Who are Newcastle United?

So, done again. Liverpool have gazumped Newcastle United to the signing of Victor Munoz.

There is a predictable meltdown going on about this of course, as it could be interpreted that Anthony Gordon has been let go with a replacement lined up who has now decided to go to one of our wealthier, more established rivals in a stinging echo of last summer’s disastrous window.

Easy to bemoan that nothing has changed and another two months of misery lies ahead, before we kick off the new season with a woefully undercooked squad that shows no hope of improving on last season’s miserable position.

Sandro Tonali being genuinely linked with regularly 17th place finishing Tottenham Hotspur does not help.

In reality, I don’t think anyone at Newcastle United can be blamed for the Munoz thing. It was the right calibre of signing – emerging, unproven, with bags of potential – for Newcastle to target having messed up last summer by competing for Champions League level players and getting repeatedly outmuscled. It’s possibly a little baffling that Liverpool have jumped in here, given the options they have on the left of attack, but the paranoid android in me can’t help but wonder if this is a tactic driven by keeping Newcastle United down.

In January 2022, Newcastle signed Bruno Guimaraes despite Arsenal having had a sniff around the player and deciding not to act. Bruno swiftly became the talisman of an emerging team that intruded on the Champions League places (and cash) twice in the next three seasons and even took one of the trophies the big six like to keep locked up.

Suddenly United had the financial capability to compete to a certain extent and the competence to translate that into a genuine on-field threat. Last summer we lost out on Joao Pedro to Chelsea, James Trafford (Man City), Benjamin Sesko and Bryan Mbuemo (Man Utd) and Hugo Ekitike to Liverpool, who rubbed that right in by snatching our own star player. I wonder how many of these actions were escalated to some extent out of fear of Newcastle United getting another Bruno effect and snatching more of their precious prize money.

At the end of the day, that is what it all comes down to – money.

For all the bluster of certain players having dreamed of playing for Man Utd/Liverpool since they were a child, any transfer is driven and largely decided by the agent, and the only factor in their decision is cold hard cash. If you’re being objective, you’d have to see the viewpoint of someone with zero emotional connection, moving abroad and being offered more money to do the same job and ask yourself what you’d do in those circumstances?

This is where the glass ceiling feels like it has been reached. Right now, in the murkier parts of the internet, people will be screaming and gurning about a lack of ambition, or how Newcastle United need to develop an “elite mindset”. Yet again, I will present these facts:

In the 2026 Deloitte football football rich list (covering the accounts of the 2024/25 season) published in January, Newcastle United have a total revenue of €398.4m. Decent, in fact the 17th best in the world, but compared to our peers? Liverpool’s 836.1m dwarfs our total, whereas the closest “rival” is Chelsea with a mere €584.1m.

Top 20 Revenue-Generating Football Clubs (2024-25)

All figures shown in Millions/Billions Euros (€). Source: Deloitte / PA Graphic. Best viewed in landscape on mobile.

Translating into pound Sterling (at today’s 18 June 2026 exchange rates), this is how much more turnover each of the establishment six have recorded than Newcastle in this years accounts:

Newcastle United £345m
Chelsea £505.8m (+£160.8m)
Tottenham £582.4m (+£237.4m)
Man Utd £686.8m (+£341.8m)
Arsenal £711.6m (+£366.6m)
Liverpool £724m (+£379m)

So, the red cartel basically each have double our amount of money to play with. Of course they do, they’re never off the TV, they have millions of sycophantic followers all over the world and even their stadia are bigger and more equipped to generate cash than ours. This translates to paying double the wages, double the transfer fees and basically having the carrot of coming into a team of the world’s highest paid, and therefore best, players as a result. As long as SCR (Squad Cost Ratio), PSR, or whatever comes next is in place, this gap is insurmountable and no amount of ambition, “elite” thinking, or screaming down the camera is going to bridge that gap.

Growing the international fanbase and worldwide appeal is a way to start clawing back that deficit, but often that brings naive attitudes. I’ve seen people online saying to pay, say, Marcus Rashford’s wages/transfer fee with justification along the lines of “he elevates the club, and teams with ambition sign top top players”. Yes mate, he’d also bankrupt the club, and teams with ten point deductions and transfer bans for breaching the rules sign no one for three windows.

I honestly think there’s a question at the heart of all this: who are Newcastle United and who do we realistically want to be?

Let’s start with who we actually are.

Right now there will be the usual online yawn about our place in the food chain behind the above clubs. While this is accurate financially (as illustrated), in terms of heritage and stature we are one of England’s biggest clubs. This is helped by the fact that one of our founder clubs collapsed meaning we enjoy a one club city status that most don’t have, but historically we have always been highly relevant, with our 94 top flight seasons the 7th highest above both Spurs and Chelsea. Winners of all the major English cups and a European trophy still has us ninth in the list of successful clubs, despite our barren years between 1969 and 2025. We’ve never been outside of the top two divisions (one of only 8 clubs who can say this) and our only seasons outside of the Premier League since it’s 1992 inception have seen the Championship title won. Our crowds have consistently been at the top end of the scale and we have a strong identity representing a major English city.

Given everything above, what then can we expect to be, or aim to achieve in the near future? The unknown is whether various charges and court machinations might allow the PiF to strap a rocket to us, as Abramovich and Abu Dhabi did with Chelsea and Man City respectively. Failing this, I’d say we need to accept being the best we feasibly can.

For me, this means an expectation of Europe every year. The par should be the Europa and the stretch the UCL. Failing to qualify, like last season, is a woeful underperformance. As and when we do land a Europa or Conference league spot, the ambition should be to win it, and any such victory would be widely and rightly celebrated across Newcastle in the same way the Carabao Cup was not so long ago. The domestic cups should continue to be taken extremely seriously, and I’d expect that another League Cup win sometime soon is well within our capabilities at least. The FA Cup is more competitive but not impossible, whereas under current restraints competing for the league title or the Champions League is just not possible.

All of the above is the stuff of dreams when compared to the austerity of the Ashley era.

Trophies, European adventures and a sense of pride in our club and city is what Newcastle fans have always wanted. However, there is a growing element of football fandom that will think this lacks ambition. I’d love to think our ambitions can grow, but everyone needs to accept the seismic shift that is needed to make this a reality. A new stadium and some wiggle room on those spending restrictions are the two pillars that need to fall for David Hopkinson’s 2030 vision to become anything like realistic.

All of this underpins the disappointment currently being felt. A rotten season with some embarrassing performances exacerbated by transfer humiliation that now threatens to repeat itself. I have said previously that a jaded looking Eddie Howe may well have taken this club as far as he can, but I absolutely do not subscribe to the view that removing Howe is a silver bullet to propel us to the Premier League title. The next manager would have the same restrictions on spending and the same challenges on squad building that Howe has experienced, irrespective of his so-called “pull”. To think otherwise is being wilfully ignorant of readily available facts.

We all have fear that the regression of last summer cannot afford to be repeated and the Munoz business is understandably ominous in that sense. For me this is offset by a hope that the structure we now have in place will recover and move forward from this in the ample time we have left. I also hope that a manager who has delivered massively for us in the past can recover from a poor performance and regain the momentum that delivered some of my best moments as a fan. I don’t care about being right (which seems to be the main motivator for some) I just want the best for the club and to enjoy more good times as part of Newcastle United. Because that’s who we are.

You can follow the author on BlueSky @bigjimwinsalot.bsky.social

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