'It's Dog Eat Dog' Says Magpies Chairman - 30/11/2004

Large and financially successful football clubs should not be concerned about those struggling at the lower end of the industry, 'popular' Newcastle chairman Freddy Shepherd told a football conference in Dubai. 'I think it is dog-eat-dog', he said. 'The big fight will be for the Premier League to take over the running of the other leagues. The others cannot hold us back, the time will come, I think, when it is the Premier League running the whole show. Many of these other clubs will have to go part-time. When we have got 52,000 fans at each home game, the last thing we are worried about is clubs in the third division.' No stranger to controversy, Shepherd responded to claims that Premiership clubs needed 72 clubs thriving under them in a solid Football League pyramid by commenting, 'There is no sympathy here.' Newcastle board members have made trenchant remarks about their own fans in the past and the boss of the team also known as the 'Barcodes' explained, 'We run Newcastle United as a business. We are not ashamed to say we take a dividend out of it, but at the end of the day we are fans too.' Mr Shepherd complained that the arrival of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea had distorted the amount top clubs had to pay for players: 'We had transfer fees going down to realistic levels ... He came in and has blown the market up to the skies.' The Newcastle boss said that the club was still working on a project to get a Newcastle-based team to play in the Hong Kong league. He also unveiled a Geordie tour of the US to coincide with the release of the film Goal! which was filmed at St James's Park. There was an interesting contrast between Mr Shepherd's remarks and the opening comments of Soccerex chairman Tony Martin who had commented, 'The beautiful game must also be the beautiful business.' He said that 'quality management' was needed in the running of football clubs and warning that falling gates in England had to be addressed with some urgency. Shepherd's remarks do have some basis in reality as top clubs are now far less reliant on players developed in the lower divisions. But the clubs in those divisions are still important to the identity of their fans and the communities in which they live.