Eddie Howe has suggested that Newcastle United's owners will be 'hoping for more' after the Magpies ended their 70-year wait for a major domestic trophy.
Newcastle had not long lifted the Carabao Cup when Yasir Al-Rumayyan vowed 'that's the first and it's not going to be the last' while fellow co-owner Jamie Reuben, similarly, wrote that last month's triumph would be 'the start of many'. Although Howe has not had direct contact with those at the very top since that night at Wembley, clearly, the win against Liverpool has given them a taste for silverware.
"I'm sure that they will have seen things through maybe a slightly different lens," the Newcastle boss told reporters just a few days after 300,000 Geordies gathered to celebrate the win in the city. "Seeing the reaction of everybody at Newcastle, they will have no doubt seen that and will be hoping for more.
"It just changes beliefs. It shows what is capable. That's important for us that we believe and I've never not had that belief but, sometimes, people need to see it to believe it. The competition gets harder and harder, as we know, and nothing gets easier so our work has to be better and that's all I can focus on."
Newcastle certainly can't afford to rest on their laurels. After all, there is still so much to play for in the final months of the campaign with an extra Champions League spot set to be up for grabs for the side who finish in fifth place in the top-flight.
Newcastle are just a point behind champions Manchester City, in fifth, and a couple of points off Chelsea in fourth ahead of the visit of Brentford to St James' Park on Wednesday night. That is how fine the margins are at a time when a host of sides are struggling for a run of results, including Newcastle.
Newcastle have lost four of their last seven league games and Howe was the first to acknowledge that the black-and-whites' consistency was the 'big question mark against us'. Yet it is not a coincidence that Newcastle have finished each of the previous three campaigns strongly and it was just a couple of years ago that Howe's team won nine of their final 14 games to qualify for the Champions League.
Newcastle received £29.8m in Champions League distributions, as a result, but that figure did not tell the full story. Returning to Europe's top table helped Newcastle attract a signing like Sandro Tonali, who was fresh from reaching the semi-finals of the competition with AC Milan, while group games against PSG, the Rossoneri and Borussia Dortmund 'significantly increased' match day income, which rose by nearly a third.
Qualification stands to be even more lucrative this time around following the competition's switch to the Swiss model. Kieran Maguire previously told ChronicleLive that returning to the Champions League would be 'transformational' for Newcastle, when it comes to 'releasing substantial resources', while fellow football finance expert Professor Robert Wilson has even estimated that taking a seat at Europe's top table would be worth at least £58m to the club. Howe needed no reminding of that.
“There's no doubting the power of Champions League football," he added. "It could be game-changing in terms of revenue and also in terms of what it means and the competition, and then of course the changes that you have to make to be ready for Champions League football.
“That changes everything, as we found last year to our cost to some degree with the extra games, so there's a lot to think about. But, for us, qualifying for that is going to be very difficult.
"There are, as we know, 10 games, there are a lot of teams competing for those places. It's one of the tightest Premier Leagues that we've seen in recent times - very little between the teams competing for those places - so it's going to come down to who is the most consistent. Of course, we want that to be us and in those 10 games, we are going to have to give everything to get there."
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