The public relations battle is a no contest.
Benitez will be seen as a manager of tactical brilliance who has had Newcastle punching above their weight, with Ashley viewed as the villainous owner who has claimed his latest victim.
So what are the issues that led to the announcement on Monday that plunged Newcastle into their latest crisis?
Ashley’s business model is that Newcastle is a club that must look after itself financially but Benitez was not happy with a summer transfer budget of £60m plus money raised from sales, or at least how he would be able to spend it, given the desire to ensure the squad retained a relatively
youthful look.
Ashley wanted a young squad with potential sell-on value and it was very unlikely any long-term contracts would be sanctioned with players aged 28 or over – again a bone of contention for Benitez.
The owner did loosen the purse strings enough to break the club record to sign Paraguay playmaker Miguel Almiron from MLS side Atlanta United for £20m in January but even this rare show of financial boldness in the transfer marker failed to persuade Benitez, who wanted to push the
club into the top 10, that it would become the norm.
He has always wanted a huge measure of control over the club he manages – with some justification given his track record of success, stature and experience – but it would surely not have come as a huge surprise that Ashley was slow to give ground on this wide range of issues.
The Spaniard will surely also have harboured concerns about whether Newcastle would offer the sort of contracts to attract the calibre of player he wanted to push the team forward, while an upgrade on the club’s training infrastructure, another source of concern, had not been addressed.
Throw a failure to agree on transfer finance, contracts, control and infrastructure into the melting pot and the relationship between an intransigent, immovable owner and a manager demanding what he would never get is unsustainable. And so it proved.
Ashley and Newcastle can insist they have been trying to get Benitez’s signature on the dotted line for well over a year, but the offer of a one-year contract on his current reported £6m-a-year terms failed to break the impasse.
Newcastle might also say they would be right to display a reluctance to hand out long-term deals to players working under a manager only committed for the next 12 months.
