Newport County had a dream to be different. When Huw Jenkins bought a majority stake in January 2024, he arrived with a vision to replicate his own successful past in this part of Wales: passing football, developing players, rising up through the EFL to who knows where. At Swansea City, with Jenkins, the ceiling never seemed to exist.
It was a brave plan with one slight problem: forget the ceiling; it was the floor that scared everybody in Newport. Having lost two League Two play-off finals, a long funk had set in. In the last four seasons, Newport have finished lower each time: fifth to 11th to 15th to 18th to 22nd. It goes without saying that they cannot afford to finish lower this time.
And yet: Newport County are bottom of the Football League. They have won four league games since 9 August and have two home wins in all competitions over the last 11 months (although both were since Christmas).
In the short term, Newport have not scored in four games. Christian Fuchs, appointed as manager in November, has 10 points from 15 league games and that is not going to be enough.
There are historical reasons for the threat of relegation to cause deep fear here. The last time Newport left the Football League, in 1988, they were expelled from the Conference and the club faced liquidation.
It took until 1994 for Newport to get back to Wales, exiled through financial necessity. It took until 1999 for the club to even get their original name back and 14 further seasons for Football League promotion. Nobody can face going through all that again.
At a fan’s forum event in December, Jenkins stressed that he has been seeking outside investment to help the club’s financial situation. Jenkins said that his own arrival in 2024 came 48 hours before an inability to pay the players and that he has invested £3m of his own money to keep the club on a stable footing.
The problem is that Jenkins said that an external cash injection has been complicated by Newport’s league position. That is the crux of this issue, an unpleasant catch-22: Newport need more money to be better, but they need to be better to attract more money.
And so the question inevitably grows in significance and volume: is the plan itself so flawed that it will not work?
Jenkins’ hope was to mimic the best bits of that Swansea model: young players signed on the cheap from less glamorous clubs and sculpted into a specific way of playing before being sold on as the team improved.
Newport have the youngest squad in League Two. They try to play passing football (they rank eighth for accurate passes but low for possession, aka they get the ball and pass it around the back a lot). They are 20th in the division for touches in the box and the lack of attacking penetration has reached a nadir over the last four games.
The recruitment plan has been emphatic and largely split into two areas over the last 18 months: clubs in Wales (Haverfordwest, Merthyr Town, Penybont, Barry Town) and U21 loans and free transfers (Swansea, Queens Park Rangers, Newcastle United, Cardiff City, Sunderland, Leicester City, Manchester United).
There was a slight shift in January, when Newport signed loanees aged 29, 29 and 30. But is that too late?
“The model is obviously to buy young players and try to sell them on but it feels like we’ve not got the blend of experienced and inexperienced players right,” season ticket holder Dan Grace tells The i Paper.
“The hope is that some of these young players will settle in and improve, but clubs in League Two rarely manage to then sell for decent money anyway, because players normally just leave when their contracts expire.”
The added complication is the managerial recruitment.
Fuchs is a big name with a Premier League title as a player, but this is his first full-time head coach job. Newport have appointed their last three managers from Maritimo B, Barry Town and Charlotte SC (where Fuchs was an assistant).
If you are going to develop young players in this environment in this league, surely you need some experience around them?
“This really plays into the narrative that we’re trying to do this on the cheap,” Grace says.
“With our coaches over the last couple of seasons it feels like even they’re learning on the job, which can’t help the players. The comment from Fuchs a few weeks ago about us not being in a relegation battle after we had won one game just speaks to that naivety.”
The last time I came here, I was minded to enthuse about any small club in a provincial city trying to do something different. It is undoubtedly brave to embark upon a project that you believe can work if it rides out the first two seasons.
But there is an obvious counterpoint and it is gaining significant support amongst supporters: this just is not going to work here. At their best, Newport County was a team that fought for its relevance and bruised the noses of clubs who would always have bigger budgets. There is a substantial risk that Newport have lost sight of what they are good at in favour of something that is failing to land.
This can only get harder if the worst happens between now and May and that is increasing in probability with each winless or scoreless match. Forget the ambition for a moment; Newport are in firefighting mode and the worry is whether the last decade is being quickly fragmented into pieces.
“Our EFL status is the main selling point for anyone who might want to invest,” Grace says.
“We don’t own our own ground, training ground – we’ve got no assets.
“Once our EFL status goes we become a really unattractive club and attracting outside investment becomes even harder. Then what happens?”
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