Mike Ashley’s great charitable gesture to Newcastle United?
Posted on September 11th, 2011 | 130 Comments |
Dear reader, my estteemed colleague Hugh has already touched on this story earlier today and presented his own viewpoint on the matter. However, I am so incensed that I also feel compelled to register my extreme displeasure at the latest utterings of our unesteemed Managing Director, Derek Llambias.
In case you are still wondering what I’m gannin’ on about, in the responses to Chronicle readers questions on Mike Ashley’s intentions for the club, Derek Llambias responded to “Is Mike Ashley considering putting the club up for sale?” with the quote below amongst other things. At the end of the answer, he wrote:
“I’d like to make a further point here. This club can’t support itself without the financial backing of Mike Ashley; we still rely heavily on the owner. To date Mike has invested over £280m into the club, including £140m in interest-free loans. For him to continue to support the club, he has to be interested and enthused to do so. He deserves credit for his financial support but a section of supporters don’t make him feel welcome at St James’ Park, or when he attends away games. Criticism is part and parcel of the job, abuse is not. This makes life uncomfortable and certainly doesn’t make Mike feel more inclined to put his hand once again in his pocket. That’s not stubbornness, it’s human nature. I think most of us would feel exactly the same.”
Does the sheer gall of this little cipher and his fat controller know no bounds?
From the picture Llambias attempts to paint, it was almost as if Ashley bought Newcastle United and as some kind of benevolent charitable gesture to save the club from the grip of the Byker Beelzebub for the Geordie people, and we have been mere ingrates who have failed to appreciate his wonderful and generous gesture. It is absolute tosh and completely dishonest, as is the norm for Ashley and his Owlheaded henchman. You just have to take one look at what the stadium is becoming to know that previous owner, Sir John Hall was right in what he said in a recent interview. When quizzed on the circumstances surrounding Mike Ashley’s takeover of the club he replied:
“I was told that the man behind the deal was Mike Ashley and I sat with his representatives over three days thrashing out a deal. I was keen to know why they wanted the club and they were quite honest. They wanted to market their sports goods in the Far East and would use the club to help do this.”
Mike Ashley is not a philanthropist by any stretch of the imagination, he is a vulture Capitalist who buys up respected but struggling brands to take them downmarket and distribute through his Sports Direct outlets, and is now using Newcastle United as a tacky billboard to promote Sports Direct to a worldwide audience through the Premiership. He also wants to develop other benefits for himself too besides the usual sources of revenue, ie TV money, gate receipts etc. He is developing a Footballer Farm, where livestock is bought cheap and developed for a few years before being sent to market once again for (hopefully) considrable profit, a Premiership “Feeder Club” in other words. However all of these point to some kind of gain for Ashley in the long term and his purchase was purely a business decision from all angles. This codswallop about Ashley not wanting to buy Newcastle to make money but because he loves football is just pure flannel for consumption by a, hopefully for them, gullible Geordie fanbase.
Vulture Capitalists, as immortalised by the Michael Douglas character ‘Gordon Gecko’ in the film “Wall Street”, see distressed businesses as a way to make millions for themselves, not as charitible projects. Such projects are usually high risk / high gain ventures and Ashley knows this. Yet his cipher wants us to see him as some kind of benevolent saviour, a “Messiah” even because he saved us from the clutches of big bad Freddy, failed to do due diligence on the club and got it relegated though his own mismanagement, ably assisted by his fawning little croupier of course.
He isn’t and if he doesn’t feel “comfortable” with the customers of his football club aquisition, he should know where the door is by now.
Fantastic Article!
Keep em coming Worky!