Amanda Staveley: Steve Bruce didn’t want to come to work

Amanda Staveley has revealed that Steve Bruce ‘didn’t want to come to work’ after PIF, PCP and the Reuben family sealed a takeover at Newcastle United, discussing the early challenges they faced following the £300m buyout.

Speaking at today’s Bloomberg summit in Jeddah, she highlighted the long list of issues new owners encountered after purchasing the club back in October 2021.

Alongside issues with Bruce – who was replaced by Eddie Howe a month after the takeover – Staveley also discussed the lack of commercial revenue, the aging squad and the frustrated fanbase who needed investors to ‘inject some life’ back into the club.

“When you go in, you have all of the hype trying to acquire the club – it took us four years to do that” she said. “We know we are patient and persistent, but there needed to be dramatic change, because the club had been run in a very different format.

“We had very few commercial revenues, we had a team that was aging, a coach (Steve Bruce) that basically didn’t even want to come to work, a fanbase that was very angry and we had to take this incredible club and inject it with some life.”

“We have incredible partners (PIF) and they work incredibly hard to make sure that we are all very focused on the business plan. You have to be. 

“You have to make sure you make sensible decisions in terms of the transfer window, keep to your FFP constraints and try to do things that innovate and push outside the box, as that’s the only way we’re going to engage our fanbase and grow the club.

“We have an incredible coach. We have an incredible team. Bringing Eddie in and an executive team was really important. Everyone is very much involved in the day to day running of the club. It’s a very competitive market in terms of players and rules around that, so you have to be very focused.”

Asked if football clubs are now seen as ‘toys for rich people’ or ‘financial assets’ that can be monetised at the Bloomberg summit, Staveley then discussed how the landscape has changed following the introduction of FFP:

“They are very much seen as financial assets. In 2008, the rules and environment around the Premier League changed. Different rules on ownership and stakeholders and then the growth, the incredible growth of the Premier League in terms of the players it is attracting, the media rights that underpin those valuations. They have attracted a lot of institutional investors. 

“I know everyone says ‘oh FFP is difficult’, but it’s actually that regulatory environment that’s allowed private equity to come in and invest, so you’ve got a huge change in the type of owner in the Premier League against 15 years ago.

“On valuation (of Newcastle), PIF and myself, my husband (Mehrdad Ghodoussi) and the Reuben family bought the club well, at less than two times turnover. Most clubs at the top of the league have valuations at five or seven times turnover. We look at things in a more measured way.”