“We are like the Basques. We are fighting for a nation, the Geordie nation. Football means so much to us, it is part of our lives. Football is tribalism, and we are the Mohicans.” Sir John Hall, January 1995.
Newcastle United’s former chairman and part-owner always loved a grand vision with a north-east twist.
Hall was the businessman who had overseen the construction of the Metro Centre, Europe’s largest shopping mall, in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. Thinking small was not part of his worldview.
His stewardship of the city’s football club was transformative, pulling it back from the brink of oblivion in the early 1990s to become a force in the Premier League, with a renovated stadium and a dashing, doomed team, managed by Kevin Keegan, which broke the mould for attacking talent, and, ultimately, broke hearts.
Not all of Hall’s visions were prophetic. His dream of a Newcastle United sporting club to rival Barcelona’s brought the roughshod acquisition of local rugby union, basketball and ice hockey teams, a concept that was born amid division and died with disastrous dissolution.
His dream of Newcastle one day fielding a team comprising 11 Geordie players was also undermined from within, with Keegan scrapping the reserve side in protest at the over-use of the St James’ Park pitch. When Kenny Dalglish replaced Keegan in 1997, “There was no pathway for kids to get to the first-team,” as he told The Athletic a few years ago.
In those days (much like these days), Newcastle’s ambition had raced way ahead of its infrastructure.
Sir John Hall, centre, at the unveiling of Newcastle manager Kenny Dalglish, right, and assistant Terry McDermott (Stevie Morton/Allsport/Getty Images)
The Athletic has written in depth about local players at Newcastle, or a lack of them, in the Premier League. We have also gone behind the scenes at the academy, which is managed by Steve Harper, the club’s former goalkeeper and longest-serving player.
Yet with Spain’s Athletic Club visiting Tyneside in the Champions League on Wednesday, that idea of a Geordie identity feels pertinent, particularly after the 3-1 defeat at West Ham United on Sunday, when it was difficult to work out what Eddie Howe’s team were trying to do or trying to be, apart from ineffective. Athletic, from Bilbao, only field players who, according to their official website, were “either born in the Basque Country or brought up here”.
This remains a fantasy, a pipe-dream for Newcastle. Dan Burn was the only Geordie to start for the club against West Ham at the weekend, although Jacob Murphy, the winger, was a boyhood Newcastle fan and his parents are from the region. Lewis Hall has a similar background to Murphy and was on the substitutes’ bench, as was Lewis Miley, who was born in Stanley, Co Durham, and progressed through Newcastle’s academy.
In recent years, brothers Sean and Matty Longstaff have represented the team, while Elliot Anderson, who was serenaded by fans as the “Geordie Maradona”, was reluctantly sold to Nottingham Forest last year.
Elliot Anderson throws his Newcastle shirt to fans at a friendly in Australia (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
It is also not a level playing field. The Basque Country has a population of well more than three million. Newcastle-upon-Tyne has a population of 320,000, and the neighbouring county of Northumberland is about the same.
Are there other, related parallels? Is there a Geordie identity in footballing terms? Is that a thing?
“I think it is,” Howe said at his latest pre-match press conference. “My kids are playing football here, so I’m getting a unique look at football at that level. You see that enthusiasm, love and passion for the game are unparalleled here.
“I visited Athletic Club and (fellow Basques) Real Sociedad a few years ago and had a really good few days with them, and I think it would be similar. The link is there.”
Howe has previously spoken about retaining a local core within his squad. “By preference, you would have a sprinkling of players who have come through the youth system, have a great understanding of the club and can educate new players coming in on expectations and how things have been done,” he told reporters in January.
This, of course, could apply as much to Bournemouth as to Newcastle, and the truth is that Geordie for Geordie’s sake has never been especially venerated at St James’. A cliche became entrenched in the Mike Ashley era of a club at war with the “Cockney mafia” then running it, but birthplace had nothing to do with it, which became apparent when Steve Bruce replaced Rafa Benitez as manager in 2019.
Benitez, a Spaniard who spoke about Newcastle’s history and ambition rather than its stunted reality, was adored. Bruce, a Geordie who had played for Manchester United in the 1990s and gone on to manage Sunderland, Newcastle’s local rivals, effectively came home a stranger. He had no hinterland.
Sean Longstaff — who moved to Leeds United in the summer — and Burn have often felt the brunt of criticism when team performances have suffered. Longstaff told reporters in 2020 that “being from Newcastle can be a bit of a burden at times, because anything that does happen, you’re the first one to get pointed at”.
At the same time, Burn’s story of watching Sir Bobby Robson’s Newcastle team in the Champions League as a kid, scoring in a hammering of Paris Saint-Germain, winning a trophy with his hometown club and surging into the England team is beautiful and compelling. He has played every minute of every match for Newcastle this season, aside from their Carabao Cup victory over third-division Bradford City, when he was given a rare night off. His quality and his attitude are integral.
A Newcastle fan holds up a banner celebrating local hero Dan Burn (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
When Hall spoke about a Geordie “nation” where “football means so much to us”, it tapped into something else. First, it is that idea of separation, whether politically, geographically, spiritually or all three. This is a consequence of the north east’s place in the United Kingdom, nearly 300 miles from London, a history of corroded industrialism and that sense of being ignored. Merseyside has a similar feeling of isolation.
Football in Newcastle has traditionally been portrayed as part of a great release: graft all week and then let off steam at the weekend in a stadium that looms above the city and draws its population towards it on matchday. It is a one-club city, a compact city, with St James’ an iconic structure at its centre.
“When they’ve worked all week, it’s like the people down south going to a theatre, they are going there to be entertained,” Keegan said at his introductory press conference when he returned for a second spell as Newcastle manager, under Ashley, in 2008, an incompatible marriage that swiftly hurtled to the divorce court.
For Keegan, who was born in Doncaster, two hours’ drive to the south, but had a Geordie grandfather, entertainment meant giving the club goals and flair and attacking abandon. In his first stint in the St James’ dugout, they were breathtaking and flawed. Sky Sports loved them, neutrals loved them, and they won nothing, gloriously.
There was a cadre of local players in those teams — Lee Clark, Steve Watson and Peter Beardsley among them, and later Alan Shearer, brought home for a world-record fee of £15million ($23.3m in 1996) — but if you want to know about Geordie love, you would do well to consult Rob Lee or Les Ferdinand, whose London heritage was utterly irrelevant. They gave all of themselves to the club and, in return, were adored for it.
Those outsiders who “get” Newcastle, whatever that looks like, are celebrated, from Pavel Srnicek, the Czech goalkeeper, who was serenaded as “a Geordie”, to Peru’s Nolberto Solano, who fired in crosses for Shearer, played the trumpet and still lives in Gosforth, and Philippe Albert, the wannabe striker from Belgium who played at centre-half and loved reading Viz comic.
The same applies to Bruno Guimaraes, now Howe’s captain and Newcastle’s thumping heartbeat, the team’s tempo-setter, who always seeks the ball and poses like a gladiator in front of the fans after he makes a tackle. “Whenever I pull the shirt on, I try to play like a Geordie, doing everything I can to help the club and the city,” the Brazilian told journalists before the 2-1 Champions League defeat against Barcelona in September.
But what does a Geordie play like? Howe has often referenced Keegan’s team as having a significant influence on him, but his penchant for attacking football is rooted in greater pragmatism. If Newcastle, as a place, “works all week”, then effort is also his starting point — running, pressing and doing the hard yards. Where Keegan’s Newcastle poured forward, Howe’s version — at their best — swarm.
Keegan is perceived as a great romantic, but as Newcastle were being overhauled by a metronymic Manchester United at the top of the Premier League in 1996, he said in a press conference that “first is first and second is nowhere”, an echo of Bill Shankly, the manager he signed for and played under at Liverpool. It gets forgotten, but more than anything, Keegan wanted to win.
Kevin Keegan, with assistant McDermott, during his first, thrilling, stint as Newcastle manager (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Neither Keegan nor Newcastle fans were given a say on their reinvention as the nation’s second-favourite team, and Howe encapsulated something far more elemental when he said, “We’re not here to be popular, we’re here to compete”, shortly after his appointment. Gone were the days of Newcastle being praised for their loyal supporters and then thanked for gifting sides three easy points. Howe’s words also related to the widespread hostility which followed their controversial, Saudi-led takeover in 2021.
Newcastle, as a city, is welcoming and proud, and can be decently hedonistic on a night out. Newcastle’s team, under Howe, has been aggressive and in-your-face and then ebullient, an identity that has been blurred slightly in the aftermath of Alexander Isak’s messy and drawn-out departure to Liverpool this summer and the late, rushed signing of replacements, which they need to reestablish, particularly away from home. In the Champions League, they have been up for it. At West Ham, they were soft.
“You can still have an underdog mentality when you’re not the underdog,” Burn said. “The best teams in the world have that. We could just be a bit more ugly with stuff, something we were well-known for a few years ago.”
Burn explained that he didn’t “want to say the word” out loud, but the phrase in question was “s***-housing“.
Now and forever — however good the team becomes — the Geordie nation needs to fight. It needs its s***-house kings.
Additional reporting: Chris Waugh
