Depending on how you define it, Newcastle United are the richest sports team/club/franchise on the planet.
Despite wink-wink assurances from the Premier League that the Saudi Arabian government would not be involved with the running of the club, the majority of Newcastle is owned by Saudi Arabia‘s Public Investment Fund, which is chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The PIF, per recent estimates, controls around $620 billion in assets.
According to Forbes, LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is the richest American sports owner, and he’s worth around $80 billion. The richest NFL owner, Walmart heir Rob Walton, who led the purchase of the Denver Broncos last year, is worth around $55 billion. Combined, the two wealthiest American sports owners are worth less than a quarter of Newcastle’s owners. Put another way, the combined wealth of the 19 other Premier League ownership groups is somewhere around $200 billion.
Given the, uh, let’s say unclear source of Sheikh Mansour’s funding of Manchester City — Abu Dhabi has a sovereign wealth fund worth close to $800 billion, though the club isn’t explicitly owned by the fund in the same way Newcastle is — the comparison to other Premier League clubs might not be totally accurate, but the point stands: even the richest individuals or groups of the richest individuals don’t exist in the same universe of financial power as nation-state funding. The average person literally can’t comprehend what it’s like to have a billion dollars; the average billionaire can’t comprehend what it’s like to have a sovereign wealth fund.
Given all of that — and given the relatively tight link between spending and performance in the Premier League — it’s no surprise that Newcastle went from fighting relegation a year ago to a League Cup final and a real shot at Champions League qualification today. But the scary part for the rest of the league is that they haven’t even really started spending like the state-sponsored teams of the past or Roman Abramovich-era Chelsea. The most famous player on the Newcastle team is … Kieran Trippier? Their leading scorer is Miguel Almiron.
So, ahead of the first cup final of the PIF era, let’s take a look at how they got here so quickly.
First things first: So how much better are they?
From a pure points perspective, Newcastle are half a point better per game than last season. They averaged 1.3 points per game in 2021-22 and that’s bumped up to 1.8 this year. Although they’re currently technically in fifth place behind Tottenham, they’re averaging the fourth-most points per game. Over the course of a full season, which would average out to a 19-point improvement: about 49 points to 68 points.
There’s nothing really fluky about it, either. If anything, the fluke is that they’re not in third place and are instead fighting it out for fourth. Although eight teams have scored more goals this season, Newcastle have allowed the fewest in the league. Through 22 matches, they’ve conceded just 15 times — eight fewer than anyone else in the league. All in all, it adds up to a plus-20 goal differential, the third-best mark in the league. And although they’re running quite hot on the defensive end (15 goals allowed from 22.5 expected goals), some of that comes from the above-average shot stopping (if below-average sweeper-keeping) of Nick Pope.
Oh, and as you can see here, when compared to their fellow top-four challengers, they’ve been much better defensively than Brighton and Manchester United while roughly equivalent on the attacking end. They can’t attack like Liverpool, but their defense might as well be playing different sports, and they’ve been better than Tottenham this season in every aspect of the game other than turning goals into wins.
More often than not, these performances put Newcastle in third place at this point in the season, but a battle for fourth is still so far away from where they were a year ago.
How much of that, though, is purely down to their improvement? One of the overriding stories of this Premier League season is, well, how bad most of the good teams have been. Three of last season’s Champions League qualifiers, Tottenham, Liverpool and Chelsea, have all had their own meltdowns to varying degrees, while Manchester City don’t seem to be clicking and functioning as fluidly as they have been in seasons past, either. Even West Ham — a top-six contender over the past two or three seasons — are currently in a relegation fight.
Overall, the bar for European qualification this season seems way lower than it has been or likely will be at any time soon.
While it’s impossible to contextualize all of that in your head, FiveThirtyEight’s Soccer Power Index serves as a nice level-setter. The model takes into account results and underlying numbers to constantly update each team’s rating to a 0 to 100 number, which doubles as the likelihood that a given team would be an average side on a neutral field.
Some of the earlier numbers probably undersell how much Newcastle have improved.
Ownership didn’t change until midway through last season, which is when Eddie Howe took over for Steve Bruce, too. When the PIF came in, the club’s SPI rating was 62.3. It’s now all the way up to 79.7 — or the 15th-best mark of … any club in the world. As of today, 62.3 would rank them 82nd — a few spots above Everton, but well below Wolves. At the same time, at the end of last season, six Premier League teams had a better SPI number than Newcastle have right now. They’ve massively improved, while a bunch of other teams have gone in the opposite direction.
Why are they so much better?
Let’s start with the players, i.e. the people who win the games. There’s been a significant amount of turnover from last year to this year, which explains a good deal of the team’s improvement.
At the top, goalkeeper Pope, who is suspended for the Carabao Cup final, has played nearly 100% of the league minutes after not being on the team last season. Per Stats Perform, he’s conceded 2.2 goals fewer than the average keeper would be expected to when facing the exact same shots.
The other two big changes to the makeup of the team are Sven Botman and Kieran Trippier. Botman wasn’t on the team last season: he was playing in the Champions League for defending Ligue 1 champions Lille, but has played 86% of the minutes so far this season. Trippier, meanwhile, has been featured in 97% of the minutes after taking up just 13% of the available playing time (he arrived in January and then got hurt) last year. The 32-year-old also came over from a Champions League side, and he’s simply been the best right-back in the league this season.
Just look at this chart, comparing all players by expected assists and passes into the penalty area. Trippier is the red dot:
The other players who have played at least 20% more often than last season are a mix of post-PIF arrivals and players who were already at the club. Dan Burn, a January 2022 signing, has played 94% of the minutes as a conservative left-back, allowing Trippier to push forward and nearly break that chart you just saw. Miguel Almiron, as already mentioned, is the team’s leading scorer; he’s played 90% of the minutes this season after being featured just 50% of the time last season. While his production has cooled in 2023, he’s still posting career-high xG and xA numbers.
In the midfield, two players have increased their playing time by around 40% since last year: Bruno Guimaraes, a January 2022 arrival who looks like a true do-everything midfield superstar, and Sean Longstaff, who has spent most of his career looking like pretty much the exact opposite of that, but has contributed a decent number of shots and assists for a tertiary midfielder.
Center-back Fabian Schar, who was already at the club, went from two-thirds of the minutes last season to 95% of the minutes this year. To steal a phrase from The Athletic’s Michael Cox, he’s the dog to Botman’s cat.
Lastly, there’s Alexander Isak, last summer’s club-record signing young-striker prospect who surely must be driving their improved performance, right? Wrong: Isak’s played just about 20% of the minutes and scored just three league goals.
Is that really enough to explain all this?
Although they haven’t brought in any big-name superstars yet, Newcastle have spent a lot of money. Since the summer, only Manchester United and Chelsea have had a higher net-spend on transfer fees, per Transfermarkt. Among their 11 most-used players this season, five of them were brought in after the PIF’s takeover.
The other big change, of course, was replacing Bruce with Howe. The latter has obviously driven the increased performance, too. He’s moved Joelinton from attack into midfield, and he has the team just playing in a more dynamic, athletic way than the drop-deep-and-try-to-counter-a-couple times style they played under Bruce. That change seems to have suited Almiron particularly well, too.
This chart, which contains each of the individual club seasons from the past two years, shows both how much things have changed and the uniqueness of Newcastle’s approach.
As you can see, most teams haven’t changed much year on year: they move the ball up the field (direct speed, or “meters per second”) at roughly the same rates and break up opposition passing at similar rates. Not Newcastle, though. They went from being one of the easiest teams to pass against (21-22 is top right) to one of the hardest to pass against. Yet, they’re still able to move the ball upfield quickly — way quicker than any of the other teams in the chase for the top four.
Except, even that doesn’t still feel satisfying, does it? A team starting Almiron, Longstaff and Burn has the third-best goal differential in what’s supposed to be the most competitive league in the world!
One final factor: They haven’t played many games.
Since the start of last season, Liverpool have played 96 competitive matches, while Manchester City and Chelsea have played 95. West Ham hit 90, while Manchester United and Tottenham are both on 87. The surprise leaders, Arsenal, are down at 77, while Newcastle, the surprise Champions League challengers, have played just 70 games. Among the teams currently in the Premier League, only Aston Villa have played fewer (67). Without so much physical demand on their players, Newcastle have been able to rely on a small core of talent, with 10 players who have featured in at least two-thirds of their minutes.
When you take it all together, it almost makes sense. Newcastle made marginal upgrades across the roster. They’re getting a career year out of Trippier. Bruno G is a star. Eddie Howe is pushing all the right buttons and their players are fresh, while everyone else’s are running on fumes.
With 15 games to go, FiveThirtyEight gives Newcastle about a 1-in-3 chance of finishing top four, with around another third each to Tottenham and Liverpool. And there’s no reason why they can’t beat Manchester United this weekend in the Carabao Cup, either.
Those are the names of the clubs that Newcastle was supposed to be competing with … in 2027, not 2023. But thanks to a confluence of factors, they’re already here. And given what we know about how much spending drives success, it likely won’t be long until they’re somewhere else.