There is a particularly telling scene in the new Netflix documentary Sunderland ‘Til I Die in which Martin Bain, the club’s former chief executive, pulls up at a set of traffic lights controlling a busy junction.
As he sits at the expensive wheel of his company car, Bain audibly wonders which way he should go, where on earth does he turn now? That little cameo has greatly amused Newcastle United fans who are delighting in lapping up a documentary revealing the grisly details of their greatest rivals’ plunge into League One last season.
Between the sniggers though comes a reminder that Newcastle, too, are approaching a major crossroads. Moreover they are heading for it in the unnerving manner of drivers blinded by low shafts of winter sunlight.
No one – least of all the manager, Rafael Benítez – is quite sure where this most enduringly dysfunctional club are destined at a time when some key decisions appear overdue.
While Bain’s dilemma at the lights was intended as a metaphor for his deliberations over sacking his then manager, Simon Grayson, uncertainty is anything but a stranger on Tyneside.
At the end of a year in which Newcastle have failed to build on last season’s creditable 10th-place finish, suspicions that renewed takeover talk could prove a cruel chimera are intensifying.
The failure of the owner, Mike Ashley, to bolster an understrength squad last summer seems set to lead to Benítez’s departure when his contract expires in May. Newcastle’s manager prepares his 14th-placed side to face Claudio Ranieri’s struggling Fulham at St James’ Park on Saturday still rankled by the £20m profit his club made during the most recent transfer window.
“There’s no news on transfers – or takeovers,” said Benítez on Friday. “But everyone seems to be buying me hampers and more hampers for Christmas. I get wine – and I don’t drink – and I get chocolate which I eat too much of as it is. So don’t give me hampers, give me strikers!”
The lack of them – not to mention reinforcements at left-back and in the playmaking department – has left one of Europe’s leading coaches firefighting rather than choreographing the top-six challenge he once envisaged.
Now the only realistic hope of the Spaniard extending his contract depends on one of two things. Either Ashley must perform a volte face and spend significantly on players next month or new owners are needed.
Ashley, keen to sell for around £300m, recently made a rare television appearance to announce the club was close to changing hands, with a sale even possible before Christmas. Since then though, nothing much seems to have happened.
Although four groups have signed non-disclosure agreements after expressing interest in buying Ashley out, it is understood none have yet made a formal bid and signed the exclusivity deal that serves as a starting gun to final negotiations and the completion of forensic due diligence. Similarly the Premier League has still to be asked to instigate the checks mandatory before any new owner passes its “fit and proper persons” test.
Of the interested quartet two are United States based, with one consortium fronted by Peter Kenyon, the former Chelsea and Manchester United chief executive and the other by Garry Cook, the former Manchester City CEO.
During an earlier incarnation, working for Nike in the north-east, Cook lived in the Newcastle suburb of Gosforth, gaining an appreciation of the club’s, and, indeed, the region’s rich potential. Little is known of those rivalling him and Kenyon, although one party is believed to be Turkish and the other Middle East domiciled.
Kenyon’s consortium are regarded as frontrunners but, while there was great excitement when Walker Morris, the legal firm acting for him, reportedly cancelled all Christmas leave for solicitors working on the takeover, it appears his investors are struggling to meet Ashley’s financial demands.
With progress slow, Newcastle’s owner has gone abroad for a fortnight’s holiday, leaving Benítez fretting about transfer window planning. The manager remains unsure if his budget will allow scope for breaking the club’s transfer record – the £16m paid to prise Michael Owen from Real Madrid in 2005 – and permit him to sign the 24-year-old, £25m-rated Paraguay and Atlanta United playmaker, Miguel Almirón.
It has left Benítez taking solace from boxsets of his beloved sitcoms. “I enjoy Dad’s Army,” he said. “I love the Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic! [the catchphrase of Lance Corporal Jack Jones] – and Only Fools and Horses is another big favourite.”
Perhaps inevitably, he was asked if he has more money to spend than Del Boy. “It depends which series you’re asking about, the first or the last,” replied a coach who could have done with reinvesting the £22m earned from selling Aleksandar Mitrovic – a striker he did not feel was sufficiently mobile for Newcastle’s counterattacking style – to Saturday’s opponents last summer after an initial loan spell.
Undeterred, the questioners persisted. Had Ashley sent him a Christmas hamper? Cue a big Benítez smile: “I’m so focused on preparing for Fulham, I haven’t had time to check!”
