It was not so long ago that the previous regime had to resort to effectively giving away 10,000 half season tickets to fill up St James' Park. Now, you can't even get a seat for Newcastle United's home game against Brighton on Saturday. In fact, that fixture sold out more than a fortnight ago.
Newcastle have been a club transformed since the takeover last October and, as obvious as it sounds, that is never more apparent than on a match day. Even Kieran Trippier admitted the atmosphere is 'something I've probably not experienced in my career'.
Rather than being daunted by that passion, as some managers bizarrely have in the past, Eddie Howe has rightly viewed it as the club's main strength. Whether it is desperately wanting to build a team the fans will enjoy watching or leading his players on a lap of appreciation after every game, Howe has tapped into support from the terraces in recent months.
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It is far from a coincidence that Newcastle have only lost one Premier League game at home under the head coach and, even then, that defeat came against champions Man City. Since Howe took charge, Newcastle have picked up 65% of their points at St James'.
Yes, Newcastle's infrastructure needs a hell of a lot of work - the hierarchy are looking at sites to build a new a new training base for the first team, academy and women's team - but the club's new owners already know they have a unique stadium right in the heart of the city. As part-owner Mehrdad Ghodoussi put it, in a recent interview with the Athletic, leaving St James' would be 'like tearing your soul out'.
Newcastle will instead look to exhaust every possible avenue to expand St James' and it is worth noting that fellow part-owner Jamie Reuben and his family already have vast experience of overseeing developments in the city while Ghodoussi and his family have a background in design.
It won't be easy, of course. There are listed buildings behind the East Stand; Mike Ashley's decision to sell the lease to the land around Strawberry Place will limit what can be done with the Gallowgate End; and the Sir John Hall and Milburn stands are already at full capacity.
However, crucially, the owners would rather try and work with the council to expand the capacity to, say, 60-65,000 people than move away when other custodians may have felt differently. An outsider might have looked at this a little coldly, after all.
Yes, Newcastle have the seventh biggest stadium in the Premier League, but the landscape has changed dramatically in even the last five years. In 2015, for example, only Manchester United and Arsenal had bigger arenas than the Magpies, but Man City and Liverpool have both expanded since then while Spurs and West Ham also have shiny new stadiums. Other clubs, like Everton, will also catch up in the coming years.
Another buyer may have felt that if Newcastle have thousands of supporters unable to get tickets then why not start looking into building a new stadium - particularly if that demand increases in the coming years? However, it was because of the unique energy of St James' that Staveley and Ghodoussi realised that Newcastle was the club for them when they attended their first game against Liverpool in 2017. Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan, meanwhile, looked visibly moved by the reception he received during his first match against Spurs last October.
It is hard to imagine Newcastle United not playing at St James' and while the same was said, say, of West Ham and Upton Park, the Hammers jumped at the chance to almost double their original capacity at the London Stadium. That move, by the way, shows how difficult it is to transfer a club, a feeling, to another site.
There are no guarantees with rebuilding on current land, either, even if Spurs have done it well. While Roman Abramovich accomplished everything he set out to do when he first bought Chelsea, in 2003, after winning every major club trophy, the Russian never managed to redevelop Stamford Bridge despite planning permission being granted in 2017.
Whoever buys the club from Abramovich will know it could cost nearly as much as the asking price to do just that in the coming years. Yes, Chelsea has its obvious attractions but Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who also previously looked at Newcastle, once pointed out 'the issue with Chelsea is its stadium' in that 'we are all getting older and it is a decade of your life to resolve that'.
Newcastle's owners will hope it does not come to that.
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