Rafa Benitez and his Championship Plans for Newcastle United
A year ago Rafa Benitez was driving to work in sunny Madrid, walking out onto the training pitch to see the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Toni Kroos. He was preparing for games against Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, he was preparing a team that would win the Champions League by the end of the campaign.
But he wouldn’t be there to see it, by then Zinedine Zidane was in charge and Rafa was sitting in the dugout at St James Park watching helplessly as his Newcastle team was relegated from the Premier League.
Now, for some reason, he’s decided to stay on Tyneside and see if he can’t rebuild this Newcastle team from in the Championship. A Champions League winning manager who only a year ago was given the job at Real Madrid, now setting his sights on away trips to Rotherham, Burton Albion and Barnsley. Fair to say most teams in this position don’t have that same luxury when it comes to leadership and reputation.
Benitez was brought in to try and avoid relegation, he wasn’t expected to be leading this rebuilding mission. Problem was, while he made some very clear and rewarding differences with the Toon, it was all too late. Sam Allardyce had spent most of the season shaping Sunderland into a functional team (no mean feat given what he began with) and Newcastle were beaten to survival by their biggest rivals. You could call that the worst case scenario… but it might turn out pretty nicely for them all the same.
At this stage in his career, Benitez has done the big club thing and he seems to be keen to hang about in England where he spent his best days at Liverpool. With his contract only guaranteed should he keep the club up, he could have walked and tried his hand interviewing for, say, the Everton job or the Southampton one. But for whatever reason he decided that he was onto something with Newcastle and extended his deal for three more years despite the relegation. Again, the man who began last season as Real Madrid manager will begin this one in the second tier of English football. That’s crazy.
Although… think of it this way. By sticking with Newcastle as they hit rock bottom he has an unprecedented amount of power within the club now. His negotiating weight must have been immense, given no other candidate was going to match his CV. True to that idea, he’s apparently now overseeing “all football-related matters” within the club – which must be music to the ears of the fans that he’s already forging a strong connection with. Not only that but he has this year, which presumably will lead to promotion again or at least that’s the target, to shape the squad for the Premier League and to his liking. His fingerprints are gonna be all over this thing.
Which is about exactly what they needed. For the last few years, the club has been something of a shambles as owner Mike Ashley has isolated fans with his own business-first transfer policy which involved signing cheap, young, foreign players with resale value and then, well, reselling them a year or two later. In comes Yohan Cabaye for €5m and out he goes for €25m. In comes Mathieu Debuchy for €6.2m and out he goes for €15m. Moussa Sissoko cost them €2.5m and he’s reportedly set for talks with Real Madrid for what you can expect to be a fee of at least ten times that number. If Ashley had his way then there’d be several more examples of comparable successes but the club happened to overlook the fact that players also need to be playing well if you want to start a bidding war. Too many of these players seemed under-motivated as the club wasted a fifth place finish in 2011-12 to finish 16th, 10th, 15th and 18th in the following seasons. Alan Pardew finally fell out and was let loose to Crystal Palace in 2015 and that’s when things really got bad.
In came John Carver for the rest of the season as caretaker. It was ugly. Carver oversaw eight consecutive league defeats at one point, though that didn’t deter him, declaring: "I still think I'm the best coach in the Premier League.” There were talks of near mutinies in the squad, who Carver threw under the bus by claiming Jack Colback was the only one worth a damn of the lot of them – he even suggested that Mike Williamson got himself sent off on purpose in a 3-0 defeat to Leicester. An open letter to fans from Fabio Coloccini via the club’s PR team didn’t exactly appease things and Steve McClaren took over for the next season.
Clearly spotting the need to upgrade the squad, Newcastle under McClaren made nine significant additions to the club, including during January (while Williamson was sold to Wolves for next to nothing). In fact only Manchester City, Manchester United and Liverpool spent more money and only City had a worse net spend. Of those incoming players, Georginio Wijnaldum was very good, Aleksandar Mitrovic was often good and Andros Townsend was great under Rafa. Jonjo Shelvey had a couple moments but on the whole it just didn’t work – we don’t even need to start on the bust that was Florian Thauvin. Newcastle struggled for consistency and with a bigger squad it was even harder to keep them all happy. End result: McClaren was sacked and the club was relegated.
Benitez is changing things, though. He’s somehow gotten through to Mike Ashley and managing director Lee Charnley and already you can see the framework of a proper football club emerging once more.
The first thing he brings is stability. The opportunity to enter a new season building off the promising way they ended the last one, with only one defeat in ten despite the drop. Obviously there’s a feeling that if they’d only brought him in earlier then Newcastle could still be in the Premier League but if that was the case then maybe Rafa wouldn’t be able to wield his influence as he has. Because along with stability, you also have confidence. Players trust him and want to play for him. The fans see a figure they can trust and that inspires hope and belief on the terraces – despite dropping a division, Newcastle has almost unbelievably seen an increase in season tickets sold. 33000 of them by mid-July.
All of this is reflected in their transfer business better than anywhere. The releases of Steven Taylor and Fabio Coloccini made sense with the club going in a new direction, while getting a little bit of cash back for offloading the contracts of Papiss Cisse and Remy Cabella, two fellas sinking to the fringes of the squad, is a positive as well. However it was getting big bucks for Wijnaldum that’s really funding everything. If/when Moussa Sissoko leaves then you can double that transfer kitty. Andros Townsend is the other first teamer to have left, heading to Crystal Palace with Dwight Gayle coming in the other direction, though in a separate deal (for a small profit). Cheik Tiote is also on the verge of leaving, Florian Thauvin likely to follow him out, yet for the most part the club has kept a hold of the guys that Benitez wants to keep. Most relegated teams don’t get to say that, Norwich have already lost Nathan Redmond with others possible to follow whereas Aston Villa just announced that Everton have purchased Idrissa Gueye, with Ciaran Clark probably on the way out to and guess where he’s headed?
As well as that, he’s made six new signings, all showing an impressive level of ambition for a team in this position. After getting Gayle to swap the Premier League for the Championship, Rafa has convinced Bournemouth/Scotland winger Matt Ritchie to do the same. Grant Hanley comes in from Blackburn to strengthen the defence and Isaac Hayden, an Arsenal youth teamer, joins the midfield. Four British players for a club that has been dealing in mostly continental talent recently. Matz Sels is a decent quality keeper that’ll aid a position where the club has struggled immensely with injuries in recent years but if you really wanna see how Rafa Benitez is flexing his power at the club you need look no further than the free agent signing of Jesus Gamez from Atletico Madrid. At 31 years old, the Spanish defender is the oldest player signed by Newcastle since 2009. Only one man is making the decisions now and it ain’t Moneybags Mike Ashley.
Sticking with the gravitational pull idea, Newcastle have triggered the release clauses of Hull midfielder Mohamed Diame and Aston Villa defender Ciaran Clark (good guess) who are probably completing their medicals as this is written and Rafa has publically said that there will be more movement. It’s a busy time, players probably bumping into each other going in and out the front door, but the important thing is that it doesn’t have to be done all at once, assuming they get promoted Benitez will have another full summer window to strengthen further. Plus at the lower level, the margins for error are a little wider. He can afford a period of integrating this new squad together because in a competition as wide open as the Championship, a three week winning streak can send you soaring up the table.
And what you’re seeing is Newcastle going after players that will be a part of their plans for promotion and beyond, not just players who top out at the Championship level. Diame played Champo last year but for a team that earned promotion and he has Premier League experience, as does Clark who was one of the few decent Villans last time out and will be playing Champs for Villa anyway. Hanley is a young defender who has done well at this level and has room to evolve. Isaac Hayden did okay at loan with Hull last season and probably needs this one to further establish himself. Ritchie has also shown success at both the top and second flight, Gayle too.
The argument will always be there that it’s still not worth getting relegated for but Newcastle will be a better team for succeeding in the Championship than they would have been scrapping in transition in the bottom half of the Prem once again. Even the players that they have, many of them are going to thrive being able to play this stuff. Jamaal Lascelles, Chancel Mbemba and Aleksandar Mitrovic are great examples of players who have the potential to be leading Premier Leaguers in their positions but all three are 22 or younger and were wildly inconsistent last season despite the promise. Mitrovic especially, he has some pretty frustrating problems with temperament and maturity that can only be solved with the passage of time. This season out of the spotlight, where he can play regularly, should be huge for him and if he or Gayle or Ayoze Perez can score 20+ goals this season, well we’ve seen recently through guys like Jamie Vardy, Charlie Austin, Troy Deeney, Callum Wilson, Odion Ighalo and plenty others how confidence drawn from Championship form can still flow into the top division despite the apparent gulf in finance between the two – a gulf that Newcastle are having no trouble at all with thanks to all of this.
Where this gets tricky is if they don’t get promoted for whatever reason. Then the club is left in a weird place where they’ve got this Premier League standard squad, probably many of them on top flight wages too and while they’ve shown they’ll sacrifice this season down a division to work on something that could be special, it’s a tougher ask to get them to do that for two years. Fair to say that Rafa Benitez is the one thing holding many of them in place right now.
But to get back to that other allusion, this really could be something special. In any way it’ll be an experiment like we’ve never seen before. This kinds of thing, it doesn’t happen. Managers of this pedigree don’t take on jobs out of top divisions at this stage of their careers – Benitez isn’t an up and comer nor is he an old fella winding down, he’s 56 years old for God’s sake. Plus while teams bottom out and go on the rebuild in football, it’s rare that you see them do it in a lower division. Mostly that’s because teams with the financial status and the fanbase of Newcastle United tend not to be relegated in the first place, which is one reason why this model isn’t exactly going to become the norm for strugglers. This is sort of an ‘everything falling into place at once’ situation that won’t be easily replicated.
And none of it would have been possible without Rafa buying in. If he doesn’t return, they end up with at best a Nigel Pearson type manager, at worst a Tim Sherwood and whoever it was they surely wouldn’t have the control that Benitez has. Wijnaldum and Sissoko would be sold all the same but they wouldn’t bring in the replacements. Fans would still be staging protests and walkouts, ticket sales would be low. Expectations would be lower. It’d be the same Newcastle we’ve known the last few years only even more shambolic.
One guy sees something to work with, though, and now we’re looking at one of the most exciting team projects in English football. And it’s Rafael Bloody Benitez of all folks. Hey, credit where it’s due, Rafa’s not always gotten the best press in his career. From his horribly misjudged Facts Rant against Sir Alex Ferguson that time to when the Sampdoria president said he was too fat to manage his team. He has this reputation, kinda undeserved, as a cold, cerebral manager and here he is taking a job with immense risk but also immense passion, vision and romance.
As Ali G, another famous goateed man, would say: Respect.
