There are many things for which Newcastle United supporters have Kevin Keegan to thank: escaping relegation to the third tier in 1992 and then promotion to the Premier League; Andy Cole; Albert’s chip; Faustino Asprilla; Champions League football; a 12-point lead over Manchester United; and a defiant blast against the dark arts of Alex Ferguson.
But supporters of other clubs perhaps owe him something too. That magnificent away weekend you once had in Newcastle? The train into Central Station, St James’ Park looming like the acropolis above the city, several pints before kick-off, several more afterwards, then a confused and groggy awakening in a budget hotel somewhere near the Bigg Market?
You may, indirectly, have Kevin Keegan to thank for that as well.
Keegan arrived and the lights went on
Because something extraordinary happened to Newcastle in the 1990s. At almost exactly the moment Keegan transformed Newcastle United from a decaying Second Division club into the most glamorous team in English football, Newcastle itself was undergoing a remarkably similar reinvention.
When Keegan returned to St James’ Park in February 1992, Newcastle was still struggling with the psychological aftermath of the 1980s. The industries which had made Tyneside famous — shipbuilding, coal, heavy engineering — were disappearing, while the football club seemed to be following the same trajectory. United were fighting relegation to the Third Division and St James’ Park was shabby, half-empty and unloved. Then Keegan arrived, and somebody switched the lights on.
Within 18 months, Newcastle were in the Premier League. Within two years they were playing in Europe. By 1996 they were trying to win the title with a team playing football so gloriously irresponsible that they became known simply as the Entertainers.
Keegan’s philosophy was wonderfully uncomplicated. In his own words, going to the match “was like people down south going to the theatre.” People had worked hard all week, and on Saturday they deserved a show. Newcastle attacked because attacking was exciting. If the opposition scored three, Newcastle would try to score four.
It was less a tactical system than a civic philosophy, and outside St James’ Park, Newcastle was doing much the same thing.
Pioneered by property tycoons like Sir John Hall — who, after making millions as the developer of Europe’s biggest shopping mall on top of an old slag heap in Gateshead, became Newcastle United chairman — the ancient city was rapidly reinventing itself around a leisure economy centred on shopping, culture and nightlife. The Quayside filled with new bars and restaurants. The Riverside became one of Britain’s great music venues. Thousands more students arrived.
The Toon’s drinking circuits acquired almost mythological status, and then, wonderfully, in 1995 an American travel company reportedly placed Newcastle alongside the likes of Rio and Las Vegas among the world’s great party cities. By 1997, Times Higher Education was reporting that Newcastle’s new reputation as “the party city” was actually helping its universities recruit students.
This was not entirely Keegan’s doing, obviously. But football captured the zeitgeist and provided an extraordinarily powerful advertisement for the city’s transformation.
Every Sunday morning, Premier League highlights transmitted a new version of Newcastle around Britain: 36,000 people roaring inside a rebuilt stadium; Newcastle Brown Ale across those famous black-and-white shirts; Keegan bouncing around the touchline; Ginola flying down the wing; young men in replica shirts going ballistic. Newcastle suddenly looked like somewhere you wanted to be.
And Keegan understood instinctively that football was about more than winning. It was spectacle, pleasure and escape. That fitted the emerging city perfectly – and actually tapped into the city’s ancient Rabelaisian traditions as “the drunkest town in England”. The old Newcastle had churned out guns, ships and coal; the new Newcastle was increasingly selling an experience.
So was Newcastle United.
There was another important ingredient: geography. In most English cities, the football ground sits some distance from the centre. St James’ Park doesn’t. It erupts out of Newcastle itself. You can arrive by train, drink in the city centre, walk to the match and be back in a pub minutes after the final whistle — a ready-made urban ‘fan zone’ decades before the idea was even thought of. Suddenly the visiting supporter wasn’t merely travelling to an away match. He was entering an ecosystem remarkably efficient at separating him from his disposable income.
Newcastle upon Tyne had accidentally invented the football city-break, and Keegan’s Entertainers supplied the mythology. Even losing at Newcastle could be enjoyable. You might watch Beardsley play a pass nobody else had seen, Ginola humiliate your right-back or Asprilla do a samba-shimmy past your centre-half. Keegan’s Newcastle offered the visiting supporter the same implicit promise as Newcastle’s nightlife: something might happen.
That matters because cities, like football clubs, acquire reputations through stories. People went home talking about Newcastle. About the atmosphere. About the stadium in the middle of town. About the people they’d met. About what happened after the match — frequently with significant gaps in the chronology.
Thirty years later, Newcastle remains one of English football’s great away trips. The Quayside has changed. The Bigg Market isn’t quite the grisly Bacchanal of legend. The football club has travelled through several historical cycles of hope and despair.
But the basic proposition survives: come to Newcastle and make a weekend of it.
Keegan didn’t create Newcastle nightlife, of course. Nor did he build the bars or recruit the students. But between 1992 and 1997 he helped change the story Britain told itself about Newcastle. The football club and the city suddenly projected the same qualities: exuberant, slightly excessive, hospitable, ambitious, emotional and determined to have a good time.
For a few extraordinary years, Newcastle wasn’t merely the home of the Entertainers. Newcastle was the entertainment.
So next time an Arsenal, Chelsea or Spurs supporter wakes up on Sunday morning in a Newcastle hotel room with a traffic cone, half a kebab down his shirt and absolutely no recollection of getting back there, perhaps he should observe a moment of gratitude.
King Kev made this possible.
Howay the Lads! A People’s History of Newcastle United by Dan Jackson is published by Abacus and out now (RRP £25). Get your copy HERE
