Murrayfield friendly a dry run before use during St James’ Park rebuild by Newcastle United owners?
· Yahoo Sports
I was thoroughly finished with the 2025/26 Newcastle United season weeks, or even months, before it finally came to a relatively disastrous end.
My main positive was that now several weeks lay ahead where Newcastle United’s ability to ruin my day/weekend/life was at least greatly diminished, if not removed entirely.
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Not thinking about it was a blessed relief, so it came as an unwelcome shock to the system when an email dropped in only days after the final match, offering me the chance to buy expensive tickets to a pointless friendly at a neutral venue.
In case anyone has missed it, Newcastle United have gone early with the announcement of a pre-season friendly, against Everton at Murrayfield on 12th August.
The past few days have seen multiple folk point out the many things that are wrong with this.
For the uninitiated, Murrayfield is the 67k capacity home of the Scotland rugby team, owned by the SRFU and conveniently situated next to Haymarket railway station. Anyone visiting or passing through the Scottish capital by train will have seen the impressive stadium as it looms over the station. It’s actually quite convenient from Newcastle too, an hour and a half from central to basically the door of the venue.
While obviously being predominantly a rugby ground, Murrayfield has had a couple of ventures into football. Hearts used it for a handful of SPL games while Tynecastle was being redeveloped a few years back, and as a venue for European games prior to that smartening up of their own ground.
However, recent years have seen invites fly south of the border, with Man Utd venturing up for pre-season games vs Lyon and Rangers in the consecutive summers of 2023 and 2024. Liverpool also played there in 2019, against Napoli, but this summer marks the first occasion of two Premier League sides going head-to-head.
This is one of the issues. With the entirety of Europe, nay the world, to choose from it feels absurd to be playing a regular opponent. If you’re a season ticket holder, you could rationalise that the monthly direct debit deducted this month could cover a meaningful game against that exact opponent for around half the price. This is another one of the issues, with tickets available exclusively via Ticketmaster and setting you back more than £65 for the majority of seats behind the goal more than £88 at the side of the pitch.
An article on The Mag called out this pricing and rightly so, many other fans saying the same. Another issue, with the kick off being 5.15pm on a Wednesday, extremely awkward and costing you at least a half day off work. This will unlikely roll into a second day as hotels in Edinburgh are extortionate on this particular date, and herein lies the likely reason for the scheduling of this fixture.
The game occurs bang in the middle of the Edinburgh Fringe festival, which inevitably sees the city booked to the rafters with fans of the arts. It’s speculative on my part but I think it’s safe to say Newcastle United have become part of the Edinburgh Fringe. As folks flock from around the world to see theatre, comedy and dance performances, why not filter them across town for a night seeing teams from the expanding international behemoth that is the Premier League? In years gone by the prospect of seeing Man Utd against anyone may have been enough for the fringe hoi polloi, but the slightly lower profiles of Newcastle or Everton maybe wouldn’t draw as big. However, put them both together and you’ve got yourself a winner, a genuine pretend PL fixture for the tourists to enjoy. Welcome to the ghost of football future.
This is why the ticket price feels so offensive: it’s basically not for us. This will be a game riven with selfies, air horns and rafts of empty seats for the ten minutes either side of half time. Local fans are welcome to attend but they must pay the prices of an exhibition, even though chances are that the actual match will be anything but. For the above reasons (allied to my post 25/26 downer) I will be giving this one a swerve, so apologies to any fans out there looking forward to a report/travel-log.
I’m at least 75% convinced the above reasoning is sound, or at least more feasible than the conspiracy theory put forward by my mate Hutch on hearing of the fixture. A theory/fear that I’ve seen replicated multiple times across various social media.
Apparently the suggestion has been mooted that the Newcastle United owners were considering Murrayfield as an alternative “home” ground should they choose an option of extensive redevelopment of St James’ Park in a way that would necessitate closure in the medium term.
This has got to be a very real fear for those who are contending with increasing cost of living and escalating prices at United, having to factor in the price, time and logistics of a train to Edinburgh for every fixture. Midweeks would become near impossible for many and some would have to sit out this option either in full or all barring a “day out” or two. You would hope should it come to this that the club would have an amnesty on the various policies geared towards taking your season ticket away should you fail to attend x% of matches but I wouldn’t bet on it.
It is an unfortunate reality that, given the directness of the train, Murrayfield is actually the second most convenient alternative venue should this be necessary. The first is the Stadium of Light, but I think even the club realises what a non-starter that is. However, surely temporary relocation to Edinburgh can’t happen. While I think the fringe rationale is the reason for this game, I wonder if there is a bit of a feasibility study being carried out by NUFC on the quiet here.
People would be up in arms for definite but NUFC would sugar coat any message, citing it as the only way to build the stadium we all want and need, possibly (lightly) subsidising rail travel. It would surely bend Premier League rules to play outside of England but I can imagine a concession being given as it’s only just outside of the English border and the PL would only see the potential for shiny new “customers” among the locals and visitors of Lothian.
If we are ever to get the stadium development, temporary relocation has to be one of three options, with the others being (relatively modest) upgrades that are feasible in the close season and the favoured option of building an adjacent stadium with St James’ Park staying as is until it’s ready. There’s the sub factor of temporary relocation, if the club had the appetite to build a Qatar style pop up stadium (possibly on the footprint of Kingston Park or Gateshead Stadium) to fill the gap but surely that’s getting mad with the expense, not to mention logistics.
Most will be thinking outsourcing “home” matches so far is a ludicrous concept behind even the progressive ruthlessness of football club owners. However, given the more likely reason for this summer’s friendly is to provide sideshow appeal to visiting arts enthusiasts, it might be worth at least considering what modern football is willing to do with little consideration for the average fan. G’wan the lads?