New-look Newcastle now setting sights so low that even success looks like failure | OneFootball

It’s interesting to read the replies on X-formerly-Twitter to Luke Edwards’ attempt to convince Newcastle fans – and quite possibly himself – that everything might be okay despite a summer that has now seen the club lose three of its best players and manager.

“It’s been a car-crash summer but Newcastle 2.0 can still work” is a headline that has certainly caught the attention of Newcastle Twitter.

And what makes it interesting is that they are largely unanimous in being furious about it. Just for two completely opposing reasons.

There are those unwilling at this time to accept any kind of optimism about what might be in store for Newcastle in the short, medium or long term. This is, it has to be noted, the majority voice.

But there’s also a sizeable minority of happy-clappers whose displeasure is aimed not at the idea that everything might still turn out just about okay somehow, but that it’s even been a car crash at all. To us, that’s a fascinating point of view.

We have to believe it’s copium, because it’s been a worse summer than Newcastle could possibly have feared. And they feared another troubled one on the back of a harrowing 2025 summer and horribly disappointing 25/26 season.

Mediawatch has dealt in some detail with Edwards’ piece, but a key point for us is the idea that losing a manager and, across the last 12 months, four of the biggest and most significant players in the squad and then replacing them with a manager who has no big-league experience and a host of young, inexperienced players is a plan that ever really works well for anyone, anywhere.

There is, as wry old Mediawatch put it, more than a hint in Edwards’ desperation to apply some kind of positive spin of the Arrested Development ‘but it might work for us’ meme.

Perhaps more importantly still, even in this attempt to put the most positive possible spin imaginable on recent events there’s an acceptance of failure.

The plan for Newcastle 2.0 is to become a bigger version of the admirable and canny B teams – your Brightons, your Brentfords, your Bournemouths.

Two issues here. First, even if that works, it’s a failure. Because that is simply not the vision the fans were offered when being asked to sell their soul to the Saudis. Newcastle fans didn’t entirely throw away the vast amount of goodwill that genuinely did exist towards the club to become a slightly heftier version of Brighton.

They were promised – or at least certainly expected – a pathway to Man City or Chelsea success levels that might feasibly justify the means and create enough noise to quiet down those pesky voices inside their heads.

Being Bournemouth but on a slightly larger scale was never going to be worth all of the trauma.

But there’s a second and even more fundamental issue. It won’t work. It can’t work. Newcastle cannot be just a slightly bigger version of the B teams because that isn’t a thing that exists. That is not a place in the food chain Newcastle are willing to accept.

This is a club whose supporters have started an online discourse over whether Arsenal are even meaningfully bigger than they are. Short answer: They are.

Newcastle 2.0 appears to be a club busily turning a floor into a ceiling, not so much seeking to curb expectations as crush any lingering ambition or even hope altogether.

How do they achieve escape velocity from their new reduced circumstances? There were no guarantees that trying to become a proper member of the Big Six/Seven/Eight/Whatever would work, but at least it plausibly could have. If, in the wildly unlikely event all these very talented but very, very raw new ingredients do by some alchemic miracle produce a team capable of challenging the top six, what stops them all just being picked off if Newcastle are just striving to be the Biggest Bees?

The current crop have been picked off at a time when Newcastle have, at least in theory, carried loftier ambition to try and convince those stars whose stock has risen so high during their time in black and white that they could achieve their goals here.

How to do that with a next generation where even that possibility apparently no longer applies?

A catastrophic worst-case scenario just looks so much likelier for Newcastle now than any best-case scenario. And not only because we’re no longer sure what a best-case scenario even looks like for a club that qualified for the Champions League only 15 months ago but has been doom-spiralling ever since.

In summary, then: things seem far more likely to go badly than to go well. And even if they do go well on the club’s newly stated terms, they’re still probably quite bad.