The bright hopes of five years ago at Newcastle are fading

Listening to Radio 5 I heard a Newcastle fan seeing the departure of Eddie Howe as a positive move.  My thought was ‘be careful what you wish for.’

Howe may well have run out of steam, but as Alan Shearer pointed out, the timing was odd.  More fundamentally, the strategy of the owners may be changing.

The departure of Eddie Howe is the clearest sign yet that the Newcastle United of the near future is not the one many hoped for five years ago.    Newcastle’s strategy has shifted. Even as PIF remain in situ, the goal of quickly becoming a sustained, dominant force in the Premier League is fading with each day of this transfer window.

Newcastle’s net spend across 2021-22 to 2023-24 was £408m, the fifth-highest in England and ahead of Liverpool and Manchester City. On a gross basis, they were the sixth-highest spenders on players. The wage bill jumped from 12th-highest in the division to eighth.

A fallow year followed before spending ramped up again last season, in what now looks like the final salvo of the post-takeover era. Even with the British record sale of Isak, Newcastle spent £141m net on transfers in the summer of 2025, or an estimated £280m gross, comfortably a club record.

Buying low and selling high is fine for some, but it’s not what was offered in 2021 and it’s not, you suspect, what PIF intended. Last year’s Carabao Cup win was meant to be the start of something, not the high-water mark.

Based on publicly known amounts, only Chelsea and Everton have received more than Newcastle’s £492m in net owner funding since October 2021. That has fuelled the club’s improvement in recent seasons.

PSR has received much criticism from Newcastle fans but squad cost ratio (SCR), which tethers club spending limits to revenues, is even worse for competitive balance. The frequency with which the Premier League’s richest are now pilfering the best players from fellow English clubs is no coincidence.

Inherently, it allows the biggest earners to spend more. Newcastle have narrowed the salary gap, most notably with respect to Spurs and Manchester United, but four clubs still spent over £100m more than them on wages in 2024-25. Clubs trying to locate a seat at the top table find themselves more susceptible to revenue drops when Champions League football is missed, stuck between domestic and continental rules regimes.

Player sales, one way to bridge the revenue gap, are averaged over three years and less immediately effective than under PSR. Newcastle’s revenues are growing steadily, but so are the incomes of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’.

Moreover, Newcastle are now in a settlement agreement with UEFA that aims to reduce those losses. Breaching it confers a European ban. It is a further restraint and while the near-£300million in player sales of the past year will help a long way toward compliance, their margin for error — like, for example, misfiring on big signings a year ago — is much lower than those very clubs they hoped to dislodge.

Revenue has jumped impressively but even more ambitious moves that might turbocharge it, and the club’s appeal, have been lacking.  Five years on, progress regarding redeveloping St James’ Park remains glacial.

Infrastructure investments sit outside football’s financial regulations, so the lack of movement on the stadium cannot be attributed to rules-based fears and actually serve as a restraint in an era where club spending limits are dictated by income. Indeed, Aston Villa, who have frequently danced with the regulatory devil, have shuttered their North Stand for redevelopment and expansion this season, taking a hit to income now in exchange for bigger returns in the future.

 Newcastle have been heavily reliant on their majority shareholder, with injections of equity cash arriving, on average, every five months during the first four years under PIF. Last season, £156.5m was provided (£5m of it to the women’s team). 

There has been no owner funding since the decision was made to pull back from LIV Golf, albeit those big player sales have reduced the club’s cash need in the short term. But it is easy to speculate that a move to a youth-focused transfer model, rather than plug-in-and-play stars, could be linked to PIF’s broader retreat from overseas spending.

Newcastle have shifted strategy, and while there are plenty of reasons for that, there is little evidence the dreams of those 2021 revellers will be realised any time soon.

However, Newcastle have one of the most devoted fan bases anywhere, so one has to be careful not to be too glooy.