Newcastle better off without Conference League as financial situation laid bare by experience

On Tuesday, the Toon posted their accounts, which showed an increase of £15m the previous year.

Though that was largely due to selling the 72-year leasehold on St James’ Park to a subsidiary company for £172.1m, which generated £129m in paper profit.

Without that, they would have posted a club-record £98.4m loss, but instead, the ‘sale trick’, which has been used by Chelsea in the past, saw them declare a total pre-tax profit of £34.7m.

Having crashed out of the Carabao Cup, FA Cup and Champions League in the space of six weeks, Newcastle have also struggled for consistency in the Premier League.

Sitting 12th in the table following a 2-1 defeat to bitter rivals Sunderland, the Tyneside outfit are in a fight to be playing across the continent next term.

The Premier League are on course to benefit from an extra Champions League place by UEFA, with the Europa League spots extending from sixth to seventh should a team that finishes in the top five win the FA Cup.

Currently, Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool remain in the tournament ahead of this weekend’s quarter-finals.

“Because if you qualify for the Conference, you have to abide by UEFA’s rules which say that you can only spend 70 per cent of your revenue on player costs.

“If you don’t qualify for Europe and finish eighth [or ninth], you can spend 85 per cent [instead of 85 per cent under Premier League rules].

“I had a long conversation with the club, and [a Newcastle figure] said, ‘Yeah, Albania on a Thursday night, nobody particularly wants to go there from the club, apart from the fans, and we certainly don’t want to do that from the boardroom point of view.’

“So what the Premier League wanted to do, was to make sure that those clubs that were regularly not qualifying for Europe, to give them a little bit of a bonus, a little bit of a benefit to try to encourage them to try them to encourage them to vote in favour of the SCR [Squad Cost Ratio] rules.

“And it has to be remembered, that the vote was 14-6, so you have to have a two-thirds majority, so it was the bare majority, it was always the bare vote that went through to allow this change, and therefore concessions were given.

“But I don’t think it was necessarily thought through, but some of the smarter kids in the room have already crunched the numbers and have worked out that you’ve got this overhang, which does seem crazy.

“The way that the money is distributed under the UEFA rules, is that if you’re in the Champions League, for every £1 you get there, you get 22p in the Europa League itself, and then you only get 11p in the Conference.

“And as you can see, it’s not really worth the effort from the club’s financial point of view.

“But football clubs are far more than surely about financing, because Newcastle United didn’t get a lot of money from winning the Carabao Cup [£100k] last year, but they still created memories which will stay with fans forever.