You have to accept the very clear and obvious truth – Newcastle United are not a big club… | OneFootball

A message for all Newcastle United fans – You have to accept the clearly very obvious truth that Newcastle United are not a big club…

….We are a MASSIVE club.

Or as Bruno Guimaraes would say – A f…ing MASSIVE club!

It isn’t the events of Saturday 29 March 2025 in Newcastle Upon Tyne city centre that have made Newcastle United a massive club.

The reality is, that as Newcastle United fans, we have always known this.

Especially the older fans knowing fully of this, those with a few more years on the clock and a bit more perspective.

Older fans who got a glimpse of what could be possible if/when the club was run in a professional and ambitious manner with a talented manager, in the Sir Bobby Robson era, the Kevin Keegan era before that.

Some younger fans who had known nothing other than a decade and a half of Mike Ashley rule, where he and his minions were always so keen to tell us that Newcastle United were nothing special, that we should know our place, you could excuse them of having been brainwashed and overwhelmed by the negativity and shame we experienced living under Ashley’s rule.

To the rest of the footballing world, Newcastle United were simply the byword for what a joke football club should look like. A not so hilarious joke for Newcastle United fans but for the rest of the country and especially those the further south you went, great to see us put in our place, not getting above ourselves.

What made it especially galling to see so many unscrupulous journalists shamelessly use Newcastle United fans to blame when Mike Ashley sold to the Saudi Arabia PIF led new ownership, was the fact that they had done nothing across that decade and a half to really expose just what a disgrace it was how Ashley used our football club purely for his own financial advantage. The leech that never stopped sucking the financial benefits out of Newcastle United and at the same time also sucked out all hope for NUFC fans, young and old.

The only expectation was another season of fighting relegation having spent as little as possible to try and cling to another season of free Premier League worldwide TV exposure for Ashley’s retail empire. Or trying to recover from the latest relegation under the Sports Direct supremo.

Yet the London-centric media said nothing, or as close to nothing as it is possible to do.

If Mike Ashley had done what he did to Newcastle United, to instead say, Arsenal, would the media really have stood back and let a decade and a half go by without relentlessly pointing out shameful this all was. A ruthless billionaire becoming a multi-billionaire, largely due to the asset stripping and huge free advertising he extracted from a football club left to rot.

Not a penny allowed to be spent by the football club on its future that Mike Ashley wasn’t forced to allow to be spent.

Not an unforced penny spent on the infrastructure of the club, on St James’ Park and the training ground and so on. Those images of first team players having to use wheelie bins for ice baths, hydrotherapy for the first team in kiddie’s paddling pools.

Newcastle United an absolute laughing stock.

No longer though.

As I said earlier, it isn’t the events of Saturday 29 March 2025 in Newcastle Upon Tyne city centre that have made Newcastle United a massive club

Instead, the 300,000+ Newcastle United fans who turned out to celebrate the Carabao Cup success, are simply a reminder of how MASSIVE this football club is AND always has been.

It isn’t our fault that for the vast majority of our lifetimes the club has been so badly run, whilst other clubs have been the opposite. Whether that has been through a lack of expertise and/or lack of money. Or the ultimate under Mike Ashley, where for those 14+ years you had an owner cynically rowing the club backwards at such a huge key time of unbelievable growth and opportunity with the Premier League, as we saw certain clubs take serious advantage and build themselves into a near impregnable elite grouping when it came to money and power.

The KK and SBR eras gave those relatively brief glimpses for roughly three to five year stretches of just what could be possible, when the huge Newcastle United fanbase was given something ambitious to get behind and unite with a quality manager and group of players.

The time has come now when instead of a three to five year stretch of building towards success, Newcastle United and the fans can now go way beyond that.

What Eddie Howe and the Newcastle United have achieved is only the beginning, winning a single trophy is not the big end game and we can all now sit back and say isn’t this great.

Instead, we have to look to Brentford at home on Wednesday and beginning the job of ensuring that these next ten matches end up with Newcastle United also returning to Champions League football.

The confidence and momentum that finally winning a trophy can give, is massive.

However, finally winning a trophy AND returning to the Champions League (only two years after the last one) would together, be a real game-changer I believe.

It is still a long-term game to be able to do so BUT I think that if we can end this season in the best way possible, whilst at the same time a fair few of the self-entitled elite miss out on Champions League football, then I think we may well look back on this season as the one that really set Newcastle United on their way towards eventually bridging the financial chasm that still currently exists, between NUFC and those who have built themselves into such strong financial positions, whilst all hopes and expectations were buried by Mike Ashley.