Why Newcastle United still seem hard to root against

It has been an extraordinary few months for Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which owns the vast majority of Newcastle United. Over the summer, the fund (commonly known as PIF) spent nearly $1 billion to acquire some of the world's best players, from Ballon d'Or winner Karim Benzema at the start of the transfer window to Neymar at the end of it.

PIF signed Sadio Mané from Bayern Munich, Fabinho and Roberto Firmino from Liverpool, N'Golo Kanté and Édouard Mendy from Chelsea, Riyad Mahrez and Aymeric Laporte from Manchester City, Rúben Neves from Wolves, and the promising Gabri Veiga from Celta. Then it handed out extravagant contracts to nearly all of them: $40 million a year to Mané, $647 million over three years for Benzema and, for Neymar, the preposterous annual sum of $300 million, which isn't much less than Newcastle cost PIF to purchase in October 2021.

It was just the kind of spending spree that critics warned would occur after the ownership group, which has strong links to the Saudi state, was allowed to consummate the deal for the Premier League side. With more than $800 billion dollars at its disposal, PIF isn't just the wealthiest entity to own a Premier League club; it controls more wealth than all the rest of them combined.

"That's why the Premier League are frightened stiff of what Newcastle United can do," says Malcolm McDonald, who scored 95 goals for the Magpies from 1971 to 1976 and still lives in the city.

In September, Newcastle played AC Milan in its first Champions League game in two decades, a reward for its sudden emergence last season as England's fourth-best club. But as the starting XI trotted out onto the San Siro turf, not a single one of those star signings was included. The reason? They don't actually play for Newcastle. Mane, Benzema, Neymar, and all those other world-class players had signed with one or another of the four Saudi Pro League teams that PIF controls: Al Ittihad, Al Ahli and Al Hilal and Al Nassr, which had started the spending spree in January by enticing Cristiano Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia.

Instead, outfitted in Newcastle's traditional black-and-white striped strip were ... a bunch of plucky Englishmen. You didn't have to squint hard to envision the contours of a team that previous owner Mike Ashley might have constructed during his 14-year stewardship of the club, if he hadn't been quite so penurious. Some of them were even there when the Saudi group arrived.

"We haven't gone out necessarily and bought the big names and paid extortionate money to players," says Eddie Howe, Newcastle's manager. "We've tried to keep the players that we feel deserve to be here, and a lot of those have long links with the club."

Dan Burn, who started at left back, has been a Newcastle fan since childhood. So has midfielder Sean Longstaff, who joined the club's academy at age 9. (In fact, there are eight lifelong Newcastle supporters in the first team.) The career of Jacob Murphy, the itinerant right winger, resembles a bus tour of the English football hinterlands: Swindon Town, Scunthorpe, Colchester, Blackpool, Sheffield Wednesday, Coventry, Norwich.

While it's true Kieran Trippier and Nick Pope regularly feature for England, and Sandro Tonali (Italy) and Bruno Guimarães (Brazil) were coveted internationals, there wasn't a Neymar among them. "The way they've done it is really clever," says Longstaff. "They've still got a nucleus of lads from England -- lads from the northeast -- to make sure everyone coming in knows how important and special it is to play where we do."

And rather than, say, Jose Mourinho or Carlo Ancelotti, world-class managers with Champions League pedigrees, Newcastle was led by Howe, whose previous career consisted of taking a bunch of scrappy Bournemouth players from League Two all the way to the Premier League. Not only had Howe never managed a Champions League game before; he hadn't even attended one. "The manager here is building a team, rather than just buying up names that will fit the bill in the different positions," explains striker Callum Wilson, who played for Howe at Bournemouth. "Players who understand the way we play.

"They're buying into the culture. And I think you're seeing it working."

Because of the enormous wealth of the ownership group, not to mention the egregious human rights violations by the government of a Saudi Arabian state to which the club is to some extent connected, Newcastle is a natural target for the antipathy of anyone who isn't an actual supporter. "Inside Newcastle, the club's new reality still feels a little like a dream," Rory Smith wrote in The New York Times. "Outside, it has been cast as something far darker."

Newcastle United used to be a team nearly everyone felt fondly about as a manifestation of all that was traditional and local in English football. Even when the club briefly held the world record for a transfer fee, from July 1996 to July 1997, it was because the local shopping mall magnate who had saved them from bankruptcy, Sir John Hall, spent $19 million to bring home Newcastle-born Alan Shearer.

Those feelings ended with the Saudi-backed purchase.

"If you're an intelligent person, it must bother you," Alan Pardew, a former Newcastle manager, told the Times of London. Instead, the club has become "one of the least likeable teams in the Premier League," according to The Athletic's Nick Miller. Even Newcastle itself, The Independent's Miguel Delaney revealed last year, is "fully aware of how hated they are."

But two years into PIF ownership, the club Howe puts on the field still feels like Shearer's Magpies. Watching them at San Siro holding off barrage after barrage by powerful Milan, the storied Italian club that made it to the last four of last season's Champions League, even the assembled Italian journalists found themselves surprised.

Sure, Newcastle had unlimited funds at their disposal, said one of them, who writes for an English-language website that covers Italian football. Somehow, they still seemed hard to root against.

PARIS SAINT-GERMAIN AND RB LEIPZIG BARELY EXISTED when owners with plans for some form of world dominance acquired them. Manchester City had a long history prior to Sheikh Mansour and Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover in 2008 but hadn't accomplished much. By contrast, Newcastle United, the only football club in England's seventh-largest metropolitan area, had a storied past.

The Magpies have spent 91 seasons in England's top tier, winning three titles. Shearer, who scored nearly 50 more Premier League goals than anyone else, starred for Newcastle. So did Paul Gascoigne, aka "Gazza." So did two-time Ballon d'Or winner Kevin Keegan. Over time, the club established a personality, one that fit the chilly, gritty mining and shipbuilding center they call home.

As Newcastle's economic fortunes declined in the late 20th century, the city was left without much it could feel proud about. Its football club, which celebrated consecutive second-place finishes in the Premier League in the 1990s and two trips to the Champions League in the 2000s, provided a welcome exception. "It's way up in the corner of England," Longstaff, who was born in nearby North Shields, says of Newcastle. "It's not the bright lights of London or Manchester. Not a massive city. But football up here is something of a religion."

During the doleful years from 2007 to 2021 in which Ashley owned Newcastle United, he invested comparatively little in the club and their infrastructure. PIF and its partners, the business executive and strategist Amanda Staveley and London's staggeringly wealthy Reuben brothers, inherited the equivalent of "an 130-year-old start-up," quips Darren Eales, who was hired as Newcastle's president in 2022.

Eales had come from Atlanta United FC, the MLS expansion franchise -- he was familiar with start-ups. But really, his job at Newcastle was harder. Atlanta was a blank slate. At Newcastle, there was an expectation of how football should be played: an identity based on effort and tenacity that reflected the blue-collar values of the city. "And we were very careful to make sure, both on and off the pitch, that we stayed true to that identity," Eales says.

Was that really the plan all along? It's hard to know, because Newcastle's rebuild happened as it did mostly by necessity.

When Howe was hired as manager on Nov. 8, 2021, the club sat in 19th place. They hadn't won a game all season. By various metrics, their chances of dropping out of the Premier League were calculated to be 96% or 97%. "We were in deep trouble in the relegation zone," Howe says now. "It was about trying to find the right characters so we could elevate ourselves out of that poor position." That meant adding hard-working players such as Trippier, who seemed to have the grit necessary for a survival battle.

Even so, staying up still seemed wildly unlikely, so any new acquisitions had to be willing to play in the Championship. That ruled out most world-class players. Trippier was at Atletico Madrid, who had won LaLiga in highly emotional fashion the previous year. But his family -- his wife, Charlotte, and their two children -- longed for England, where he had spent his career until 2019. Howe sold him on the collaborative nature of the project he was building. "If you want the club to be, in my view, run properly," Trippier says now, "you can't just go out and start spending whatever on individuals. It's a team sport, and you have to get the right personnel, the characters who fit."

Trippier was a big one. So was Burn, who had emerged as a Premier League standout for Brighton when his boyhood club was purchased by the wealthiest owners in football. News of the sale brought a tinge of sadness. An area resident who had been released by Newcastle's youth academy as a player of no promise at age 11, he had set his sights on getting back.

"When the new owners came in, I sat down with me dad and said, 'There's no way I'll get any Newcastle interest now,'" he says. But Howe figured Burn could be convinced to return home, even if the club's status remained uncertain. He also knew how much Burn would fortify his back four. When Brighton turned down an initial offer of 7 million pounds, PIF came back with a number nearly twice as high. It was only money, after all -- and not even very much of it.

Burn brought to the club a towering presence -- at 6-foot-7, he is one of the sport's tallest defenders -- and an appreciation of what supporters demand, since he had grown up one of them. "They want players who will go out and give absolutely 100 percent," he says. "If you do that and don't get a result, they can accept it. But you have to give that effort. Obviously, when the ownership took over, everyone was expecting these superstar signings, but the way the gaffer likes to play, and the sort of characters he likes in the building, I think it all kind of works together for a place like Newcastle."

Howe himself wasn't necessarily ownership's first choice. If Unai Emery could have been coaxed into leaving Villarreal, the Newcastle United squad would have looked quite different. But Emery was intractable. Negotiations with Paulo Fonseca, who had been managing Roma and is now at Lille, came to nothing, and other inquiries stalled. Howe, whose name was linked with Newcastle even during Ashley's tenure, was unemployed and available. And his remarkable success with Bournemouth gave the new ownership instant credibility.

At the time, Howe had managed more matches outside the Premier League than in it. With Bournemouth, he had taken players of limited ability and taught them -- and motivated them -- until they could compete at the next level, and then the next one, and the one beyond that.

His approach requires playing with intensity; artistry and imagination are optional. "Our identity is intensity," he says -- and he says it so often, it has become the club's unofficial slogan, painted on walls at the training ground. That suits a working-class city. "There's a certain requisite of player, not only in his physical attributes and skill but also in character, who will play that way," says Eales. "And then I think there's an amplification effect to that because that passion, that commitment, that intensity resonate so well with our supporters."

Howe takes pride in his ability to reach his players, calling that "one of the arts of management." Wilson, who was part of Howe's 2015 Bournemouth team that gained promotion to England's top league for the first time in its history, has twice been a beneficiary. When Ashley signed him for Newcastle in 2020, he was what passed for a marquee acquisition; the $25 million fee was the third-highest ever for the club, but hardly market value for a first-team striker in the Premier League. When Howe arrived a year later, Wilson responded as he had at Bournemouth. "He's got a knack for getting everyone to buy in to what he wants," Wilson explains. "The players who don't get it, they get moved on. The ones that stay, you go on a journey together." In 2022-23, Wilson was Newcastle's leading scorer.

In Longstaff, Howe saw the makings of a Premier League regular. He liked how quickly Longstaff absorbed instructions and put them into practice. "He's got a very, very good understanding of how we want to play," Howe says. Last season, Longstaff played nearly 75% of Newcastle's Premier League minutes. So did Joe Willock, a midfielder signed on loan from Arsenal and then permanently in August 2022. In the season that followed, his non-penalty expected goals ranked among the highest of any midfielder.

"Sean and Joe are immensely talented players," Howe says now. "And they are progressing into really fine Premier League players." (Willock, who hasn't played this season because of an Achilles' tendon injury, is expected to return next week.)

Though Newcastle spent more than $100 million in January 2022, half of it went to a single player: Bruno Guimarães. And with Guimarães leading the way after the window, they continued to play more like a team of survivors than a team of stars. The difference was that under Howe, they won: 12 wins from Jan. 22 through the end of the season, and only five defeats. In the end, that was far more than enough. The Magpies not only stayed up, they finished 11th, just outside the Premier League's top half.

And then, to nearly everyone's surprise, they cracked the top four.

NICK POPE'S GOODBYES THIS PAST MAY WERE BITTERSWEET. The first-team goalkeeper, signed from Burnley in 2022, left on holiday uncertain which teammates he would see again. Management had been thrilled by the fourth-place finish. "Ahead of schedule," Eales pronounced, but the summer window would bring new transfer opportunities -- and a new budget. "You figure when you come back there will have been a lot of ins and outs," Pope says.

Instead, Pope was greeted by nearly all familiar faces. At the same time PIF was constructing a fantasy XI and beyond for its Saudi clubs, Newcastle only brought in Milan's Tonali, Harvey Barnes of Leicestershire and Leicester City, and former Chelsea youth player Tino Livramento, who had been playing full-back for Southampton. Allan Saint-Maximin and Chris Wood had transferred out. Mostly, Newcastle stayed with the players who had finished fourth. "I'm so pleased that we kept a lot of the squad together that got us to this point," says Pope. "We have a great togetherness. That's a real strength of ours.

PIF's loyalty is admirable. But in truth, the acquisition strategy probably had more to do with limiting the club's net loss. Watch only a few minutes of Amazon Prime's "We Are Newcastle United," a recently released four-part documentary series, and you'll notice the obsession that both Yasir Al-Rumayyan, PIF's governor and Newcastle's chairman, and minority owner Staveley seem to have with UEFA's financial fair play rules.

Keenly aware that the rest of football already feels threatened by its financial might, PIF seems to be taking pains to strictly obey what has previously proven to be an almost entirely toothless law. Unlike Manchester City, which has been charged with violating financial fair play laws nearly 100 times over nine years, Newcastle has spent slowly and relatively modestly. Real Sociedad's Alexander Isak cost $70 million in 2022, which broke the club record, but the expected nine-digit acquisitions haven't happened.

Instead, Newcastle's future plans are built around growing sponsorship revenue. (Currently, only one of its five biggest sponsors is based in Saudi Arabia. That may change before long.) Revenue matters because FFP only limits how much money you can lose in a given period, not how much you can spend. "Ultimately, the more revenue you have, the more wage bill you have," Eales says. "And as much as you dress it up, there's a direct correlation between wage bill and finishing position."

For now, Howe is right where he wants to be, with a blend of striving overachievers and elite internationals of an ideal temperament. His biggest challenge is keeping them all happy. "You see players coming in for 50, 60, 70 million pounds that want to play every week," says Wilson. "And so do those of us that were already here. That's what the manager has to contend with, and I feel like he's dealing with that the right way." He smiles. "Sometimes at the expense of myself."

Newcastle started slowly this season, losing three early Premier League games before a crucial -- if aesthetically unsatisfying -- win at home against Brentford. That came the Saturday before the trip to San Siro, and it didn't completely quell the sense of unease. "We have to return to our highest level of performance," Howe said before the trip. "I'm very calm in one sense, but also anxious to succeed in another."

That's why the effort at San Siro meant so much. Milan took the game's first 14 shots. Among them was a backheel by Rafael Leão, who had slipped between three defenders. Leão muffed that chance, Pope snuffed several others, and Newcastle gained confidence. Outshot 25-6 in the end, they almost stole a win deep into extra time with their only shot on target all evening, a Longstaff missile that was fingertipped over the bar. They left Italy with a crucial point and an intimation that their luck was set to turn, returned to England and then battered Sheffield United 8-0. Then they outclassed Burnley and drew with West Ham. That has left them in eighth place, only four points out of fourth.

Before the international break, too, the Magpies moved to the top of the Champions League's Group F with a surprising thrashing of PSG at St. James' Park. In a sense, the game could be framed as one nation-state against another: the Saudi investment fund against the emir of Qatar's collection of stars, which included international players from six nations in the starting side. One of the Newcastle goal scorers in the 4-1 win was Miguel Almirón, an MLS breakout signed by Ashley in 2019 who is yet another Eddie Howe reclamation project. Two of the others? Sean Longstaff and Dan Burn.

But whether those players will still be featuring next season -- or even by the end of this one -- remains an open question. Despite all the talk about culture and temperament, the idea that an $800 billion fund will be content to merely battle for a Champions League place year after year seems difficult to accept. PIF has a history of extravagant spending, both for its Saudi clubs and with the LIV Golf League. Newcastle's revenues are up from last year. And now that Newcastle's supporters remember how it feels to be competitive, will they remain satisfied with merely that as the transfer window approaches?

Winning organically, as Newcastle did last season, brought a special satisfaction. But the prerequisite is the winning. "To be honest," says Longstaff, "if they went out and signed the best 11 players in the world and won every week, everyone would love it."

Everyone in Newcastle, anyway.