Newcastle United were sold for £305m in 2021 and the club's valuation has since soared at a time when a 43% stake in Crystal Palace costs £190m
Newcastle United owners Yasir Al-Rumayyan and Jamie Reuben with Kieran Trippier
Newcastle United owners Yasir Al-Rumayyan and Jamie Reuben with Kieran Trippier
Jamie Reuben felt that Newcastle United's owners bought the club for a 'decent price' - and it certainly looks that way.
After all, it has cost New York Jets owner Woody Johnson around £190m just to buy a 43% stake in Crystal Palace. This deal values the FA Cup winners, as a whole, at a figure beyond the £305m that Newcastle commanded in 2021.
Although it is worth remembering the perilous situation that relegation-threatened Newcastle were in at the time, and the subsequent sums that have been pumped into the club, purchase prices have soared since then as football finance expert Kieran Maguire explained.
"Newcastle went for £305m and that's increasingly looking like a huge bargain," he previously said. "It's unusual for Mike Ashley to sell at too low a price or it could have been a superb piece of negotiating by Amanda Staveley, but we have certainly seen an increase in the value of the cost of football clubs in the last couple of years."
For context, since the takeover, Chelsea have been sold for £4.25bn, a minority stake in Manchester United cost Sir Jim Ratcliffe £1.25bn and even a 10% share in Chelsea Women went for £20m last month.
Newcastle still have a long way to go to reach anything close to the valuations of the established order, but the Magpies' rise has even been noted by Forbes, the American business magazine, who listed the black-and-whites in the world's top 20 most valuable clubs earlier this month.
Newcastle's income streams have more than doubled from £140.2m in the final full campaign of the Ashley era to £320.3m last season and CEO Darren Eales stated that the black-and-whites' 32% compound annual growth rate was 'more than any club has done before'.
Newcastle have made a quiet start to the window, but the Magpies remain in a strong position to recruit this summer and the owners have committed to 'spending to the max' allowed within PSR rules.
"The good news is when I talk about PSR it's always a yearly cycle so you can see that we had to do our housework in these windows," Eales said a few months ago.
"In these financial accounts - 23/24 - we had to do what we had to do, that year was a good year for us in terms of PSR and it's still part of our three-year cycle.
"So the good news is it gets a little bit easier once you have a good season like we had in these accounts to invest in the future."
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