FOR a second successive summer, the rumours of Neymar swanning into St James’ Park have proved unfounded.

Newcastle United, branded the ‘richest club in the world’ thanks to the wealth of their majority owners, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, continue to invest heavily, with around £125m having been spent on the purchase of Sandro Tonali, Harvey Barnes and Tino Livramento. But any suggestion of a billion-pound splurge akin to the kind of spending that transformed Chelsea and Manchester City in the last two decades has long since been dismissed.

In part, that is simply not the way Eddie Howe operates, nor the way in which Newcastle’s CEO, Darren Eales, and sporting director, Dan Ashworth, want to develop the club. Ultimately, though, it wouldn’t matter if they wanted to spend every petro-dollar at the PIF’s disposal. The Premier League’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules dictate that a club’s outgoings cannot exceed their income by a sum of more than £105m across a rolling period of three seasons. Until Newcastle significantly increase the commercial revenues that had lain dormant for the best part of a decade under former owner, Mike Ashley, their hands will effectively be tied.

“As a club, Newcastle United are always looking to spend to the limit, so it will never be a case that we are not trying to spend what we can under the regulations,” said Eales, who met members of the North-East press pack for a wide-ranging pre-season chat this week at Newcastle’s newly-refurbished training ground, which has been improved to the tune of £10m this summer. “We’ve got this aspiration to be a top-six club, a sustainable top-six club, that’s the reality. It’s never that we’re looking for a bottom-line profit.

“We can only spend what we can spend. The FFP regime is in place, and every club has to deal with it. Different clubs are in different period of the cycle. There are tighter margins of error, and we are on that scale. Since the takeover, there’s been a lot of investment in the players, and obviously you’ve got to account for that under FFP.”

So far, so very sporting. Yet while the FFP rules arguably work for a club like Manchester United, whose immense global income enables them to retain their preeminent position in the transfer market even when they are underperforming on the pitch, it arguably acts as a barrier to a club like Newcastle, who are attempting to disrupt the status quo from a lowly starting point.

Newcastle’s Saudi owners have been the great sporting disruptors in the last couple of years, lavishing billions on their Saudi Pro League football teams, who now boast the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema among their ranks, and turning the golfing world upside down thanks to the advent of LIV Golf and the surprise truce with the PGA Tour that was brokered earlier this year and that effectively sees Newcastle’s chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, as the kingmaker of world golf.

The Northern Echo: Newcastle United chairman Yasir al-RumayyanNewcastle United chairman Yasir al-Rumayyan (Image: PA)

Given the Saudi regime appears willing to rip up the sporting rulebook, is there are any chance of them knowingly overspending at Newcastle in order to test the legality of the FFP regulations in the courts?

“I understand why FFP was brought in,” said Eales. “I think it does make it more difficult to break into the top six, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means you’ve got to do it carefully.

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“From our perspective here at Newcastle United, the rules are pretty clear. They are what they are, and like anything, you’ve got to go by the rules of the game that you’re in. You have similar rules in Europe too, so you’ve got an agreed landscape across Europe that this is the general framework.

“An investment was made, and Financial Fair Play is the regulation. Within those parameters, everybody knows what the guard rails are in terms of what you can spend and how you can spend it.

“What you’ve seen, I hope, at Newcastle United so far since the takeover, right from day one, is an efficient use of the funds to get to where we are, which is the Champions League after less than two years of ownership. Our job now is to try to grow Newcastle United to where we want it to be within the regulations, which every club has to follow.”

So, if the rules are not going to change, Newcastle’s best chance of increasing the scope for their owners to invest in the squad is to continue significantly increasing the club’s revenue levels.

The club’s most recent set of accounts, which were published in March, revealed an annual turnover figure of £180m, which was an increase of £39.8 from the previous year. Thanks to the new sponsorship deal with Sela, qualification for the Champions League and this summer’s participation in the Premier League Summer Series, next year’s figures should show another marked increase.

However, Manchester United’s most recent financial disclosure estimates an annual revenue of £640m for the 2022-23 financial year. Bridging that gulf will hardly be easy, but it is essential if Newcastle are to keep pace with their rivals at the top end of the Premier League.

“It is certainly a big gap,” admitted Eales. “If you look at our pace, then we’re roughly doubling the revenue every two years. That gives you an indication of how we’re looking, and that’s a phenomenal rate of growth.

“From that perspective, we have to credit Eddie, Dan and the team. The Champions League has really helped us. It’s not just the revenue of the Champions League, it’s also the cachet, the ability to talk about it to players when you’re bringing them in and, from a sponsorship perspective, it gives Newcastle a different feel as a club.”

Another avenue to increase income would be to extend St James’ Park. The geography of the area surrounding Newcastle’s stadium makes increasing capacity extremely challenging, but Eales has launched a feasibility study aimed at investigating any potential option, no matter how seemingly outlandish initially.

The Northern Echo: Newcastle United have commissioned a feasibility study into the possible expansion of St James' ParkNewcastle United have commissioned a feasibility study into the possible expansion of St James' Park (Image: The Northern Echo)

“What I really want us to do as a club is engage some experts that just look at what is possible,” he said. “Look at everything and tell us what we could do. Don’t think of cost, then we can look at it and say, ‘Okay, these are our possibilities’. That’s a process that is ongoing now and will feed into the possibilities of what we can do at St James’ Park.”

Meanwhile, on the pitch, Newcastle head into the new season competing on four different fronts and looking to fend off a chasing pack featuring the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham, all of whom have made major investments into their respective playing squads this summer.

When Eales conducts his conference calls with the heads of the PIF, or speaks directly to al-Rumayyan at the club’s board meetings at Alnwick Castle, what is he being told is the ambition for the new campaign?

“It’s difficult to say a specific target,” he said. “We have to admit that finishing fourth in the second season after fighting relegation was definitely something that was an incredible achievement, and was probably quicker than we thought it would be if you drawing a plan.

“But, as we know, things never go in a straight line. We know it’s going to be difficult, we have to acknowledge that. We weren’t in Europe last year, we are in Europe this year with all the challenges that brings. But you want to be coming out at the end of this season feeling that, as a club, we’ve grown.”