I’m generally in favour of the aims of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST). I’m a Newcastle fan, and I think it would be great for fans of the club to own a stake in the club (or even to fully own the club, if possible); I think it would be brilliant for there to be an elected fans’ representative on the board, and I’m well behind the idea of the club being more open and more accountable to the fans.

In fact, I think this would be a good thing for every football club. Putting rivalries aside for a moment, in general fans have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the directors of their respective clubs. Basically, fans are treated as a cash cow for the club to milk by whatever revenue stream necessary (TV, gate money, merchandise) in order to ensure that the club makes a profit to pay large sums of money to players, directors and shareholders.

Okay, it doesn’t always work that way, but who wouldn’t prefer to see their club run by the fans, for the fans?

And that’s why, despite being a little sceptical that they would be able to raise the amounts of money required, I’ve been firmly behind NUST up to now. Until what I can only see as misinformation coming out of their mouths at the expense of Mike Ashley.

I’m not a fan of Mike Ashley: I don’t see that he has the best interests of the club at heart, and I’m sure he’ll sell up as soon as he finds someone who will meet his asking price. But that’s precisely why this information coming from NUST looks completely bonkers. If I give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s not deliberate misinformation, then it looks like stupidity… and frankly neither of them look particularly good for someone who thinks that they would be able to run the club better and more openly.

What they said was this:

sources have told us that Mr Ashley is making up to £7m profit out of our club every monthNUST: Supporter Survey

Note that they’ve chosen to include the quote (they could easily have skipped it if they felt it was nonsense) — so either they attach credence to the sources or at very least they want the reader to — and they’ve associated it with a survey suggesting that the fans should buy the club from him.

If Mike Ashley was making £84 million pounds per year out of the club, do you really think he’d have tried to sell it only six months ago for around £100 million? There may be better businessmen out there, but I can’t imagine he’d want to sell an asset for only a tiny smidge more than it makes in profit per year.

In the Premiership (when we were making considerably more in TV money), the club had a turnover of £100 million, with £73 million on wages. That year, the club made a loss of £34 million (source: The Guardian, Jan 2009). This means that the other outgoings of the club were around £60 million.

Now, even if you were to assume that all club outgoings were down by two-thirds (a frankly ridiculous scenario), and that income was exactly the same (again, nonsense), then Newcastle would still not be making £7 million per month.

By allowing this sort of information to be associated with their cause without any justification (fine, if they’ve got figures to back up this level of profit, but it seems extraordinary so I’m not going to accept it on their say-so), NUST have made exactly the same false assumption about the credulity of Newcastle supporters that many others have made in the past — and they’ve pretty much destroyed their credibility in the process.

Of course, if they can back up this claim, then I’ll apologise…

But I’m more inclined to believe what I read from the independent NUFC Finances site, which looked into published finances:

A year ago the comment on this site was “In summary what Shepherd left was a club that was losing over £30m a year, had debts of £70m, had no assets they could borrow more money against, and had a set of players on long, lucrative contracts. Ashley can get rid of the debt but the £30m annual losses with over paid players will take longer to sort out.”NUFC Finances

NUST have a lot of explaining to do if they want to regain any credibility. And may I suggest that one of the first things they do — unless, as I said, they can back up that quote — is to apologise to Mike Ashley. He might have done many things wrong, but without him the club would be in a much bigger financial hole.