The proof of how Mike Ashley ruined Newcastle United | OneFootball

Mike Ashley has a lot to answer for.

I know I am preaching to the converted here, but when it comes to outsiders, it can be a very different matter.

Mike Ashley cynically used Newcastle United purely for his own personal benefit. A billionaire when he took over the club, a multi-billionaire when he left, with NUFC playing a key part in that increase in his personal wealth.

Most Premier League owners look for as many ways as possible to give their football club as many benefits and cash as possible to push it forward, using the rest of their business empire. Mike Ashley the exact opposite.

It doesn’t mean these other club owners are kind philanthropists, quite the opposite in most cases!

However, they see building up the wealth and power of their football club as the best way of extracting the best possible financial rewards long-term. Whereas Mike Ashley asset stripped and used Newcastle United to promote his business empire around the globe, for so many years, for free!

This meant that when the Newcastle United takeover happened in October 2021, the new owners took over a shell of a football club, ran by a skeleton staff, with not a penny spent on the infrastructure of the club that Mike Ashley hadn’t been forced to spend.

In 14 seasons where we kicked off under Mike Ashley, in the 12 of them in the Premier League he relegated the club twice and he was overseeing a third one for sure until the takeover saved us.

Outsiders mocked us and told us this was our natural position, as Newcastle fans we were supposedly deluded to expect more.

Is that really true though.

This is the record of Newcastle United in the Premier League era, from the first season when NUFC competed in it after promotion in 1992/93, the placings in the Premier League table.

Sir John Hall / Freddie Shepherd era

3, 6, 2, 2, 13, 13, 11, 11, 4, 3, 5, 14, 7, 13

Mike Ashley era

12, 18, Championship, 12, 5, 16, 10, 15, 18, Championship, 10, 13, 13, 12

Consortium era

4, 7

So in the Hall/Shepherd era, Newcastle finished top seven, in eight of the 14 seasons.

In the 14 seasons we kicked off under Mike Ashley, only one Premier League top seven finish.

Under the new/current owners, two out of two.

So either side of Mike Ashley’s reign, 10 of 16 seasons finishing top seven in the top tier, as opposed to one in fourteen when kicking off the seasons under him.

Indeed, if not for massive blunders in appointing Kenny Dalglish and Graeme Souness, that ruined the Kevin Keegan and Sir Bobby Robson legacies respectively, I think we could have been looking at a near permanent place in the Premier League top seven in the years without Mike Ashley.

Like pretty much all of you, I know the potential of this club is massive, what it could become. However, at the very least, I know for sure that if anybody is talking about Newcastle United’s natural place in the scheme of things, top seven in the Premier League is where we should be for sure, for all but the odd season potentially.