Rafa Benitez and Mike Ashley’s at a crossroads in their relationship, but will they breakup or work through problems?

Ashley is the bad boyfriend of football, everyone thinks they will be the one to change him

It was reported earlier this week that Mike Ashley, who is often described as the “owner” of Newcastle United in much the same way that people are “owned” by herpes, is in talks to take over the ailing department store House of Fraser. A venerable and cherished institution currently fighting for its future, short on investment and in desperate need of new stock in advance of the busy season ahead, it’s not hard to see why the retail chain might be such an attractive prospect for the ravenous billionaire, a man who has built his fortune on acquiring the sort of classic brands that bring back instant memories of the vaguely whiffy kit bag in the store cupboard of your school PE department.

In any case, Newcastle fans will certainly be reassured that their owner-leader-legend has managed to locate his chequebook, although with less than a week remaining in the Premier League transfer window they might be forgiven for wondering whether he quite shares their acute sense of urgency.

Almost three months after the end of the season, Newcastle have still made a net profit on transfers this summer, with the purchases of Fabian Schar and Yoshinori Muto more than funded by the £20m sale of Aleksandar Mitrovic to Fulham. Newcastle were thrashed 4-0 by Braga in a friendly on Wednesday night, after which manager Rafa Benitez issued a terse diagnosis of the team’s failings and said he had “no idea” whether further transfer funds would be available, which of course is exactly what you want to hear when you are in dire need of reinforcements and four of your first five league fixtures are against Tottenham, Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal.

For many of Newcastle’s fans, who by media law must be referred to as ‘long-suffering’, the debasement of a manager they have grown to love over the last two years is simply the latest in an entire stable of final straws. The “if Rafa goes, we go” movement has gained a certain traction in recent weeks, its adherents insisting that if Benitez is forced out, they will follow him, raising the amusing prospect of several thousand Geordies turning up at Celta Vigo in November and asking where the pie stall is.

You wonder, though, whether Benitez shouldn’t accept a certain sliver of responsibility. Not for Newcastle’s predicament, necessarily - a club that was in shackles long before he arrived and will doubtless remain so long after he has gone - but his own. You do sort of wonder, when he took this project on, what exactly he expected to happen. After all Ashley is, in many ways, the really bad boyfriend of football. Every new squeeze comes along thinking they’ll be the one to change him. Benitez, a man supremely confident not just in his coaching ability but his emotional pull, is beginning to learn the hard way that you can lead a horse to water, but if the horse really wants to sink eight pints and brag about flogging discount sportswear, there’s not a huge amount you can do about it.

Mike Ashley says he wants Sports Direct to be the Selfridges of Sports (PA)

Even if Benitez wasn’t entirely aware of Ashley’s methods when he signed up, there have been plenty of clues in the interim. You wonder, for example, whether he might have learned anything from last year’s high-profile court case in London, at the conclusion of which Mr Justice Leggatt observed: “The Sports Direct senior management meetings certainly show that Mr Ashley is happy to combine discussion of business matters with the consumption of alcohol”, which if nothing else casts the appointment of Joe Kinnear into a whole new light.

According to Jeff Blue, a former colleague suing Ashley over a business dispute, meetings with Ashley were like “no other senior management meeting I had ever attended”. They were, he said, “effectively a pub lock-in, with alcohol continuing to be served well beyond closing hours, and fish and chips or kebabs being provided throughout the evening”. During one such meeting, he testified, Ashley challenged a young analyst to a drinking contest, after which he “vomited into the fireplace located in the centre of the bar, to huge applause from his senior management team”.

(Getty Images (Getty Images)

With all this in mind, perhaps it’s not quite so surprising that the sporting directors and intermediaries of European football’s most glittering clubs haven’t exactly been queueing up to do a deal. Or perhaps they have, and Ashley has simply failed to hear them. Another nugget we gleaned at the High Court last summer is that Ashley is given to taking a nap during particularly protracted meetings by sliding off his chair and lying down underneath the table. Well, it’s one way of getting out of an image rights negotiation.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from that case, however, is that despite all this, Ashley won. He usually does. Even after a parliamentary inquiry compared Sports Direct warehouses to “a Victorian workhouse” and gave him a dressing down on live television, even after being derided and denounced by Newcastle fans for a decade, even after his earnest promises (“Rafa has my full support”, “Rafa can have every last penny generated by the club”) have been exposed as chimeras, Ashley remains unimpeachably in place. Indeed, he has just won his latest battle, a costly court case with Rangers - well, costly for Rangers, anyway, to the tune of £500,000 - over the club’s right to sell its own kit. Ashley wins, even if - for the most part - Newcastle don’t.

Still, though, they persist: the hand-wringing, the broadsides, the impassioned pleas to Ashley’s better nature. This week the local MP Chi Onwurah introduced a petition in the House of Commons demanding action against Ashley for failing to invest in “players, training facilities and community engagement”. Given that Parliament is currently treating the gravest political crisis in modern British history like an extended game of hand slaps, you can well imagine how seriously it will take Onwurah’s well-meaning attempts to free up some cash to sign Salomon Rondon.

Of course, you can try appealing to Ashley’s emotions, his sense of loyalty or dignity, but to be quite frank you may as well be talking in Klingon. Benitez will surely know this, and so the only real question left at issue here is what his next move will be. The time for counselling and candlelit dinners has surely passed. Will he try to make it work and stay together for the kids? Or will he heed the advice of the numerous friends whispering conspiratorially in his ear, urging him to take that trash right out where it belongs. He don’t care about you! He don’t respect you! He don’t care about making you happy! Rafa, what in the hell you waiting for? Girlfriend, dump his ass!