Blinkered or bang on view of our finances?

[Happy Face 29]

Young Robin shoved this on N-O. Wondered what the grown-ups thought....

 

How the Geordie Nation turned into a cash cow

 

The Newcastle job has become one of the biggest around after the Halls turned football into regional conflict

 

David Conn, sports news reporter of the year

Wednesday February 8, 2006

The Guardian

 

What is it then about the Newcastle United manager's job, fulfilled until relatively recently by Willie McFaul, Jim Smith and other domestic gaffers, which has become so overblown that the club's chairman, Freddy Shepherd, can describe the St James' Park vacancy as "one of the biggest in world football"?

 

On Saturday, during Newcastle's 2-0 victory over Portsmouth, with Alan Shearer accepting the worship of a 54,000 crowd for breaking Jackie Milburn's club scoring record, a heartfelt rendition of Blaydon Races cascading down from the Leazes End, you could believe the claim. Mass self-delusion this may be but it is a powerful brew.

 

McFaul and Smith, who grew care-worn in the late 1980s trying to keep Newcastle in the old First Division watched by crowds hovering around 20,000, must wonder at the transformation. Its genesis lay in the 1991 takeover by the property developer Sir John Hall, who bought 79.2% of Newcastle United for an estimated £3m after a bitter battle with the patrician former owner Gordon McKeag and installed Kevin Keegan as the manager, reawakening the Toon Army's natural inclination to hero worship. Hall, a national figure at the time and said to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite businessman, hammered the idea that, more than a football club, this was the vanguard of regional revival. "The Geordie nation, that's what we're fighting for" went one choice line of rhetoric. "London's the enemy! You exploit us, you use us."

 

Michael Martin, the editor of the True Faith fanzine, recalls his own Geordie blood stirring as Keegan's rejuvenated side galloped into the breakaway Premier League. "John Hall tapped into something latent, the pride and the apartness of the north-east. Newcastle was depressed; industries like mining and shipbuilding had been destroyed. We bought into the idea of the club as the flagship of revival."

 

Membership of Hall's Geordie Nation came at a cost, in hyperinflated ticket prices, with bonds at £500, season tickets on credit from the club at 19% APR and at Newcastle, like no other club, replica shirts were adopted as required uniform. When the fans in black and white stripes rise to acclaim their team in the expanded St James' Park the Toon Army becomes a living symbol of modern football: a giant barcode.

 

Hall promised to invest the money in the team and, after Keegan's infamous crumble in 1995-96, Hall unveiled the £15m signing of Shearer, the Geordie talisman. Eight months later payback began for the Halls. The north-east's warrior football club was floated on the London Stock Exchange, after which the Hall family company, Cameron Hall Developments, still owned 57%. It turned out that the Halls had put money into the club only as loans and the new money raised by the float - much of it from fans who immediately lost fortunes as the share price fell - went partly to repay the Halls.

 

Shortly afterwards Sir John Hall retired to spend much of his years under a non-Geordie sun, in Marbella. He left Cameron Hall and the club to his son Douglas to run. It was not long before Douglas and Freddy Shepherd, then a director and less well-known minority shareholder, became the first football victims of the News of the World's dressing-up cupboard, bragging to an "Arab sheikh" in a Spanish lap-dancing bar about the Toon Army's gullibility in buying replica shirts and calling Geordie women "dogs". The grossness of that boardroom image soured a mood already in a post-Keegan hangover, as Newcastle twice finished second in the Premiership then laboured prosaically under Keegan's successors, Kenny Dalglish and Ruud Gullit.

 

The Halls had pledged to the City not to sell any shares until late 1998. That December, as soon as they could, they did, selling 6.3% to the cable company NTL, making £10m. Not widely noticed then was that the Halls had agreed to sell out completely should NTL bid for the whole club, which would have made the family a further £79m. It did not happen but the following year the family sold a further 3.26% of the Cameron Hall holding to NTL, making £5.28m. Douglas personally sold a stake for £637,516.

 

The Halls had taken over Newcastle just a few years earlier, in an era when businessmen were still hailed as philanthropists for buying into football, and they have gone on to make massive money out of the club. The plc has declared a dividend every year after flotation worth millions to the major shareholders, the Halls, and Freddy Shepherd and his brother Bruce, who have steadily increased their holding. More recently, Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall have earned prodigiously as directors from their salary packages.

 

Remarkably Cameron Hall, which seemed to bestride the north-east in Sir John's heyday, has slunk into a comparative wreck, making huge losses in 2000 and 2001, which they staunched by selling property. The football club seems to have changed from being a Hall marketing tool to the family cash cow. In June 2003 the Newcastle board announced that the club itself was buying some Hall family shares, paying £4.5m. Cameron Hall's accounts that year showed a loss of around £3m; the latest accounts, for 2004, are late.

 

Douglas Hall has moved his residence off shore to become a tax exile. He is paid his half-a-million-pound salary package via a club subsidiary, Newcastle United (International) Ltd, registered in the tax haven of Gibraltar. His own tax planning accountant, Timothy Revill, who is based in Gibraltar, is a director of Newcastle United plc. Revill chairs the remuneration committee that determines Hall's salary.

 

At any other club you would expect more of this to be known. At St James' Park, Shepherd has won himself some credit by staying stubbornly put and insisting that he wants only to make the club successful. You get the sense that the financial mining of the club does not matter that much to too many fans. The Toon Army - apparently ageing like elsewhere as a generation has been priced out - seems still largely sold on the idea a huge part of their regional identity is wrapped up in the club. They are desperate for some success on the field to justify the journey.

 

That is why the job is so big. Any manager prepared to take it on will carry the wider hopes and historic frustrations of a powerful human soundbite called the Geordie Nation. That is pressure but it is also a major attraction. For anybody able to win something, anything, adulation, of Shearer and Milburn proportions, awaits.

 

david.conn@guardian.co.uk

 

From big spenders to big earners

 

Since Newcastle United were floated on the Stock Exchange in April 1997 the Hall family and Freddy Shepherd have earned from the club as follows:

 

Sales of shares by Cameron Hall, Sir John and Douglas Hall's company:

 

December 1998 Sold 6.3% to NTL: £10m

 

December 1999 Sold 3.26% to NTL: £5.28m

 

December 1999 Douglas Hall sold 0.39% to NTL: £0.57m

 

June 2003 Sold 11.4% to Newcastle United itself: £4.5m

 

Total earned by Hall family in sales of Newcastle United shares £20.35m

 

Sales of shares by Freddy Shepherd Nil

 

Shepherd and his brother, Bruce, have increased their shareholding, via their company, Shepherd Offshore, from 7% at the time of flotation to 28% now

 

Dividends paid by Newcastle United plc to shareholders 1998-2005

 

Total to Halls: £13,698,280

 

Total to Shepherds: £5,489,239

 

Salary packages paid

 

Year Hall Shepherd

 

1999 £23,533 £23,533

 

2000 £35,000 £75,000

 

2001 £110,000 £232,868

 

2002 £524,257 £591,639

 

2003 £591,667 £668,920

 

2004 £635,465 £717,145

 

2005 £495,951 £552,954

 

Total £2,415,873 £2,862,059

 

Totals made from Newcastle United

 

Sir John, Douglas and Cameron Hall: £36,466,153

 

Freddy Shepherd and Shepherd Offshore: £ 8,351,298

 

Total £44,817,451

 

Figures compiled with assistance of Ian Ferguson from www.nufc-finances.org.uk

[Renton 22001]

I saw that on N-O. Main impressions are it has a few innaccuracies and its pretty patronising. It's largely correct though unfortunately, at least about the finances if not this Geordie Nation bollocks.

[Happy Face 29]

I thought 90% of it was bollocks. Raking up old shit for no reason.

 

I think it is reasonable that the Halls have taken £36Million from the club. 15 years after having taken a large personal risk I'm happy with the fact they've seen a healthy return on their vision. On the whole I think I've got good value for what I've paid in those 15 years.

 

The only thing that gall's me is that they have surely taken what they're due now. The ongoing earnings of Shepherd and Hall are way out of line with their performance.

Edited February 8, 2006 by Happy Face

[Guest alex]

Read it on N-O and it's quite interesting without revealing too much that I didn't already know. It galls me when a professional journalist can't even get our attendance/ground capacity correct though. Makes you wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.

[LeazesMag 0]

Read it on N-O and it's quite interesting without revealing too much that I didn't already know. It galls me when a professional journalist can't even get our attendance/ground capacity correct though. Makes you wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.

90830[/snapback]

 

typical southern propaganda by a probable cockney manu supporter or similar who just delights in running us down, because they are shit scared of us getting the manager we will one day get and give them all a good hiding, and dwarf all of their "big clubs"

 

Wanker.

[Renton 22001]

Read it on N-O and it's quite interesting without revealing too much that I didn't already know. It galls me when a professional journalist can't even get our attendance/ground capacity correct though. Makes you wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.

90830[/snapback]

 

typical southern propaganda by a probable cockney manu supporter or similar who just delights in running us down, because they are shit scared of us getting the manager we will one day get and give them all a good hiding, and dwarf all of their "big clubs"

 

Wanker.

90835[/snapback]

 

That's a bit paranoid to be honest, but they love patronising us.

 

Btw, I spotted that you're NE5 over on N-O, the use of Rose-tinted glasses gave it away!

[Guest Sima]

Read it on N-O and it's quite interesting without revealing too much that I didn't already know. It galls me when a professional journalist can't even get our attendance/ground capacity correct though. Makes you wonder how accurate the rest of the article is.

90830[/snapback]

 

typical southern propaganda by a probable cockney manu supporter or similar who just delights in running us down, because they are shit scared of us getting the manager we will one day get and give them all a good hiding, and dwarf all of their "big clubs"

 

Wanker.

90835[/snapback]

 

Southern media are paranoid against us

 

Bit paranoid there tbh.