Reps of the Shiekh confirm the talks are genuine and ongoing.
There goes any last hope of playing european football/winning a trophy.
Good luck competing with 2x Man City's and the rest of the top 6.
I wonder if this may put a dent in Moshiri's ambitions? I imagine once the new ground is built he'll want to sell for a profit and get our of here ASAP
I think we need to be a bit calmer about all of this. It's not even happened yet.
It seems very likely we are bankrolled by Russia's wealthiest man. We have spent significant money and it's only when we have put a structure in place will it have gone well.
Clubs such as Liverpool, Manchester City and Spurs have only really started cracking things when they stopped spending money all over the shop, but started spending prudently.
People don't grasp what happened under Abramovich or Sheikh at City. Essentially an investment of £100-£200m per season was worth substantially more. In todays money Chelsea spent about 1.7 billion in the first 3 seasons and City 1.5 billion. Both started from a much higher starting point than Newcastle (or particularly Leeds). It took both probably 3-4 years to get to where they wanted to get too.
The reality is, for anyone to come in and have the impact those owners had, you'd be looking at requiring around £1.5 billion, as a minimum for the first 3 years. I am not going to say it's impossible, but it is highly unlikely. What City and Chelsea did, wa the equivalent of signing in one summer (for example) Van Dijk, Laporte, Sterling & Kane and the next summer, Alli, Hazard, Salah and Pogba. Essentially paying a huge premium on the best players. As I've said, not impossible but on a raw cash point alone unlikely.
The other factor in this is now FFP. 7 million a year you can increase wages before money coming in. It will probably take 3-5 years to really start to move players on at a premium to help you do much about this (as a minimum requirement). You are actually quite restricted. Understandably so too, as why would United, Liverpool, Arsenal etc just allow team to push them out?
See the context of what is happening to Manchester City, who are well established at the top of the league. They are being screwed over royally for some minor infringements of FFP (i.e. allegedly falsifying sponsors to pay way above the market rates for sponsorship). If clubs such as Liverpool/Manchester United are hot on this, how hot will they be on Newcastle or Leeds doing the same (but far more blatant to replicate the sort of progress City showed).
What is far more likely, is owners have probably seen owning a PL club is quite lucrative. If you can sustain them in the league (which will be the first objective for both Newcastle, Aston Villa and Leeds if they come up) it's a decent cash cow. Thats not to say they won't be a threat, but they remain some way behind where we are as a club.
In truth if they did start lashing massive sums on players, in truth it wouldn't even bother me that much. They would destabilise the pp of the league more than us, by targeting their players. They will have to pay an enormous premium for players and can probably help a club like us if they tried to sign one of our players for a heavily inflated fee. (The sale of Lescott for example allowed us to re-build). We should have sold Arteta to Chelsea earlier and Rooney to Chelsea for £50 million.
The truth is we have a very very wealthy owner, connected to one of the most wealthy individuals in the world and a live and continual supply of liquidity. He has stumped up more money than most (and certainly more than people who're allegedly going to take the league by storm). Wolves for example, who were going to become the new Manchester City didn't spend as much as us over the last couple of years. We have a plan, we have a strong DOF and we have individuals with substantial resources on our board.
I don't believe it will be City/Chelsea MK 2 (as it hasn't been for Wolves) but even if it were, I would be more focussed on us doing what we need to do right.
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