Alan Pardew’s time at Newcastle always looked as though it might end messily. Which just goes to show how wrong you can be because in the event Pardew’s (imminent) departure has been an oddly frictionless business, a very grown up, strangely sexless public divorce. Pardew out, they said. Well, he’s going now, not sacked, but off on his own terms. At the end of which everybody concerned seems, on the face of it, to have cause to be jarringly almost-happy.
The anti-Pardew rump among Newcastle’s fans can congratulate itself on having helped usher off a manager who was disproportionately but still undeniably unpopular. Crystal Palace have what looks a good appointment in a fractured season. Pardew himself leaves Newcastle with a profile reconditioned: a slightly wonky appointment four years ago, he has now been elevated to a spot among the elite mid-rangers of the Premier League, an angrier Bruce, a less convincing Allardyce, a River Island Tony Pulis. Meanwhile Mike Ashley has reinforced his well-earned reputation for expertise in flogging off sporting goods you’re not sure you really want at a phoney knock-down price. Box fresh Pardew: recommended retail price £6m. Yours not for £4m, or £3m, but – and I’m robbing myself here – just two million pounds!
Beyond this nothing about the Pardew era (success, stagnation: nobody really knows for sure) makes much sense. Just as the details of this strangely acrimonious non-sacking don’t follow any of the familiar patterns. None of the usual rap sheet elements are there. The team are doing well enough. The dressing room is united. Signings have been good (and indeed largely out of Pardew’s hands). There is no obviously better contender lurking in the wings.
From a distance it feels, in between the headlines, like a drama with a hole in it. There is nothing to get your teeth into beyond the only really tangible fact of Pardew’s very obvious unpopularity with Newcastle’s fans. And even this is unprecedentedly personal, a function of that oddly jarring presence, the touchline peacocking, the grating amour-propre, the willingness to comport himself like a kind of north-east Mourinho while in reality acting as a tame – and it must be said very effective – place-man for his chairman’s vision of mid-range, profitable stasis.
With this in mind a common response in the wider footballing world has been a sigh of weary foreboding. Be careful what you wish for, Geordie malcontents. A Pardew in the hand is better than an ill-fated Fabricio Coloccini in the bush. There is even a slightly depressing case to be made that Pardew was, though a perfect storm of niche motivational skills and professional neediness, exactly the right man in the right place to keep this particular ship on its even-keeled course.
And yet even this is a point of confusion. Just as success is increasingly difficult to quantify in a sport so brutally stratified by money (are Newcastle succeeding? Are Arsenal? Are Manchester City? Nobody knows) so Pardew’s success or failure at Newcastle is unlikely to become any clearer with the passing of time. Under Coloccini or Peter Beardsley, or Steve Howey or Mirandinha, a Pardew-less Newcastle may yet end up struggling. But they might have ended up struggling anyway, just as they did while winning only six of 30 matches played between the end of December last year and mid-October this.
What seems more likely, and more bizarre in its own way, is that Pardew has instead been neither particularly good nor particularly bad, neither a semi-concealed disaster nor a count-your-blessings success. He has instead been more or less irrelevant, at best a handy organiser and conveniently noisy distraction from the real operation at hand.
The notable successes of the last four years are clear enough: the excellent transfer policy that has seen Newcastle sell their best players for a profit while keeping the plates spinning on the pitch; the Alanus mirabilis of 2011-12 when a depleted squad finished fifth in the Premier League; and at year’s end a consistent profit on the balance sheet.
There is an argument Pardew had little to do with the first and last of these. The chief scout remains in place. The commercial team is unchanged. The man who nails up the Sports Direct billboards is still on the payroll. In the middle of which the manager looks no more than a willing and capable motivator in an ever-changing dressing room, plus a very useful lightning rod for dissent that might otherwise have been directed towards more sensitive targets.
The most convincing argument for change has always been the suggestion that all the fans really want – hang the league position – is a more attacking, ambitious style of football. But even this seems oddly detached from reality. Ashley isn’t interested in risk-taking or cavalier football and will ensure above all that the current profitable stasis is maintained. Indeed from this angle, the Pardew-bile, the yearning for something to stir the blood, looks like an expression of a more profound dissatisfaction with the way Newcastle, and indeed football itself, is now headed.
The real sense of ennui here is simply the boredom of diminished possibilities. This is a club that has existed in a state of gloriously thwarted ambition for the last 60 years. But which is now in the grip of a business model designed not with glory or even particularly entertainment in mind. Instead Ashley’s sights remain set on staying in the top 10, selling profitably and sitting on the club like a London property tycoon watching the TV rights market rise around him, all the while providing a global billboard for the world’s most bizarrely overexposed cut-price tracksuit shop.
It is always tempting to paint Ashley as a kind of corporate homunculus, draining the city’s historic passions to service his interests elsewhere. But like the notion of Pardew as a grand managerial villain finally ousted, it is a construct that falls to pieces under any serious scrutiny. Instead Ashley is a shrewd and timely operator who has bent Newcastle United to fit the restricted horizons of the new footballing world. Seven years ago the club was in hock at every level and making unsustainable losses. Ashley has INVESTED
It is a considerable achievement, albeit one in which successive managerial place-men have had relatively little input, and in which the desire of the fans to be transported, seduced with dreams of something larger, has been essentially ignored. Just look at some of the names punted about as permanent appointments: Jürgen Klopp, Frank de Boer, Rafa Benítez, rapaciously ambitious and demanding managers, Ashley kryptonite every single one of them. The disjunct between supporter expectation and the limits of the role has never been clearer.
What does seem certain is that the feeling of broader alienation is unlikely to be dissipated by Pardew’s departure and that for now it is unrealistic to expect anything more than different shades of Alan in the dugout. And beyond this that the sense of very vocal alienation at Newcastle and beyond – including at least one club that is currently in the last 16 of the Champions League – will remain a persistent background music.