If you were a Newcastle fan back in the early 2000s, chances are that you dreamt of seeing your club play in the Champions League one day with the likes of Alan Shearer, Michael Owen, and Kluivert on the team sheet.
Fast forward to 2021 and you find your team heading out to start the season with a 7 to 3 odds of your club playing in the Championship next season. Any place over 15th position will make you open the champagne bottle and keep celebrating all night long.
And you look up to thank one certain businessman for all this achievement over the years.
Mike Ashley bought Sir John Hall's 41.6% stake in Newcastle United at one pound per share for a total cost of £55,343,223 via his company St James Holdings Ltd. back on 23 May 2007.
This certain purchase of over 30% of a listed company made him obliged to buy the remaining shares with an equal or greater price by the terms of UK takeover law. On 7th June, it was confirmed that Freddy Shepherd had agreed to sell his 28% share to Ashley which left him free to take the control of the club.
The British billionaire eventually went out to acquire a 77.06% stake in June, and later, buy out the entire club by July with a reported total of around £134 million.
Now, back then, it was all looked upon as an act of saving the club which was losing £500,000 a week prior to their ever-increasing wage bills for signing high-caliber players to compete in the top half of the Premier League.
So it was obvious that the fans took him up as somewhat of a hero who saved their club from certain financial ruins and was taking drastic measures to keep the club up and going for the upcoming years to come.
The businessman's involvement with the fans in the local bars and clubs, as well as watching every single match from the stands with the fans wearing the team shirt helped to escalate that popularity by miles. He was always vocal in the forums, his social media presence surrounding the club was frequent and he was loved by the Newcastle fans.
But it was always going to be a short-lived love story, specially when you go on to run a club more than a business than an actual club. What the fans thought out to be a breathing relief soon turned out to be a nightmare for the club.
It all started with the falling out with the manager Kevin Keegan as the Newcastle legend publicly critisised the board claiming that the club directors were not providing him the financial support necessary to operate in the top half of the Premier League.
This led to bad press for owner Mike Ashley who was cutting down operating costs by every possible pound to dim down the massive losses the club was leaking out every other week.
The fans were outraged which led to several protests around St James' Park and fingers were pointed on both Mike Ashley and Executive Director Dennis Wise.
The claims of Keegan were proved to be correct as we saw Newcastle follow the opposite route taken by the other Premier League clubs, which is to constantly decrease the wage budget every single season.
And in the case of the transfers, Michael Owen was signed by the club on August 2005 with a record fee of £16.5m. A transfer record that was just broken in the summer of 2019 with the signing of Miguel Almiron.
By then, it was quite clear where Ashley's head was and the fans can bid farewell to their ambitions for the club until some other passionate owner takes the helm of the club.
The fans had to see the clubs like Spurs which were trailing them back in the 2000s play Champions League football on a regular basis and even reach the final of the prestigious tournament. They have turned into a billion-pound club and recently moved into a new state-of-the-art stadium, surpassing the Magpies in every aspect possible.
The average net spending around St Jame's Park over eight years went on to reach only £700,000 a year, which is laughable even to a newly promoted side's standard. With this, came the drop in player quality which was followed by relegation to the Championship on two separate occasions.
No significant improvements were made in the case of the club's infrastructures either with only a few changes of scoreboards and advertising signs here and there made to the stadium. The club saw a record low of stadium attendance by the fans in protests surfacing from the resignation of Keegan and later, for relegation.
Production of quality players from the youth academy was low as no improvements were made in that sector either and the club was gradually facing a decline in its reputation.
All these series of events were followed by the controversial renaming of the stadium as Newcastle United announced that the stadium would officially be renamed Sports Direct Arena as a temporary measure to ''showcase the sponsorship opportunity to interested parties'' back in 2011. It was stated that the St James Park title was dropped for not being ''commercially attractive.''
There were more fan protests as they stood against buying team kits from the official store of the club, leading up to missed merchandise sales for the club.
At this stage, Ashley made it quite clear that he no longer wants to own the club and will sell the club immediately given any owner comes up with a suitable offer. He went on to meet with several parties who proposed to buy off the club but ultimately ending up with an agreement as none were able to provide any proof of funds to purchase the club.
It kept going downhill for the owner as the club started losing their grounds among the other Premier League sides and frequent departures of well-known managers only made the relationship with the fans worse.
Newcastle went on to get relegated for the second time under the ownership of Mike Ashley in the 2015/16 season even after appointing Rafa Benitez to lead the club to an escape from the relegation battle.
Rafa Benitez managed to bring the club back in the greener grounds of the Premier League but Newcastle was hit with another blow as the manager stepped down as manager upon the expiration of his contract in 2019 which, later revealed in an interview with The Athletic in December 2020, revealed that it was all due to financial disagreements with the owner. Rafa also made sure to slam the owner, describing him as ''a businessman who I don't believe really cares about the team.''
Speaking of being a businessman, the owner also invested no money after the club over the last 9-10 years, making the club depend on its own generated revenues and depend on the same source for recruitment. The last ever investment recorded till today was back in the 2009/10 season when Newcastle was hit with relegation and with it, saw a hit in the club's overall value which worried Ashley.
£30m was invested in the club with the license to sing ''anyone to secure promotion'' was given to the then manager Chris Hughton to get the team back in the Premier League. Ashley also promised the fans that every penny earned by the club in the Premier League through revenue will be invested after the infrastructure of the club.
But following their promotion to the Premier League, Ashley withdrew the £30m that was invested before, which gave rise to another wave of displeasure among the fans. They felt that the owner failed to keep his promises, and by then, their owner has grown used to being thick-skinned to the harsh criticisms.
He no longer showed his face on the matchdays, no more online presence. His very first televised interview as the owner of the club came eight years after owning Newcastle when he decided to sit on an interview with Sky Sports where he spoke about his plans about selling the club.
Stating that Newcastle fans hate the businessman will rather be an understatement if we look at the bigger picture. That's where Rangers steps into the scene.
Ashley owned an 8.92% stake in the Scottish club Rangers' parent company, Rangers Internation Football Club(RIFC). He eventually wanted to raise his shareholding in the company to 29.9% but was rejected by the Scottish Football Association to avoid conflict of interests considering his ownership of Newcastle United.
The businessman faced major backlash from the Rangers fans when he planned to secure a £10m loan using the club's stadium as security. In addition to that, he also caused the merchandise sales of the club to put to a halt following a dispute with the other owners of the club.
Now from what we have seen from Mike Ashley so far in his ownership spell at Newcastle, the Englishmen is a sore loser for how he dealt with the club and its finances. Rather than going all strict on the finances, if he managed to secure some good signings and invest after the club on a regular basis, Newcastle could have found themself in somewhat of a similar situation to that of Spurs.
Instead, the club finds itself struggling in the mid-table every season, praying to avoid another relegation.
The latest news surrounding the club's takeover has been mudded with more controversies following the potential financier Amanda Stavely's approach to taking ownership of the club with a reported sum of £340m was halted by the Premier League authorities due to the arbitration process.
Mike Ashley was also vocal about the incident as he went on to urge the Premier League to take the arbitration process into the public domain and demanded transparency over their handling of the failed bid last week.
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