Why NUFC couldn’t afford to appoint anybody else

By The Northern Philosopher
May 1 2006

Submission from 'The Northern Philosopher' titled, "Glenn Roeder: Why Newcastle United couldn’t afford to appoint anybody else."

Glenn Roeder: Why Newcastle United couldn’t afford to appoint anybody else.

 

"This will be one of the most important decisions ever taken at this football club, for we are entering a period in the game when the leading clubs are opening up a larger and larger gap between themselves and the others - and we have to maintain ourselves as one of those leading clubs.”

 

-         Freddie Shepherd speaking in his program notes before the visit of Spurs.

 

Newcastle supporters must have read the above quote from the Chairman with a mixture of hope and cynicism.

 

All fans of Newcastle United must have hoped that in saying this, Freddie Shepherd was acknowledging that the club needed a top class manager to finally take us in the right direction. Indeed, Mr Shepherd gave the fans plenty to encourage them that this was the case; he assured us that a long list of ‘high calibre’ and ‘exciting’ candidates were interested in the job. Speculation as to the identity of these ‘exciting’ candidates was huge. Was it Mancini or Houllier, Hitzfeld or Allardyce, O’Neill or Bruce, Curbishley or Koemen? Just who had sent their CVs along to Saint James’ Park?! It was at this stage that an equal if not superior amount of cynicism kicked in.

 

A lot of the fans have stopped believing anything that Freddie Shepherd says and when they heard him this time they just thought it was more of the same. They pointed to bad managerial appointments Shepherd had made in the past, most notably Souness, and told us to expect more of the same. This was all just flannel, said the cynics, designed to keep an impatient set of supporters happy. 

 

Now it looks as if Glenn Roeder is going to be the next manager of NUFC and how have the two groups taken the news? Well, I think it’s fair to say that very few fans are devastated by the news of Roeder’s impending appointment as manager. No one can argue that Roeder’s record in charge of the Magpies isn’t impressive, both in terms of results and in the manner in which they’ve been achieved. Even more impressive is how he achieved those results without any opportunity to sign players of his own and how he’s coped with major absentees such as Owen, Taylor and Parker. I also think that most fans realise that Newcastle could do far worse than make Roeder their next manager. But the fact remains there’s still some discontentment as to why Roeder looks the favourite to be appointed.

 

The people hoping to see a bigger name checking into NE1 felt disappointed and cheated; they wanted to see someone with a better CV and a bigger profile get the job especially after what Shepherd had said. Roeder was just a bit of a letdown particularly when the media had told us to expect the arrival on Tyneside of names such as O’Neill and Hitzfeld.

 

The cynics, who had always been expecting somebody more low key, weren’t surprised when Roeder became the chosen man, but they were still disappointed. After all, the people hoping for a big name manager and the ones being cynical about the chances of one being appointed weren’t distinct groups. Plenty of fans belonged to both of them; that is they hoped for a big name manager but didn’t expect to get one.

 

I think the cynics are disappointed because they feel that Freddie Shepherd hasn’t thought enough about what kind of manager Newcastle really needs. They think either Freddie doesn’t know what type of manager we need or just doesn’t care. A lot of them, either out of distrust of his ambition for NUFC or whatever, also think that he was never likely to appoint a good enough manager because he doesn’t have the footballing knowledge needed to do so.

 

The fans hoping for a bigger name with a better CV than Roeder’s were disappointed for the things I’ve already mentioned and because they want to see Newcastle do well. Many supporters do feel that for Newcastle to succeed what it needs is a big name manager who can attract big name players to the club. Glenn Roeder just isn’t a big enough draw, they say.

 

What I want to say to these two groups, the hopeful and the cynical, is that I think that they’re both wrong. Wrong about the reasoning behind the Chairman’s decision to appoint Roeder and wrong about what type of manager Newcastle United needs at the moment to help us succeed.

 

RESPONSE TO THE CYNICS

 

To the cynics who see the appointment of Roeder as being just another sign of Shepherd’s ineptness at choosing managers, I say, look at this article’s title. I genuinely don’t believe Newcastle United could have afforded to appoint anyone else but Glenn Roeder. The club is already slipping way behind other big clubs, this term we’ve even slipped behind mediocre teams like Spurs!  We couldn’t afford to slip even further behind our rivals; we needed to appoint a manager as close to a dead cert to succeed as possible. In the absence of a fully functioning crystal ball Roeder is the closest thing to a dead cert we’ve got.  The fact is that another year or two in the wilderness, not finishing in the top six never mind not winning a trophy, would hurt this club big time, financially and in terms of profile and big players wanting to leave. The Chairman knows this and realised that he just couldn’t risk appointing a manager who wouldn’t do as good a job as Roeder was doing. He couldn’t risk appointing a manager who might ignore or want to sell the good players already at the club in order to spend millions on his own bunch of players. He couldn’t risk appointing a manager who had no knowledge of the club or how high supporter’s expectations were. Finally, he couldn’t risk appointing a manager who would waste millions on attempting to buy success instead of working with players already at the club. Glenn Roeder’s approach to the game, performance and his comments have already made it plain that in appointing him Freddie Shepherd would be risking none of these things.

 

Well, say the cynics, if Shepherd was looking for a dead cert then why not just appoint a top manager to the post, he did say top managers wanted the job after all? Let me start by saying that there is a gap between how big a draw we fans think this club is to managers and how big a draw I believe it actually is. To be honest part of the blame for this misconception has to be levelled at the Chairman and him saying what a big job managing Newcastle is, but, to be fair to him; it’s not all his fault. We fans obviously view managing our club as being the biggest and most important job in the world. Financially speaking, Newcastle is one of Europe’s top twelve richest clubs and has been for awhile now even without the extra revenue Champions League qualification brings. But I believe that there is a large discrepancy between how big we are financially and how big we are in footballing terms.

 

Below is a list of the 11 teams ranked above Newcastle in the recent rich list:

 

Real Madrid

Man Utd

AC Milan

Juventus

Chelsea

Barcelona   

Bayern Munich

Liverpool   

Inter Milan

Arsenal

Roma

 

With the exception of Chelsea, who we all know are a special case, all of the clubs above us has an illustrious past and a generally successful present. The fact that Newcastle hasn’t won a trophy since 1969 speaks volumes - could you imagine the teams above us not having won anything for nearly 40 years? Compare the emptiness of our trophy cabinet to the cabinets of the clubs above us and you see my point

 

I believe this massive discrepancy between our financial status and our on field successes has lead to a misconception amongst the fans of the class of manager we can attract. I’m not going to argue that perhaps bad appointments haven’t been made by Shepherd in the past.  But I think we would struggle to attract a manager able to do a better job than Roeder is doing at the club right now and I think we’d be taking a massive risk by appointing someone else other than him. We could appoint someone with a better CV but then again Souness, Gullit and Dalglish had all either managed bigger and better clubs than Roeder or had won more trophies than him. The important thing is that right here and now, Roeder is doing a good job, and in a manner which suggests that he’ll keep on doing it.

 

My point to the cynics is that I don’t think we are capable of attracting the type of world class manager we’d like to see. And that we couldn’t risk appointing the type of manager that we could attract, not when Roeder is already doing such a good job. And that Freddie Shepherd, far from not thinking enough about who was appointed, made the best decision he felt possible for the future of the club when he chose Glenn Roeder as the next Newcastle boss.

 

RESPONSE TO THE HOPEFUL

 

People hoping for a big name were only hoping that because they wanted the best for the club, but would appointing a big name manager  necessarily have delivered this? Appointing big names certainly hasn’t delivered success in the past. Generally all that appointing big name managers who can attract big name players has done for the club in the past is to lumber it with a succession of expensive wastes of space. The list of these players is longer than I have space to list but here’s a few to jog your memories:

 

 Marcelino,

 Bassedas,

 Pistone,

 Guivarc’h ,

 Viana,

 Goma,

 Maric,

 Domi,

 Cort,

 Butt,

 Kluivert,

 

.. and by the looks of it two more expensive misfits in Albert Luque and Boumsong.

 

I don’t think that another high profile boss capable of attracting expensive white elephants is what Newcastle needs. I believe what we need is a manager who understands how important it is to the supporters to see Newcastle playing good, attacking football and scoring goals whilst also winning games.  I think what we also need is a manager who is capable and willing to coach the people at the club to be better players.  The happiest and most successful time in the club’s history was when we had exactly that in Keegan and Cox. Look below at the list of players that Keegan and Cox brought to the club and ask yourself how many of them came from massive foreign clubs and cost us astronomical fees:

 

John Beresford

Rob Lee

Les Ferdinand

Brian Kilcline

Gavin Peacock

Peter Beardsley

Paul Bracewell

Barry Venison

Warren Barton

Andy Cole

 

I know not all of these players are good enough to take us where we want to go but a lot of them are and I’d take any of them over some of the wastes of space I’ve mentioned! People like Rob Lee, Les Ferdinand and Peter Beardsley are rightly considered legends at this club and we didn’t need to go trawling Europe to find them.

 

The happiest and most successful time this club has had is when we’ve had a man in charge that loves the club and could coach players. It’s worked once with Keegan and I think it’ll work again with Roeder. He’s the kind of man we need not some big name who’ll want to sell good players so he can buy his own bunch and attempt to buy success for us yet again. That approach definitely hasn’t worked in the past and if we repeated it again then I see no reason for it working this time.

 

CONCLUSION

 

This is a pivotal time for the club; it’s a time when what Newcastle is crying out for is a return to being a Premiership football club.  We can’t afford another season of existing just to amuse back page readers everywhere with tales from the soap opera that is NUFC. We can’t afford yet more upheaval at Newcastle which would lead to us falling even further behind the Premierships big four. That’s why appointing Glenn Roeder was the only rational option.

 

When Bobby Robson was sacked I said the first thing we need to do is become a proper football club again. I haven’t changed in that opinion, we still need to see proper footballers playing good football and not getting drunk and throwing strops and chairs and whinging like the brat pack. I support any manager who can help Newcastle achieve this and at the moment Glenn Roeder is doing exactly that. Sure, some one else could come in and help us achieve this too but if we're already going in the right direction with Roeder why bother changing?

 

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