NEWCASTLE CHAIRMAN ANGERS FANS

Last updated : 11 December 2004 By Charles

Freddie Shepherd has once again angered many football

fans with his comments in Dubai recently saying he had “no sympathy” for the lower league clubs below the Premier League.

However, he must be forgetting certain things in his old age, as Newcastle never always played to crowds of 50,000 week in week out, when they were in the lower reaches of the old third division.

To call himself a football fan is preposterous. He is out for all he can get and seems to carry that attitude at all times. As long as his club are doing well what does it matter what the lower clubs are doing.

"When we've got 52,000 fans at each home game, the last thing we're worried about is clubs in the third division," declared the North-East's voice of reason. "It's dog-eat-dog," He declares

As a true football fan, I find it difficult to comprehend our another supposed football fan could say something like that. Given his power and the fact that many of his younger players have started out at lower league clubs like Bradford, Forest and some even lower teams than them, it is surprising he has no regard for the teams that have nurtured his overpaid “stars”.


At a perilous time when something like 40% of lower league clubs could be heading for serious financial trouble they want an extra 5% of television revenue money paid to Premiership clubs to help the weaker ones survive when surely that money would be better off going directly to those clubs that need it.

Where many Premier League teams have offered sympathy at our situation, Shepherd could not be more insulting. The Premier League clubs don’t owe us anything, granted, but comments like this do nothing to ease concerns of the fans at troubled times.

I only hope that Shepherd is alone among Premiership chiefs and that Yeading do them one in the F.A. Cup in January Third Round match at The Warren, maybe then he’ll take notice of the lower league clubs and give us the respect we all deserve.