[RELEASED] Troy Deeney

Newcastle fans are a bunch of dribblers

 

Apart from the two years they didn't.

 

Was listening to him today and he put one entitled plonker in his place when he pointed out where Boro and Sunderland are, and why do Newcastle fans have an entitlement to be in an even better position than they are, comparable to both of them?

 

Everything is all OK until it isn't though, Newcastle had a bottom half squad last season and a woeful manager, they absolutely could go down this season. In 2019, people outside the club finally came round to the idea that our model works, and look what happened...

 

A long time ago now, but before Ashley took over, Newcastle were pretty regularly in Europe, and with one of the largest fanbases in England, they're always going to generate a lot of money, yet with his general buffoonery they've slipped to the point where survival is genuinely the aim, and they've even failed that twice

Putting aside the fact that the people who call into Talksport are morons, Newcastle are a bigger club than either Sunderland or Middlesbrough, in my whole time watching football, Sunderland have had one season where they've finished in the top half of the Premier League (barely!), but they've had plenty of seasons where they've been an absolute meme, and that was long before Sunderland Till I Die! Kind of similar for Boro, their highs have been obviously been higher, but were they ever anything more than a medium sized club punching above their weight?

 

I don’t really buy into clubs with big fan bases deserving success. If you want guaranteed success as a fan, go and support City or Chelsea. Everyone else should accept they’ve got a divine right to precisely **** all. Enjoy the highs when they come along but don’t take anything for granted.

 

Well, as I say, Talksport has moron fans who say anything, and it all attracts clicks and listeners. I don't really like the term 'big club' as history means little in terms of current achievement, but they generate a lot of money and could very feasibly, without breaking the bank, be a club who competes to finish in the top half and qualify for Europe, rather than a club whose sole ambition is survival. Besides, as has been mentioned before, everything is fine...right up to the point where it isn't

 

They have what, 50k fans? Compared to our 20k, so they probably make (being generous) 4x our PL match day revenue of £9m, so they probably make £30m extra and maybe an extra £10m from plastic overseas fans they may have accumulated from their success 20 odd years ago.

So they would maybe make an extra £40m a year, which is still massively dwarfed by the TV money to the point it’s helpful, but it’s not going to put them in the CL spots, not by a long long way. So to get the success they want, they basically want a rich oligarch or nation state to come along and buy them, which is something I just can’t get my head around or understand.

 

On a completely unrelated note, one thing I noted as the parent of small children was their delight in constantly repeating the same, unfunny, joke, and continuing to find it hilarious. Happily, they matured and grew out of it.

 

They were roughly that far ahead of us in 2018/19 (I'm not sure about the season before last) but that was a high water mark for us given that we finished 11th and reached a cup final. That season they were 10th in the revenue list, about £20m below West Ham in 7th and about £25m clear of Palace in 12th, but when you consider Wolves were below them, Leicester only fractionally ahead of them and Everton not too far ahead, is it any wonder they're pissed off? All of those clubs have more to show for their efforts than Newcastle

 

Will you be talking about this on your Podcast?

 

The key thing there is that Everton, Wolves and Leicester all have very wealthy owners who are happy to pump money in, they haven’t got there off their own a steam so to speak. In fact, relatively recently Wolves and Leicester have not been in the PL at all, alongside traditionally big clubs like Forrest, Sheffield Wednesday etc. They only got where they are because of being bought by wealthy owners, not simply because they’re clubs of a certain size. So I just don’t get the idea any club has the divine right to be successful because they’ve got a lot of fans, or indeed they have the divine right to be bought by a wealthy owner. We can all hope for it as fans, but ultimately its pot luck as to whether a billionaire decides to buy your club, being a big club shouldn’t mean it’s your right for it to just happen and there are plenty of big teams a lot worse off than Newcastle.

 

Ooh! Burn!

Did you make a podcast about being a parent?

 

‘Maybe I’ll give my kid a bath tonight, maybe I won’t. I’ll maybe revisit it in an hour.’ #OneToWatch

 

Of course - it’s a podcast about parenting.

 

Yup. But it’s for adults only. Sorry.

 

There was a period of football history in this country, after the abolition of the maximum wage until the early years of the Premier League (so about 35 years), when the big city teams dominated because their wealth was generated by the number of fans they had. Before that the difference was not so important because the best players could play for any team and get paid the same wage (e.g. Stanley Matthews playing for Blackpool). However, in the 1960-1995 period the difference was not great enough to prevent well-managed medium-sized clubs like Derby, Forest and Ipswich from having significant success.

Nowadays, the size of a club's support is largely irrelevant because of the PL income which, as we have seen, can sustain a relatively tiny club like Bournemouth for a number of years. But the only true success can come if a club has mega-rich owners and they tend to be attracted to well-supported clubs anyway because of the reflected glamour they provide. The logical conclusion to all this is that eventually more and more big city clubs like Newcastle get mega-rich owners and they become concentrated in the PL (no more room for Watford and Brentford). Then they will realise they cannot all be successful at the same time and the debate about having a US-style closed shop 'Major League' will begin.

 

I agree fully that for the next billionaire owner the most logical choice would be a club like Newcastle, least not because from an FFP point of view it makes sense to go for clubs with the biggest potential revenue base, as it will be easier to wash your billions through the club without falling foul of the rules. So I agree it’s probably likely they eventually get bought by one sooner or later.

I just can’t get onboard with their fans entitlement that they deserve it. I also can’t get onboard with the fact so many of them are miserable, just waiting for this billionaire to come along and buy them before they can actually enjoy anything, I mean what is the point?

We’re nowhere near as big or successful as Newcastle, yet as Watford fans we’ve had plenty of high points and enjoyable moments obviously interspersed with low points as well. But it seems Newcastle fans are in a state of perpetual misery, unable to enjoy anything because they somehow feel they deserve to be owned by a billionaire? Why not just support another team, or get into another sport? Or here is an idea, why don’t you just enjoy supporting your team and savour the high points as and when they come along?

 

Yes it's no longer the size of the town/local fanbase, it's all about how much the owner is able/prepared to invest/throw away. Plus of course how well they then spend that money.

 

Deeney has said in his first interview since joining Birmingham that he had 'big clubs offering different options, both home and abroad, but this felt right.'

 

That should put the Geordies fanbase into perspective: it may be geographically huge but outside of the major conurbations (Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesborough and Sunderland) the population density is effectively zero - WH are 'just' one of 13 London teams in the PL or EFL.

 

Listening to this morning's FTRE pod against every fibre of my being to see if they give any proper answers to the questions Leventhal asked for on Twitter last night, and some of the stuff they are saying amidst the hagiography, particularly Leventhal, goes as far as ever in hinting at just how much influence Troy had behind the scenes at the club. It's crazy to hear, and even crazier to think that for most of what they're saying, it's clear that they intend it as tribute rather than tribulation.

 

Today’s learning is that I now know what hagiography means.

 

Can you summarise? I really can't be arsed to listen to it.

 

The podcast as a whole summing up the transfer activity is honestly worse than you would/I did even imagine in my wildest dreams in terms of bootlicking, cracking jokes and making pathetic and insulting excuses that fans asking for adequate defensive cover to be brought in (which was, in summary, almost universal on this forum, no matter how COG or BW aligned the poster) were just being confused by PSG spending loads and saying 'we want to do that too' and Leventhal chuckling whilst being incredibly funny and revelatory by saying 'I'm pretty sure Gino and Giaretta knew their calendar, and when the window ended - they are football people, it wasn't just a mistake'. I'm not really sure how that's supposed to excuse it, or which bank we can take that to when that lack of players costs us wins/points.

Where I have just paused it, he's started down a line of saying 'we have to remember, you can't, you CAN'T have more than 25 players' - when one of his fellow contributors unhelpfully pointed out that we currently have just 23, his sputtering response was first that 'at the MOMENT they have 23, but we can't know what will happen between the time of recording this and when it drops on Thursday morning; they might have secured someone' before immediately following that up with 'but also, you're quite wise to leave a bit of space if you need too' and going on to claim that from 'the researching' he has been doing, you are allowed to bring free agents into your squad, and the Prem only get annoyed if you do that whilst at the same time there are players on the fringes being left out.

So basically, admitting that it would be a good idea to bring someone in and they still might be going to do that (he has absolutely no idea whether that is likely or not, of course - and, indeed, we did in fact not do that) but then also in the very same sentence claiming that it is actually a good idea, and a mark of fine football-people planning from people who do their business properly, not to even have a full squad of players to submit to the league at the end of the transfer window

In terms of the quotes on Deeney themselves, I will go back and transcribe them a bit later so you can read them in their full context.

 

Always a good idea to leave places in your squad for imaginary players.

 

I thought I'd give it a listen just so I had something to come on here and whinge about, but I got a few minutes in and at this point and had to turn it off. There's only so much guff one person can take and I only made it to four minutes I'm afraid.

 

I too listened to the podcast, nothing in the slightest bit insightful. Leventhal not in the slightest bit critical about the lack of investment in the defense, he thinks we are adequately covered when we all can see we are only an injury or suspension to be absolutely not.

Would have liked to have a little insight behind Chalobah and Hughes on the face of it making on the face of it sideways moves with shorter contract lengths, doubt we will ever here any more on this though.

 

What are those clowns on about? We don’t want to spend like PSG. We just want to not prioritise keeping Mogi Bayet happy by using a big chunk of the budget on a 6th choice midfielder and would prefer if those resources were directly to a couple of defensive reinforcements. I imagine if all other transfers were in place, but there was no Louza and instead an extra CB and RB most people would give the transfer window an A grade.

 

Louza is basically an extreme budget equivalent of the Saar signing, we neglected defensive reinforcements back then also, but at least Saar had some obvious quality to offset it slightly.

 

What if a fan displayed a particularly good touch when a ball pinged into the stand during the warm up? If we had a full squad we couldn't even give him a 6 month deal

 

The Josh Morris segment was my favourite part

 

I think we all know that any of us could have written any of AL's articles or hosted one of his podcasts. Or maybe we couldn't have. #onetowatch.

 

I was umming and ahhing about including a mention of it at all because I was dangerously close to my full vexation quota, but I will add that part to the segments I include later this afternoon/evening just for the bants.