The South is pulling away, but the North will always play.

When I looked into studying Sports Journalism, the opportunity to go to the North East was a no-brainer. Oozing with a beautiful cocktail of tradition and passion, it has always boasted a hubbub of footballing activity. The two major cities of Newcastle and Sunderland look like they were solely built for their football clubs. Both The Stadium of Light and St. James’ Park are found at the very heart of the city and tower over their skylines in what almost feels like a fatherly figure-like manner.

The current debate therefore is not about the importance of the clubs to the people, but more the concern over their welfare. At the time of writing, Newcastle and Sunderland make up the bottom two of the Premier League. More alarmingly, they are the only two sides out of the 92 league clubs without a win to their name.

Gary Neville recently wrote about the decline in football in the North as a whole, putting it down to “the drift in economic power towards London”. I would have to disagree.

It is not the economy that is bringing the larger northern clubs to their knees, it is simply poor footballing decisions. To focus a little on Yorkshire, whose decline as a footballing county has been more prominent and long-lasting than that of the North East, I do not think you can place the blame on London. Countless London firms and businesses have set up offices in Leeds in recent years (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, to name but a few) and it has fast become the business capital of the North. Not to be confused incidentally with the ‘Capital of the North’ which historically has always been the often forgotten York, but that is my own personal axe to grind.

So how, for example, did the mighty Leeds United fall to its knees? It was not players with itchy feet dreaming of the bright lights of London, nor was it due to a decline in support. It was Peter Ridsdale.

The former chairman spent £18million in November 2000 on a young Rio Ferdinand, breaking the British transfer record as well as making the England international the world’s most expensive defender. It turned out that this was money the club could only afford on the condition that they would get it back from the revenue that a Champion’s League campaign brings in. The club missed out on qualification by one point as Liverpool pipped them to 3rd place and the rest is history. The club continued to gamble on flops such as eight million-pound man Seth Johnson and £11m Robbie Fowler with Ridsdale desperately throwing more money at a lost cause, entrenching the club in further debt with every purchase. By May 2007, Leeds United were forced into administration, taking the league’s obligatory 10-point deduction with them which relegated them to the 3rd tier of English football on the spot.

Granted this is an extreme example, but every club is unique. It is not fair to blanket the demise of football clubs over an entire region. Newcastle United, for me, are not a club in permanent decline as Neville suggests. They have been relegated before and bounced back before. Of course a weak squad is a concern as it rightly should be, but any decline in stature is due to the decisions of the club, not the financial climate.

This summer, the Magpies spent an eye-watering £46.7m on new players, with a revenue of just £1.5m being raised by the six players that left the club. This to me, does not sound like a club whose finances reflect the region’s economic climate. It is a football club with a chairman who perhaps is not as football-financially savvy as his SportsDirect franchise may suggest.

Sunderland’s transfer policy is a little more modest, with £23m being spent this summer on four new players and £7.3m being accrued through sales. But another vast spend we must consider for the Black Cats is the cost of their manager’s revolving door, which has been churning coaches in and out with monotonous regularity. Since November 2011, the club has had no less than six managers, with the current boss Dick Advocaat set to leave in the summer (if he avoids the swinging scythe above his door before then that is).

The signing and sacking of managers comes at a huge cost. The likes of Paulo Di Canio and Gustavo Poyet are world-renowned names in the sport and can only be tempted by a move to the North East with the promise of a considerable salary and considerable job security in the form of a long-term contract. If the club then decides to part company with their man at the helm, then the severance pack is going to cost the club millions in an area they presumably did not budget for at the time of appointment, believing they had got their man.

I believe that, geographically speaking, the football clubs of the North East are utterly blessed. Those sceptical on Newcastle United’s future need only to walk the streets of our northern cities on a Saturday. The replica shirts colour the city centres in stripes. The same goes for Sunderland, Sheffield too.

No matter how many disastrous decisions befall our Northern clubs, they shall never become an afterthought in English football. They represent regions that will always have a wealth of passion money further South cannot buy.

If Newcastle United and Sunderland AFC are relegated, the Premier League will be a weaker division for it. It certainly is for the loss of Leeds. But it can take just one individual to resurrect an entire region’s fortune. Take for example, the effect of Sir Alex Ferguson in Manchester or Sir Bobby Robson in Newcastle. What is to come on the field remains unclear. But with the manner of those off it, the North shall never be in decline, it is simply acclimatising.