THRU BLACK & WHITE EYES - Money - 17/Jun/25
Newcastle United are improving their balance sheets by taking more money out of supporters' pockets.
I don’t know how I became someone who spends an inordinate amount of my awakened hours thinking, talking and writing about football and in particular Newcastle United. Many can point to a parent, usually a Dad or older sibling who got them into football and passed down a family tradition. Or it became a means of bonding within a parent-child kind of thing.
I’ve got no one to blame but myself really.
My old man liked football but he was miles away from being a fanatic. He enjoyed the odd game and he took me to the occasional match when I was a kid and hence I became a Newcastle United supporter … I’d liked the Leeds strip and was told I had a resemblance to Allan Clarke on account of a pudding bowl haircut with the same colouring but that whim was short-lived. Our family also kept an eye out for Celtic results and I recall my old man shaking his head at the state of Gateshead FC who he had a fondness for … Callendar Brothers, Redheugh Park et al.
As the football world embraced or created its first pop-star in George Best, El Beatle was ubiquitous in what counted for the media in those days but I drifted towards Newcastle United with mostly everyone else from the council estates of Gateshead.
This week I’ve been thinking more about my formative years following football and my old man’s attitude towards it and how I became what some might describe as a fanatic. Maybe its the days after Father’s Day that provoke a bit of melancholic reflection at a Dad gone for two decades plus. But I do know what his response to being asked to pay £60 to watch a football match would have been. Spoiler alert … he wouldn’t have been running to the Box Office kidding himself he was doing his bit to keep Alexander Isak at Newcastle United.
By all accounts my old man was a decent player, wing-half I believe and I can’t argue that his elevation of playing over watching is completely correct. He could take or leave watching a match and the impression I got was watching any game, World Cup on the telly or a local park game was completely inferior putting a pair of boots on and playing himself. He had it right really.
The most heated arguments I had with my old man were about football. He didn’t like Kevin Keegan at all. He described him as a “hunger shite” aka money-grabber who had left Liverpool for money to go and play in Germany. We went nose to nose in a disagreement over Jack Charlton who I wanted sacked and who my old man defended … now I realise for the Ashington lad’s support for the Miners in the dispute of 1984-85.
He could barely contain his temper at the rumoured amounts of money KK was being paid in the deal with Scottish & Newcastle Breweries and shares of the gate. He was equally scathing of Waddle leaving for Spurs and thought spending £15m on Alan Shearer was sinful.
The older I get the more I have come to share quite a lot of my old man’s world view though I probably lack his conviction. Like him I’ve probably grown more left-wing with the years than less in contradiction of that old cliché I never thought was true.
But here I am … I have the option to pay £60 to see my team, Newcastle United play in the Champions League against … well, I don’t know yet. If I decide £60 to watch a football match is a bit of an obscenity, no-one at Newcastle United will blink. That ticket will be offered on the open market again … probably at a price in excess of £60 and there will be no shortage of takers.
The reaction of some people reading this will be for me to get out of the way, let them in as they are willing to pay the £60, we live in a market economy and its not like a ticket for a football match is one of life’s essentials. They’re right of course even though their logic is cold-eyed, brutal and stripped of all sentimentality whatsoever. I find that thinking a bit depressing but I’m in no position to judge.
I will not pass up the opportunity of watching Newcastle United play in the Champions League. I can afford it and despite a minute’s discomfort caused by my missus saying “how much?” when she checks our bank transactions, I’ll not pass up the opportunity to hopefully see my club create some wonderful moments in Europe’s elite football competition. £60 though? They ‘kin better create some wonderful moments for that wedge. And you see how the price we pay shifts the dial in how we think as customers and not supporters?
It will make me feel a bit tawdry. I know by paying these prices I’m encouraging the suits at SJP to believe the free-market dynamics of supply-demand can be pushed even further, more can be squeezed from supporters and balance sheets will look even better for our Saudi overlords. These prices will be too much for some people though.
And by some people I mean, Newcastle United supporters who have clicked through the SJP turnstiles fortnight after fortnight to watch mediocre football for decades. They will be priced out … just as thousands were priced out when Hall made supporting Newcastle United dependent upon owning a season ticket. That made it very difficult for those in low-paid jobs, students, pensioners and kids like me from council estates fifty years ago, to get to games. I can still reel off the names of Mags I know whose time supporting the club largely ended just as we got going under KK in the 92/93 season. Plenty were ready to replace them.
I’d have been one of those squeezed out, as a young Dad without a lot of dough but for my old man weighing me in as a treat for helping fill in his tax returns (a 15 minute exercise including the time it took to walk to the post box and post it). That was a dance between father and son I look back on with fondness.
Every one of these price increases combined with this desire to create a global support (and I’m okay with lads and lasses coming to the city and supporting the team by the way … they are very different from tourist-fans) pushes the club further away from its core support - namely local, Geordie and working class. I make no apology for my unshakeable belief that Newcastle United is the cap badge of our Geordie identity and representative of the people of the North East. Maybe I am one of those legacy-fans, analogue in my thinking but this is my truth. I don’t think this marks me down as one of those derided “gate-keepers”. I don’t want to stop anyone from going to games … SJP should be a welcoming place for everyone … race, colour, creed, sexuality or disability. And I don’t think the low-paid, unemployed, students, OAPs should be excluded either.
And that extends to the Geordie diaspora and those who fall for the unique charms of our city-region and the folk that live here. This takes a lot of explaining as I know there are some who look to take offence, bend words out of shape and all the rest of that tiresome shit.
If I allowed social media to completely influence me, I’d believe we have a large tranche of supporters who don’t care about this so long as they get in. But I think this still matters to what our club represents … Newcastle United isn’t a brand or a vassal for the Saudi state. It’s about us … you and I … the bairns in the park running around in a replica shirt (or not - it’s not essential). Newcastle United is of and for our communities of the North East - the Club of the North.
There is an argument these price increases are being forced onto Newcastle United by the PL cartel who have weaponised Profit and Sustainability Rules to maintain the status quo. Its a rational argument but the truth is Premier League clubs have been forcing up ticket prices for thirty-odd years, almost at war with traditional working class supporters who have sustained clubs since their formation.
Where will it end? Well the depressing spectacle of the Club World Cup .. Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino might be a glimpse of the future. Grim.
Keep On, Keepin’ On …
Michael Martin. @TFMick1892.bsky.social
Thanks for that lovely piece, Mick. Despite me being older, it’s remarkable how similar our lives were when growing up. For me, born in a council house just a couple of hundred yards from Whitley Bay FC, the Seahorses was the team I truly supported as a kid. Not that I got to see them much as, from the age of 11, I was invariably playing two or three games a week for my school, Whitley Bay Boys Club, and/or North Shields FC. Maybe once this prostate cancer is sorted - and my brain fog hopefully disappears - I could write a little piece for True Faith, how playing football is a million times easier and less stressful than watching it? Too boring? Probably! 😂
Oh, and like you, I don’t care where Newcastle United supporters come from. They might have been born in Timbuktu for all I care. Support the Toon and in my eyes you’re a Geordie. Thanks again for such an interesting piece, Mick. I found it fascinating.
"Weaponised" is precisely the correct word regarding PSR: what started of as a safety-net is now a straitjacket.