OLIVER HOLT: Fan anger at Newcastle should be aimed at Saudis not Howe

Maybe Newcastle United will beat Barcelona at St James’s Park on Tuesday evening. Barcelona are a better team with better players but the atmosphere at Newcastle’s magnificent old stadium is the best in England now. It can create magic, particularly on a big night under the lights.

A Newcastle win wouldn’t surprise me but if they lose, it won’t surprise me when a large percentage of the supporters start calling for the head of Eddie Howe, the manager who is the best thing to have happened to the club since Sir Bobby Robson left more than 20 years ago.

Whenever it is that Newcastle get knocked out of the Champions League, their season will effectively be at an end. It is then that the swell of discontent with Howe and the conviction that it is down to him that Newcastle aren’t challenging for the top five will grow and grow. ‘Howe Out’ is a thing on Tyneside now.

That’s what happens when a club is bought by Saudi Arabia and the supporters, giddy with the promise of fabulous wealth, dress themselves in Saudi robes and sing songs about how they’ll have ‘Lionel Messi selling the pies’ and taunt Manchester City supporters with chants about being ‘richer than you’ on a visit to the Etihad.

That’s what happens when you tell yourself that you’re going to be winning the title every year with Kylian Mbappe and Lamine Yamal in your front line and you find yourself sitting in 12th place in the table, below local rivals Sunderland, the sting of all those boasts coming back to bite you.

That’s what happens when Profit and Sustainability Rules mean you can’t just buy the title every season. Supporters of many clubs rightly feel resentful about the limitations PSR imposes upon them but PSR is the price we pay for protecting the game from the prospect of Saudi Arabia turning the Premier League into a procession every year.

Here’s what does surprise me, though: amid all the criticism of Howe, there is precious little said against the Saudis, precious little said against Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, which owns 80 per cent of Newcastle United, precious little dissatisfaction with what they have, and haven’t done.

Newcastle sold their soul to the Saudis when they bought the club in 2021. At the very least, everybody looked the other way when a state that dismembered a journalist with a bone-saw, which continues to treat even mild opposition with savage punishments and which treats women as second-class citizens, took over at St James’ Park.

And sold their soul for what? Winning the Carabao Cup?

Sure, the Saudis have bankrolled Newcastle’s transformation from a club that was an habitue of relegation fights into the mid-table team that it is today. But the continued deference that many supporters show to the ownership while they turn their ire on Howe is hard to comprehend.

Al-Rumayyan is feted as a king at Newcastle, front and centre in a team photograph, routinely referred to as ‘His Excellency’ by some media outlets. That nauseatingly fawning tone was set by Sky Sports when the takeover first happened and their reporters cracked open cans of beer to celebrate.

And sure, the Saudis lifted the gloom that had enveloped the club in the crushingly dispiriting years of Mike Ashley’s tenure. And, yes, they have invested in player acquisitions that have seen wonderful talents like Bruno Guimaraes and Sandro Tonali arrive for handsome sums.

But there has rarely been an impression that the Saudis are anything more than semi-detached owners of the club. They can point to PSR limitations if they want but what about the other investments they could have made without any of those issues?

Look, I think state ownership in English football should be banned. It is blindingly obvious that it can distort spending and undermine competitiveness. Concerns about its influence and the cross-pollination of funding between state assets is at the heart of financial charges against Manchester City, which hover over our game like a dark cloud.

But within that context, when you look at the contribution Abu Dhabi has made to Manchester’s development during its time as owner of Manchester City, it has been considerable. It has transformed a swathe of east Manchester that was depressed and unloved. It has improved the stadium. It has built a sumptuous new training ground.

None of that has happened at Newcastle. Soon, it will be five years since the Saudis took over and there have been a few improvements to the training ground and occasional flurries of news about suggestions of building a new one. There have been discussions about a new ground, too, or a rebuild of St James’ Park. But nothing has actually happened.

The structure of the club has been a mess, too. Sure, blame Howe if you want but the Saudis botched the appointment of a director of football and that led to confusion and incompetence in the signings of new players. When Liverpool came for Alexander Isak, the Saudis rolled over and sold him. Newcastle might have the richest owners in the world but they are still a selling club.

Howe has been a fig leaf for all that. He has been Saudi Arabia’s human shield on Tyneside. And now it is him who is paying the price for an ownership that has let him down and has let the city down.

The club’s new chief executive, David Hopkinson, says Newcastle want to be the top club in the world by 2030. Which is nice. But if they get knocked out of the Champions League and the assassins come for Howe, they risk losing their prime asset. And if Howe goes, attention might finally start to turn on the failings of the richest ownership in world football.

RADUCANU’S CAREER HAS BEEN SHOCKINGLY MISMANAGED 

Emma Raducanu is still only 23. There has, quite rightly, been a reluctance to criticise her because of her tender years and an acknowledgement of the uncommon pressures she has faced since she won the US Open as an unseeded 18-year-old in 2021.

It is also true that if she never wins another tournament – a prospect that is looking increasingly likely – she will still rank as one of the most luminous players in our tennis history because of that astonishing triumph in New York.

But when Raducanu crashed out of the Indian Wells Open on Sunday, humiliated 6-1, 6-1 by Amanda Anisimova in just 52 minutes, in the midst of yet another search for a new coach, it felt legitimate to say that her career has become a study in shockingly incompetent mismanagement.

I am not putting the blame on Raducanu for that but on those around her. All that promise, all that ability, all that grit, everything that helped her squash the opposition at Flushing Meadows in that golden fortnight, has been squandered.

Hers has become a career with pockets of brilliance and nothing more. I saw her play at Wimbledon last summer and come close to upsetting World No 1 Aryna Sabalenka before being eliminated. There are small hints that she still has what it takes, but no more than that.

She split with the ninth coach of her short career in January and is now looking for her 10th. Mark Petchey helped her out temporarily in Indian Wells. No one seems to stick. No one seems right for her, or for the people who control her.

Indulging that restlessness would be OK if she was getting close to fulfilling her potential. But she isn’t. Her career is starting to ebb away in a fog of mediocrity, which feels like a crying shame.