NUSC Meeting

[Ketsbaia 0]

This been recorded?

 

Yeah, will get it online soon

 

Cheers, Pud.

[AmericanMag 0]

PP, will they be having a transcript/minutes of the meeting?

[peasepud 59]

PP, will they be having a transcript/minutes of the meeting?

 

Something will be pulled together but to be honest, other than listening to the webcast the minutes would be boring

 

For a good idea of what was discussed best checking out http://www.supporters-direct.com for a view of what we are looking at.

 

 

Heres the Times view on it all.

 

Ten months ago, when Dean Windass volleyed Hull City into the Barclays Premier League, football appeared to be consolidating in England's northeast corner. Newcastle United and Middlesbrough had finished just below mid-table; Sunderland, under Roy Keane, were threatening to spend their way into the top half, maybe even Europe. And then the new season was upon us and Hull started winning at places such as Arsenal. How long ago it all seems.

 

Not only have Hull, far from winning humbly at the Emirates Stadium, started losing furiously; all the others clinging to that blowy east coast face a more acute danger of relegation. If we accept that West Bromwich Albion will be the first club to go down, it will be no surprise if the other two come from Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough - and football moves south again.

 

Should we care? There must always be gainers and losers. But geography does matter in that Newcastle, in particular, have become a near-essential element of the soap opera - a likeable blunderer, maybe, a victim even, but a character about whom we care.

 

True, they can no longer be portrayed as everybody's favourite second club, as when Kevin Keegan, under Sir John Hall's chairmanship, produced football that did much to make the Premier League's worldwide reputation for entertainment. The Freddy Shepherd era, featuring six managers in ten years and the miserably mishandled dismissal of the best and best-loved, Sir Bobby Robson, brought disaffection and, as for Mike Ashley, he induces hollow laughter more than anything else.

 

Whatever may have been said about Shepherd and the living he made from the club, he was a Newcastle fan. Ashley has always supported Tottenham Hotspur and scarcely tried, until Newcastle's notional value started falling in tune with the times and their league position, to conceal his concept of the Tyneside institution as an investment-cum-amusement, rather in keeping with his passion for high-stakes gambling. His acolytes' statements no longer cast the supporters as mewling ingrates. But Ashley has ceased to look comfortable in his match-day skin and sooner or later, I imagine, the leper will change his stripes.

 

This week, while Peter Beardsley strove to defend Ashley - “he needs to be given a bit of credit because he's invested in the future,” the maestro turned club ambassador said - something more constructive happened. The Newcastle United Supporters' Club (NUSC), formed when Keegan quit last September and with a membership of 1,000, decided to become a trust, in the long-term hope of buying into the club and entering the boardroom.

 

This, like flying to the Moon, is an exciting idea that struggles with the question of cost. You can buy into football at its lower levels - I used to have a £35 stake in Ebbsfleet United and some Football League clubs are run by supporters' trusts, Exeter City being a splendidly successful example - but the scale of Premier League clubs is daunting, as the group endeavouring to take Liverpool out of American hands has discovered. Liverpool fans appear understandably reluctant to come up with £5,000 each.

 

So, although the trust at Arsenal is said to be intelligently active and others represent fans at Liverpool and Manchester United, they are but tiny fractions of these clubs and, because of the massive levels of debt there (incurred at Liverpool and United merely so that they could be sold not so much down the river as across the ocean), likely to remain so. Newcastle could be different if Ashley were to value the club realistically.

 

For Newcastle are not an Arsenal, let alone a Liverpool or Manchester United. If we view them as a brand, they are very strong indeed locally, like Ajax, Porto, Borussia Dortmund or Athletic Bilbao, but not internationally, like Barcelona, Real Madrid or AC Milan.

 

They cannot sensibly be said to have a value exceeding the £250million that Ashley has paid out because Newcastle are in the relegation zone, lower than when he came.

 

Even if they stay up, there is no reason to believe that income will grow, for the League's television cake, while creditably not to sink over the next few years, will barely rise.

 

Maybe the NUSC members detect an opportunity here. As supporters, while missing the sense of identification their Sunderland and Middlesbrough counterparts have with Niall Quinn and Steve Gibson respectively, they are no doubt desperate to see the team survive.

 

But relegation would drive down the club's value, bringing closer the day when Ashley might accept the desirability of returning it to the care of black-and-white hands.

 

And then maybe a dream evoked by the trust movement, guided by Supporters Direct with the enthusiastic backing of Andy Burnham, an exceptionally football-friendly Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, will come true.

 

A big club in which the supporters truly have a stake, like Barcelona or Real Madrid, here in our backyard; out of the bad times might come good.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/col...icle5946919.ece

[Big Onion 0]

A big club in which the supporters truly have a stake, like Barcelona or Real Madrid, here in our backyard; out of the bad times might come good.

 

If only.

 

Canny piece by Barclay that. I reckon he's got Ashley spot on. I've noticed him and Winter have long been sceptical about Ashley's motives. I remember Winter's refusal to take Ashley's bum-boy Beasley seriously in one edition of The Sunday Supplement had Beasley in a rage. I notice Beasley and Barclay are on this Sunday incidentally.

[Park Life 71]

Liking the trust idea a lot.