us to actually win a trophy, and pretty much kept us up last season. Moreover, he thoroughly embraced the North East for what it was and is, and I always love it when incomers do that. Not enough do, and I’m not only talking about footballers. It’s also why I had so much time for Juninho, although he was never our player.

The transfer system is a joke, and in an age of PSR and all the rest of it, transfer fees no longer serve their original purpose of compensating the selling club. Footballers - like any other workers - should move jobs if they want to do so. If money is the reason then so be it, and if it means a player agitating for a move against the wishes of his employer then, again, so be it. Player behaviour may leave a sour taste, but, far from preventing that behaviour, the archaic transfer system fosters and encourages it. I’d get rid of it all and start from scratch, but that’s for another article.

For me, Bruno G is a bona fide Newcastle United legend and always will be. Neither the circumstances nor the manner of his departure affect that one bit. I’ll probably be in the minority. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Back to the beginning, though. I’m excited to see the new lads play. I won’t be at the Liverpool game, I’ll be on holiday in Japan. It seems that the Tokyo Mags meet at the Second Half pub in Takadanobaba. Kicks off at 12:30am local time, and it’ll end around 2:30am (or perhaps closer to 3am to allow Liverpool time to score a winner). No public transport at that hour in Tokyo so I’ll probably spend an hour or two in a nearby 7-Eleven eating spicy seafood-flavoured snacks until the trains start running. If that’s not what supporting a football club is about then I don’t know what is. I can’t wait. And, as ever, I can’t wait to go to whatever matches time and family commitments allow, home and away, and to enjoy those days for what they are.

Up Matty’s Mags!

YOUSEF HATEM