Newcastle United's future chief financial officer was driving back down the A1. Simon Capper had just watched title-chasing Leicester City comfortably swat aside the Magpies alongside fellow Foxes director Ian Flanagan. The clubs were moving in very different directions at the time, but that trip to St James' Park in 2015 stuck with the pair - and not just because Jamie Vardy had equalled the Premier League record for consecutive goals at St James' Park.
"I remember coming back from that 3-0 game with Simon," Flanagan recalled to ChronicleLive. "We were saying, 'Newcastle have so many of the fundamentals, so many of the ingredients in place, to be a huge success. If they could only get it right.' It was the classic sleeping giant of a club. If it had the right backing and things started going right on the pitch, the sky was the limit."
The last 18 months have proved that, all right, taking Flanagan right back to his days at CSS Stellar Sports, when he looked after Sir Bobby Robson, who was 'phenomenal when he got going on Newcastle'. For the first time since Sir Bobby was in the dugout, Newcastle have finished in the top four and Capper will have a seat in the directors' box for those Champions League nights.
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Little is known about Newcastle's new addition, who does not have a photograph on his Linkedin profile and is not someone you are likely to see quoted in a newspaper, but Flanagan is well-placed to give an insight. It was Flanagan who worked closely with Capper during his four-year stint as Leicester's commercial director. The Irishman was even based in the office next door.
Capper and Flanagan were key figures in a remarkably small executive team, at a time when Leicester chief executive Susan Whelan was predominantly based in Thailand working for the King Power International Group, and the pair were the only directors operating out of the stadium on a day-to-day basis. Capper, as a result, had more responsibilities than most top-flight financial directors and had a far greater understanding of the club's commercial operations than your typical figure in this post.
Capper, as a result, has even been headhunted for CEO positions over the years yet it is rather telling that it is only now that he has decided to move on. It may seem an easy decision - Leicester have just been relegated while Newcastle are a Champions League club - but Capper spent 12 years in the East Midlands and witnessed, in the words of Flanagan, 'everything there is to see in football', including a fairytale Premier League win in 2016.
Newcastle will now tap into that experience and there are certainly parallels with Capper's time at Leicester, whether it is a club going from fighting relegation to upsetting the elite in the space of little more than 12 months or a majority ownership group being based overseas. Perhaps, most interestingly, Capper has also seen huge infrastructural projects take shape at Leicester at a time when Newcastle's owners not only looking into building a new training ground but are, also, exhausting every avenue to one day expand St James' in the years to come. At Leicester, such investment was always prioritised.
"Leicester have spent several years now going through the process with planning for the hotel, the stand expansion and the stadium expansion, and Simon has been deeply involved with that," Flanagan said. "Before that, he would have been deeply involved with the new training ground.
"For some owners, they don't really want to think about that kind of stuff. They would far rather buy a sexy new striker.
"Simon has always been very good in managing the conversation and ensuring there is a broad understanding of what the options are for investment and how we collectively help to grow a club so it's set for long-term success rather than short-term, financially boosted success."
So how do Leicester's finances stack up during Capper's time at the club? Well, Leicester posted record pre-tax profits of £92.5m for the year ending May, 2017, which was more than Chelsea and Liverpool at the time, but the club also suffered record losses of the same amount five years later.
As much as that figure was influenced by COVID, and the loss of match day revenues, Leicester also made a conscious decision not to cash in on a key player as the Foxes embarked on a second straight European campaign for the first time in the club's history. However, that gamble backfired following an uncharacteristically poor summer transfer window in 2021 when Boubakary Soumare, Patson Daka, Ryan Bertrand and Jannik Vestergaard all failed to make a lasting impact.
That led to a more frugal window last summer - defender Wesley Fofana was not sold to Chelsea until the final throes even though a stale Leicester side had long needed funds to freshen the squad up - and the Foxes ultimately went down nine months later. When those financial issues were put to Flanagan, the Irishman highlighted the fact Capper is among the most experienced figures in his position in the Premier League, having also previously worked at Sheffield United, and said that the appointment should be 'welcomed as a sign Newcastle are looking to recruit the brightest and the best not just on the pitch but off it as well'.
"He understands that landscape well," the Munster Rugby CEO added. "At Leicester, he would have done three seasons in the Championship and no club in the Championship is making money so he was trying to balance the books in the Championship and, before that, he would have been balancing the books at Sheffield United
"He has an incredibly sharp eye for FFP and, again, that is why you will have seen Leicester put a lot of money into infrastructure. He fully understands the need to grow the revenues and how you grow the revenues sensibly. He's always had a far broader focus rather than just the starting XI or the match day squad and the foreign signings coming in. It was all about, 'How do we grow a club sensibly and how do we take it to the next stage of development?'"
