What no European football means for Newcastle: Transfers, retention, commerce and team spirit

Nobody at St James’ Park is attempting to sugarcoat it; European football again for next season was what they wanted, and it is what they must now do without.

Those heady Champions League nights, that sense of difference, had fed Newcastle United’s appetite. As a draining, epic 2023-24 campaign reached its conclusion, the prospect of a second consecutive year of European football offered something tangible to show for it. They strained for it, seemed to get it — but in the end, came up short.

Europe is where the big teams compete, and Newcastle have designs on one day being the biggest.

“We need to be there as a football club,” head coach Eddie Howe said recently. Peter Silverstone, the chief commercial officer, said, “Just keeping the club at that European level is really important.” From the inhabitants of the dressing room, defender Dan Burn said, “It’s a short career and people want to play as high as possible for as long as possible.”

Manchester United’s shock victory over four-in-a-row league champions Manchester City in the FA Cup final wrestled a Conference League place from Newcastle’s grasp a week after they had finished the top-flight season in seventh, one place above Erik ten Hag’s side.

You can debate how much of that deflation was self-inflicted, balancing awful away form with a chronic list of injuries, but it is a blow regardless. The question is, how much of a blow?

Finances

Disappointing, but not a catastrophe; this is how a lack of European competition is being framed by figures inside St James’ Park and, in financial terms, this is doubtless correct. Newcastle’s season in the 2023-24 Champions League was a beautiful, bruising adventure, and one that arrived well ahead of schedule. They are not yet a club where finishing in the top four is viewed as a minimum requirement.

Take the top-tier Champions League out of the equation, and European football becomes much less lucrative.

According to Newcastle’s accounts, participation in UEFA’s blue-riband club competition brought the club at least £37million ($47.1m at the current exchange rate) this season. Even without any further income growth, that would represent a 15 per cent increase in revenue on their £250m turnover for 2022-23. The Champions League really is transformative in every sense, including economically. Internally, it is described as providing “a game-changing shift”.

The prize money in the second-tier Europa League and Conference League, UEFA’s third club tournament, is a fraction of the Champions League. Yet the additional income from either would still have been consequential had Newcastle managed to get to the latter stages, especially given the remuneration is increasing at every level next season.

For a club hemmed in by the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), every revenue stream counts.

Heading into the final week of this season, Newcastle were favourites to reach the Europa League and that would have guaranteed at least €4.31m (£3.7m; $4.7m). Realistically, however, they would have hoped to accrue between £15m and £20m in direct prize money, progress-dependent, with a team winning the tournament likely to bank around €40m.

Then, after coming seventh and before the FA Cup final, Newcastle seemed destined for a place in the Conference League.

Although the prize money is around half that of the Europa League, they would have been guaranteed at least €3.2m for reaching the group stage. Again, Newcastle could have accumulated £10m to £15m, depending on their progress. West Ham secured €22m in prize money when they won the 2022-23 Conference League and its champions next season could bank between €25m and €30m.

In both those UEFA tournaments, Newcastle would have generated additional matchday revenue from playing at least one home fixture, rising to as many as eight. Ticket prices would have been lower than for the Champions League, yet the extra games would have generated, conservatively, a seven-figure sum.

Another difficult figure to quantify is the negative effect on commercial incomes.

Newcastle receive bonuses from partners for being in Europe, which are staggered depending on the competition and their progress, and they will not earn that uplift.

Their brand visibility is also diminished without European football. The extra matches provide further broadcast opportunities for sponsors. As Silverstone declared this month, “It makes a big difference in terms of marketing and sponsorship deals when you can keep talking about us as a European side.”

Darren Eales, the chief executive, also admitted in January that repeat European qualification “helps accelerate our growth” and is what Newcastle require to establish themselves among the elite in a PSR world.

Reaching the Champions League for the first time in 20 years did not mean Newcastle had moved from “A to B”, Eales insisted, and any form of UEFA competition for 2024-25 was desirable from an income perspective. “To be that top-six, sustainable club, we need to have European football every season,” he said.

The counter-argument is that returning to the Champions League for the 2025-26 season would offset a 2024-25 campaign without involvement in either of UEFA’s two lower-tier competitions. In terms of the pure finances involved, Newcastle using their lack of European football next season to focus on the Premier League and, hopefully, increase their prospects of securing a top-four finish in the process could be of long-term benefit.

However, even now they are free of additional European fixtures, it is unrealistic to assume that Newcastle will qualify for the Champions League again next season. There are those inside St James’ who keep stressing that, while Newcastle’s ambition is to be top-four regulars, they are still miles behind the clubs who would be their rivals for those positions in just about every conceivable way, beyond their performances on the pitch.

Newcastle CEO Darren Eales (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Squad and transfers

The obvious follow-on question, then, is: what does all this mean for Newcastle’s summer transfer budget?

Little, if anything, is the impression being given internally.

Their key targets are already set, as are the priority positions to strengthen — centre-back, right-winger, striker and goalkeeper — and have been unaffected. The volume of incoming business may fall slightly and additional outgoings could be permitted, but the focus on signing quality over quantity remains.

There will be longer-term effects and a knock-on when it comes to spending capacity in 2025-26, but the impact will be negligible for the upcoming summer window, which officially opens on June 14. The revenue generated by the Sela front-of-shirt deal and the Champions League campaign will be available to Howe during this window, but there will be no income from Europe to bolster the kitty for the summer of 2025.

The short-term PSR situation does not materially change. Newcastle must still sell well to generate funds, even if they have decent capacity to spend from July 1 onwards, once the new Premier League financial year begins.

While Newcastle don’t need to conform with UEFA’s rebranded “Financial Sustainability” regulations in 2024-25, they are setting their budgets-to-revenue ratio with the desire to comply with them in mind.

By 2025-26, UEFA’s spending-to-turnover limit on transfers, agent fees, and player and coach wages will be 70 per cent. The Premier League’s spending-to-turnover ratio is expected to be 85 per cent, but Newcastle will be aiming for the lower figure, given their desire to return to the European stage.

The players long identified by Steve Nickson, the head of recruitment, and Andy Howe, assistant head of recruitment, are still featuring during transfer discussions. As mentioned above, beyond talks for Fulham’s Tosin Adarabioyo and Lloyd Kelly of Bournemouth, the centre-backs Newcastle are hopeful they will recruit as free agents, a ’keeper, a winger and at least one forward are being sought.

Newcastle’s preference is to sign players who will strengthen their first XI, in turn improving the quality of the squad.

But at goalkeeper, for example, the lack of European football next season may affect who they move for. Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsdale and Giorgi Mamardashvili of Spanish side Valencia would expect game time if they joined, as will Nick Pope, their present No 1, and Howe could potentially have rotated two goalkeepers between domestic competitions and Europe. Relegated Burnley’s James Trafford may emerge as a more realistic recruit, given the 21-year-old could be blooded for the future as Pope’s backup.

Failing to qualify for Europe sealed the departures of long-serving duo Paul Dummett and Matt Ritchie, too. Some inside Newcastle felt the pair should be let go regardless, given they only played a combined 138 Premier League minutes this season. But Howe argued that Newcastle should retain their experience and ability to drive standards on the training ground. He also felt they could complement the younger team he was expected to field in the early rounds of whichever UEFA competition the club ended up in.

Matt Ritchie after scoring against Bournemouth (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

After the FA Cup final, Howe accepted that shaving nearly £100,000 a week from the wage bill by allowing 32-year-old Dummett and Ritchie, 34, to go trumped his case.

There are also ramifications to not making Europe in terms of rotation, keeping players happy, and the development of the younger squad members.

Lewis Miley, the 18-year-old midfielder, is likely to receive fewer top-flight opportunities next season, assuming there are fewer injuries, but could have played regularly in Europe. The same applies to Alex Murphy, the 19-year-old centre-back, who Newcastle may now need to consider loaning out. Yankuba Minteh, the exciting 19-year-old forward, is also more likely to head out, whether temporarily again after spending this season with Dutch club Feyenoord or even permanently.

No European football is not ideal for Sandro Tonali, either.

His comeback game could have been the second leg of a play-off to qualify for the Conference League proper, on August 29 — the day his 10-month ban for betting offences ends. The Italian cannot play in public friendlies while suspended, so such European matches would have helped build his fitness. Now Newcastle must plan accordingly, potentially arranging more behind-closed-doors games, in which Tonali is permitted to participate.

When it comes to keeping hold of stars Alexander Isak and Bruno Guimaraes — the latter has a £100million release clause, which expires on June 30 — Newcastle are adamant missing out on Europe does not diminish their determination to retain both players.

What it may do, however, is affect the vision the club have sold of being perennial European qualifiers to the players already signed, while their pitch to prospective recruits may require tweaking.

“It’s important, because you can attract more players to come and play,” Burn says of Newcastle being in UEFA competition. “The lads already here want to play in Europe.”

Even so, the Conference League does not have the glamour or the pull of the Champions League, and so Newcastle remain confident they can still convince quality targets to join if they are not in that third-tier tournament.

Wider effects

Football clubs, at their hearts, are not bricks and mortar but individual people brought together in a common cause.

People, of course, have their idiosyncrasies and clubs’ dressing rooms have delicate ecosystems. Players want to feel they are getting better, achieving things, earning enough. Managers and head coaches need buy-in from players, so they can persuade those not in the team that it is for the greater good.

Progress and forward momentum are key themes here.

For much of Newcastle’s existence before the October 2021 takeover, neither of those things have been difficult to measure; huge expenditure in their first window that January, the relegation-threatened team clambering away from the bottom of the table, then reaching the Carabao Cup final in the February and ending that season by qualifying for the Champions League. Progress was a whirlwind.

What, then, to make of their 2023-24? In terms of big, life-affirming moments it was up there with the best: a series of extraordinary, historic results, playing Paris Saint-Germain, AC Milan and Borussia Dortmund and getting to the quarter-finals of both domestic cup competitions would have been fantasy in the previous Mike Ashley era.

Dortmund score against Newcastle in the Champions League (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)

For all the mitigation, the final league table suggests regression: seventh compared to fourth a year ago, 60 points to 71, 14 league defeats to five. Off the pitch, the training ground has had £10million of improvements, but it is still not an elite facility. So, in this context, how does Howe demonstrate progress?

European qualification was one short-cut answer. Everybody can endure a dip, but even a Conference League place would have made a strong argument that Europe is now Newcastle’s natural home, that players could come to Tyneside (or stay here) and fulfil that ambition.

Nobody is suggesting that failing to be there in 2024-25 will prompt a revolt, but it does mean that this season (finally) ends with a kick in the teeth rather than a pat on the back, with disappointment rather than an achievement. European weeks next season will now feel long with no games in them. And, in a subtle way, does it place more pressure on Howe and his team?

The irritation is that Newcastle’s players had experienced adversity and come through it, a strength the final league table does not reflect. Their season could have been much worse than it ended up being.

They were desperate to go again; this time more aware of how European fixtures impact their week, how the rhythm of matches at that level is different. “If we get into Europe again, we’ll learn from our mistakes,” Burn said. “Like getting used to not training as much; there are only a few teams that can get away with that — Manchester City just seem to turn up and just switch it on constantly.”

Constantly, aside from at Wembley last Saturday, when Newcastle needed them to.

And sides of City’s quality are not going to be in the 2024-25 Conference League. Put bluntly, it’s a trophy Newcastle could have targeted. If West Ham United can win it, why couldn’t they?

That sense of learning applied to other areas of a club still expanding from a low base following the takeover.

European trips became fact-finding exercises for playing staff and executives. A practical example of this will be Newcastle’s official club shop, which is currently being refurbished and will lean on what they saw first-hand of Dortmund’s retail operation during the Champions League group stage.

There is, though, another viewpoint and although everyone shied away from it when the season was still alive, they have little choice but to embrace it now. If the 2023-24 Champions League came before Newcastle were ready for it — something the club acknowledged a year ago — and if Europe contributed to stretching their squad, now they have the chance to build again.

Involved in fewer competitions, perhaps we will see a stronger, more intense, more focused Newcastle, who have to make fewer compromises over identity and playing style. Nobody will mourn the absence of Thursday-Sunday fixtures and Howe will make use of extra time on the training pitch, the place he truly comes alive.

The position is far less stark and less damaging than if returning to the Champions League had been possible but then lost and, internally, Newcastle recognise you can argue both ways about the merits or otherwise of playing in a “lesser” European competition.

They weren’t doing that a fortnight ago, but now there is little choice.

Their passports have been put away and pragmatism rules.

GO DEEPER

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(Top photo: Isak and Howe; Richard Heathcote via Getty Images)