“They don’t know football” – Newcastle United’s Amanda Staveley receives sharp response

Newcastle United are edging their way towards the top table of football, and it’s going to take the club a long time to eventually get there.

Along the way there’s inevitably going to be bumps in the road, and when hindsight hits, realisation that some things could have been done or said differently. That may be the case for Amanda Staveley, and comments she made last week about Italian football.

When insisting Saudi Arabia’s PIF no longer have an Inter Milan interest, Staveley suggested the structure and management of Serie A put them off, calling it ‘a mess’.

Now, people in Italian football often say similar things but they don’t take kindly to such words coming from the outside.

Luigi De Siervo, Serie A’s CEO, has been asked about the comments, and Calciomercato quote him as saying: “Look, this morning I had the book ‘Aesop’s Fables: The Fox and the Grapes’. Here, in my opinion, what has been said can be traced back to this. Whoever has made this statement proves that they do not know football and Italy. Probably they did it only to favour their own investment.”

The Fox and the Grapes? One day a fox saw a bunch of grapes hanging just out of his reach, he tried repeatedly to reach them before telling himself the grapes were sour anyway.

That’s where ‘sour grapes’ comes from.

Whilst Staveley may well be right, it’s probably best for Newcastle United to make as few enemies as possible on their upcoming journey.