David Hopkinson has a name for what Newcastle United are doing this summer. Newcastle 2.0 arrived on Wednesday in the person of Matthias Jaissle, a 38-year-old German who has never worked in the Premier League and who has sixteen days to ready a dismantled squad for Liverpool. The label sounds like ambition. What the chief executive said to explain it sounds like something else.
Hopkinson called Eddie Howe "the architect, the leader, the author of Newcastle 1.0", and he meant it warmly. Then he explained why there had to be a sequel. "There's no Newcastle 2.0 without Newcastle 1.0," he said. "It ignited this community and allowed us to dream. It brought us spectacular nights here, it brought us a trophy and a parade … It was a great chapter, but we were living beyond our means. And, at some point, you've got to pay the credit card bill." He also described the Premier League's squad-cost ratio rules as "the most unfair salary system I've ever heard of".
That is a club telling its supporters, in as many words, that the previous cycle was funded on terms it could not sustain. Everything else this summer follows from it.
The bill