Former Newcastle United chairman Sir John Hall has revealed that Mike Ashley said he wanted to buy the club to help him sell his Sports Direct goods in the Far East.
Hall sold his shares in the Magpies to Ashley in 2007, having presided over a fantastic 15 years at the helm of the club. Ashley’s time with Newcastle has been rather less successful, though.
Hall has had his say: “In my day the owners were all local millionaires,” he said, as per The Chronicle’s news and transfer centre [23/05; 14:15]. “Today, there’s no local millionaires like ourselves.
“I got a call one day from some of Ashley’s people. I was going to London and I met them and we did a deal. And I said ‘why do you want the club?’ and they said – his words to me from his team were – ‘we want to market the sports goods in the Far East. It would be very helpful if we had a brand in soccer’.
“So in effect they were buying it, at a good price, and they were going to use it to, basically, sell their goods in the Far East and other places.”
OPINION
This is a very interesting insight from Hall, isn’t it? He clearly felt it was time to move on from Newcastle with the likes of Roman Abramovich having moved in at Chelsea and the Glazers at Manchester United. He didn’t feel he could compete and so he made the decision to sell his stake in the club. Still, we can all say now that perhaps Ashley wasn’t the right person to sell to. He’s done nothing positive during his time in charge of the Magpies, presiding over two relegations and limiting the progress the team have made on the pitch. It’s clear from what Hall says that Ashley was never buying Newcastle because he was passionate about the team and wanted to help push them on. The club was, ultimately, a stepping stone for him to fleece his Sports Direct goods in the Far East. That’s a bizarre reason to buy a football team but is perfectly in keeping with how Ashley has run the Magpies. Whether Hall regrets his decision now is unknown, but Ashley clearly wasn’t the right person to sell to from a footballing point of view.
