The Athletic FC

Welcome to the Athletic FC podcast with me, Ayo Akimu Lerre.

Newcastle United Saudi owners are set to pull their funding of live golf,

while uncertainty is also rife at St James's Park.

With our ownership in town for talks, could they lose interest

in Newcastle? All right, joining us for this one on The Athletic. We have our Newcastle United

correspondent Chris Woff. We've also got business of football writer, Matt Slater, with us as well.

All right, Newcastle sit 14th in the Premier League. They've lost their last five in all competitions and are currently

16 points off Aston Villa who are in fifth. So, Chris, a good time for Eddie House, Saudi

Arabian bosses to come into town then?

Well, probably not from any house point of view.

That's it sort of stage. If you just take those statistics and look at Newcastle's travails so far in 2026,

certainly in the Premier League, they just seem to be regressing and continuing to regress.

It's nine defeats of the last 12 in the league.

But this meeting should not be conflated to some ideas if it's something that's just pulled together all about Eddie Howe's feature. That's not the case. Newcastle do do these annual off-siting as they refer to them every year. They've done them. In Matt von Hall as this one is in Northumberland, previously they've done it at Annette Castle. That was on the Amazon Prime documentary in 2023.

But Eddie Howe's future will be one of the points of discussion because he is usually there,

usually presents, he present on A, what he thinks has gone wrong this season, why he thinks

it's gone wrong, why he thinks he's the right man to change things, and how he believes that things can progress moving forward with him still at the helm,

certainly when it comes to transfers and they're like going into this summer.

So it is good for how that he has the chance to sit in front of the ownership and explain that,

but not great in terms of you just look at the actual statistics and what he can point to in that regard,

because this is very much

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