Very Specific Football Question No.25: Has Mike Ashley found love?

Mike Ashley would not win many popularity contests. Nor fair employer contests. Nor fashionable sportswear-providing contests. In fact, the only competition you’d back the Newcastle owner in is a Having a Lot of Money contest. His £4 billion fortune would see off most people in that one. But despite being considerably richer than you, Ashley has been consistently accused by Newcastle fans of failing to put his money where his mouth is, instead choosing to put food there.

The result of Ashley’s stinginess is that the Magpies have been bad at football throughout his tenure. Aside from a six-month spell in 2012 when Papiss Cisse decided to be the world’s best striker and Alan Pardew glistened like a silver Adonis, Ashley’s Newcastle teams have been a disappointment. This has been partly blamed on a transfer policy of buying exclusively French people, but mainly on Ashley’s meagre spending.

It’s hard to argue with Ashley’s critics, with figures backing up supporters’ claims that Newcastle’s “net spend” has been dwarfed by clubs that coin in a fraction of the Mapgies’ huge attendance revenues. In the eight seasons since Ashley took the helm, Newcastle have actually made a £20m profit in overall transfer fees.

But this season, something has changed. Not on the pitch, unfortunately, because Steve McClaren’s team have been frequently awful. But off it, Ashley has become far more extravagant.

In the summer, he gave McClaren £50m to spend on the likes Georginio Wijnaldum, Alexandar Mitrovic and Florian Thauvin - making the Magpies the second-highest net spenders in the Premier League (behind only Man City) and the fifth highest in the whole of Europe.

Ashley’s reward for this uncharacteristic generosity has been a relegation battle, but his response has been to simply spend more. Having already splashed out an additional £17m on Jonjo Shelvey and Henri Saivet this month, Ashley is also said to have sanctioned a move for Saido Berahino that would smash the club’s transfer record, as well as made funds available for £12m-rated Andros Townsend.

And it’s not just McClaren who is having Ashley’s money thrown at him. After Newcastle beat West Ham at the weekend, the retail entrepreneur gave away £2.4m worth of Sports Direct winter coats to punters. The fact they would have probably been reduced to £12.99 in store is beside the point; it’s further evidence that Ashley is a transformed character. As changes in tack go, it’s about as extreme as Susan Boyle releasing a drum and bass album, or Jeremy Clarkson making a non-white friend.

And it all begs the question: why?

What has happened to Mike Ashley in the last six months that has turned him from a scrooge-like villain - recently described as “a monster of a man” in the House of Commons - to England’s most benevolent football club owner?

Ashley has made mumblings about the club being “on a more sound financial footing”, but that does not justify such a drastic U-turn in his approach. It has to be something far more profound, and in fact there can only be one explanation.

Mike Ashley is in love.

An intensely private character, little is known about Ashley’s personal life aside from the fact he got divorced in 2003. Therefore it would be pointless to speculate on the identity of the person who has stirred his passions. Maybe it’s a lady he met on a night out in the Bigg Market, maybe it’s his ex-wife, maybe it’s a hedgehog he befriended in the grounds of his Hertfordshire mansion, maybe it’s Shola Ameobi. At this stage, nobody could say.

But what’s clear is that there’s a glint in Ashley’s eye, a glow in his cheeks and a loosening in his wallet that screams of the joyful exuberance of romance. All he wants now is for the Toon Army to share in his blissful happiness, and he is set to keep on spending until they do. Ashley’s conversion is an uplifting beacon of hope in a cold and cynical world. Who knows, he might even start paying all his Sport Direct staff the minimum wage next.

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