This Friday 8 August 2025, The Sela Cup at St James Park sees the start of the ninth season of collections by NUFC Fans Foodbank for the Newcastle Foodbank. When we started, with a DVD of ‘I Daniel Blake’ in October 2016, it was still called The West End Foodbank, and the notion that we actually needed to stand on Strawberry Lane, behind The Gallowgate End to collect food, toiletries and money in order to feed our fellow citizens and their children was utterly shocking.
We’re about to do the same from 5.30 – 7.30pm on Friday night, then 2 – 4pm on Saturday afternoon and that shock remains. However, we still have to do this because we need to, and that weird sense of the deeply familiar and yet the sense of the unknown future, with all of its possibilities, still remains. A bit like wondering how Newcastle United will play this season.
Our magnificent supporters
We know how our magnificent supporters will perform though. Last season, the volunteers of the Fans Foodbank went out 26 times (including Sam Fender concerts) and collected £78,659, an average of £3.025.34 per match. That doesn’t include the matched funds given by Jamie Reuben one of Newcastle United’s owners and directors, it doesn’t include food and it doesn’t include the Easter Eggs, selection boxes and advent calendars that make such a huge difference to the families and kids. It doesn’t include the toiletries and female hygiene products that restore a bit of dignity to the women struggling to hold their families together and it doesn’t include the dozens of Toon Teddy Bears made by two of our wonderful supporters which are given to kids, so they can look after that bear when it finds them at the Foodbank, take it home, feel its warmth and know that support here is a community as well as a family.
Whilst we volunteers have been shaking our buckets the wonderful people at the Newcastle Foodbank have been doing amazing things. They’ve supported an average of 3,500 people per month (1200 of them children), issuing 20,917 parcels of various sizes between 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025 totalling 255 tonnes of food, of which 121 tonnes were purchased and paid for.
That particular shopping bill came to £82,446, which you can see was almost all funded by the Newcastle Fans money alone, so when we sing “All the lads and lasses there, all with smiling faces” inside St. James Park, we’re not just thinking of the laughs they had at The Blaydon Races in 1862 or the glory years of winning cups, we’re thinking of the kindness, steadfastness and incredible generosity of our wonderful fans. I remember being overwhelmed by their generosity when we first started, I’m still amazed today and grateful, but there’s a bit of me that feels that this can’t go on much longer.
Dignity
The Newcastle Foodbank knows this and has instituted their Pathways Programme to help people escape dependency. Last year they helped 1,729 people with getting jobs, improving housing, claiming their pensions and getting the correct benefits sorted. This programme allows people the chance to get the dignity of being able to take care of themselves. We’ve met a few at Gallowgate, putting a few quid into the matchday collection saying, “You helped us; now we’re helping you.” Dignity.
Even so, I’m still shocked that if we don’t get foodbanks finished this season, we’ll need to go into our tenth anniversary in 2026. When the Fans Foodbank started, we used to hope that it would never become an institution. We hoped that we be seen as an emergency that the government would quickly identify that something had gone seriously wrong and deal with it as a responsible administration. We still hope that.
The spirit of the people
People who don’t know football may think that this is a manifestation of our fans revered fanaticism about their team. People who know our communities know that it goes far deeper than that. The spirit which held the frontier for millennia, which united to claim better wages and conditions, which made the world’s first knowledge economy, with the world’s first city lit by electricity, the first industrial society which did not destroy the family, which sent 54 Battalions to the Fusiliers and 39 to the DLI and all the rest does not walk away from helping its own. Even today when our people have suffered austerity, household price increases and the extra demands of supporting a now successful team which means money for European matches, travel and new kits, they have always been amazing for us, maintaining contributions and the community’s dignity which ensures all of the people of their city are fed.
That’s why this city and this region are different. The supporters who are supporters here, or far away because they or their dads had to move away or the people who know that Newcastle isn’t just a city we live in because it’s a city that lives in you, wherever you go and for the rest of your life, they stay in touch. They buy their shirts and they often sent donations to the Newcastle Foodbank. These are our city’s lost children sending money back to their motherland to feed the bairns and we love them for it.
Resistance
Right now we have the usual arguments about why people shouldn’t play for Newcastle United. Club record signings are withering, superstars are disaffected, ignorant pundits are spluttering errors of geography, climate, history, culture as if some nightclub in Watford or some grim crime-scene of a shop in London should influence the place of work of rich young mobile men. Media from cities whose streets suffer riots and division, who don’t even have one team but are split in two or more, have the nerve to tell us that we should abandon our dreams of unity just because they fiddled the rules decades ago.
We know that filthy game and when we have no foodbanks, when The Rocket and The Lindisfarne Gospels are back, when we have a Centre for Industrial Art at Baltic, a proper name for The Sage, LED lighting showing films on the Tyne Bridge and a level of cultural economic progress appropriate to a city which resounds with vitality and is at the centre of Britain and the obvious location for a new conference venue at Gallowgate, then maybe we’ll have a laugh about it all. Right now, Newcastle is about to go into the phase that always happens when we’ve been prodded by punditry, poked by media and patronised by informed commentators. That phase is resistance and the kind of unity against adversity it produces can astonish the world. The Ginolas and Asprillas and Ferdinands of this world, decent men with experience of travel and culture and the highest of football’s stages come back here as friends. Young footballers, their agents and the kind of executives who advise them should tell them that in 25 years time, when they’re lying back on a lounger on a Bahamian beach, and a kid in a black’n’white top comes past the look he or she gives you will be about more than just football. It’ll either be a nod of respect or a look of contempt. They should be encouraged to be worthy of the respect of the finest fans in the world and the best people that I know.
Thank you all who help NUFC Fans Foodbank.
Howay the Lads.
