I decided to follow Newcastle United on a whim one day around 2003.
I was in the computer lab at school, bored with a writing assignment. The Premier League was hard to watch in rural America at the time, so I’d found myself reading a few blogs instead, inspired by stories from my grandparents recent trip to see family in Morpeth and Bierley (just outside Bradford/Leeds), and in my boredom that day I decided to pick a football club.
I’ve tried to remember my thoughts many times. I’m sure now my memory of the day has been erased by my own attempts to remember.
What I remember is getting it down to Leeds United, Manchester City and Newcastle United, because they seemed like the non-bandwagon teams at the time and I didn’t want to be another American who just picked the obvious football clubs.
I did still want a team that was good — and the fact my grandparents had flown in and out of Newcastle Airport sealed it.
Part of what’s strange about choosing a football club, rather than being raised into one, is the doubt that creeps in.
Am I really a fan? Why did I pick this lot? For me, being part of the Toon Army has been a choice I’ve had to recommit to, over and over. Four times in particular.
Highbury, autumn 2007
The first was at university, when I spent a semester living in Highbury. It was the first time I knew people who watched football and many of them loved Arsenal. My ties to NUFC were weak then. Games were still almost impossible to watch for me (when I was in the United States). I mostly just read a blog, long since shuttered. And I kept thinking “am I really a Newcastle United fan?” as I walked past the Emirates, or listened to the locals sing on their way to a game.
In the end it felt too wrong to switch just because of where I happened to be sleeping that term. And that September I got to see Newcastle United play at the Emirates in the Carling Cup. I was sat with the Arsenal fans as they were all but giving tickets away to fill that huge stadium for a relatively non-important game. Strangely, that night bound me tighter to Newcastle than it ever did to Arsenal even as we lost 2-0. There was a reason that was the game I went to and they were all wearing black and white stripes.
2015/16
The second time I deeply wondered why I was still a fan was our second relegation since the Premier League started. Games had got much easier to watch by then and I lived in a city where most young professional men watched some amount of the Premier League. Watching and talking about football had become part of my life. And then it was gone. Worse than gone. It was still happening and I didn’t have much to say. Championship games weren’t shown here at the time, so even the Saturday morning habit had to stop.
In the end, the old habit of reading blogs kept me going, and we popped straight back up. That was when I started reading The Mag, because the few personal blogs I’d followed when I was younger had all gone quiet.
The end of Ashley, the start of PIF
The third was the end of Ashley’s reign and the beginning of PIF. Watching it was miserable. Reading was depressing. Hope was gone. Those last nine months under Mike Ashley were the most surreal stretch of the lot, because I could feel my own doubts about being a Newcastle United fan reflected back at me in the people writing here. And then hope arrived in the form of PIF, and, to be honest, it took me a while to be OK with that.
For me it was less about what the media was saying and more that I had just stopped working for a PIF-backed start-up, and my wife had recently advised them through her work with the World Bank, feeling weird about being a woman advising the PIF the whole time. I’d spent a few years already wrestling with what it meant to be connected to PIF, and honestly, I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Of the four, this is the one where staying took the most deliberate choosing.
I’d have to dig through the archives of The Mag to find it again, but it was an argument I read here that kept me around: owners will come and go, so why should they get to define the thing I’ll be a fan of for the rest of my life? It was a great point. It helped me carry on.
Now
The last time is right now.
The PIF years have mostly been great for football in my life. My kids started watching with me, partly because we were playing well, partly because they’re old enough now, partly because playing well meant more games and they wanted to hang out with me. Great things.
And through all of it I became a bigger fan. As a sports fan I’ve tended to care about the longer story, so individual people were never the critical part for me. They come and they go. But these last five years changed that. The people were impressive for the first time in a long time, and I got invested in the actual men on the pitch in a way I never had been before.
And now, now they’re all gone.
It’s hard for me to see what I’m a fan of at the minute. A badge? A song? Stripes that keep getting mysteriously thinner? Yes, I know, I’m a fan of the team. But what is the team right now? Many of my favourite players have left and more look to be on their way. To make it worse, I think Eddie Howe feels the same way I do, and he’s gone.
When we play Liverpool, will I be excited to see anyone on that pitch? Will we even play the way we’ve spent years trying to play? What is our identity as NUFC?
And yes, again, these changes happen. Every club goes through it. But this is so much at once, and so much of it with so little sign it’s for good reasons. Maybe in two years we will all be buzzing about the success of this reset. Maybe we’ve got a squad pushing the game forward. Maybe we stop selling people just to hit some profitability number. I don’t know. But right now, I really doubt it.
And that, I think, is the real worry. The leadership doesn’t seem to care to tell us what’s going on. No stadium updates. No clear message acknowledging the hard spot supporters are in. It feels like the days of just a few years back, when we were a club doing the minimum to keep the owner’s investment ticking over. So I have to wonder, is that where we’re headed again, and do I have it in me to be a fan through that a second time?
Anyway
Like every other time I’ve asked myself whether I picked the right team, I’m sure I’ll come out of this one too. I’ll keep opening my phone in the morning and reading The Mag. Because the fact is, I’m a Newcastle United fan because of everyone here. Hearing stories about games played before I was born, living the ups and downs of a Saturday through the words on this site. That has always been enough. It will still be enough.
But still. When we get to spots like this, I do wonder what it would have been like to pick a different fandom. And I suspect I’m not the only one reading The Mag today who feels that way. What can we do but wait and hope for greener pastures?
They’ll come. Right?