They’d finished third the season previously in their first season back in the top flight, but it’s easy to forget that Newcastle United spent most of the 1980s and the early 90s either floating around the lower half of the top division or floundering in the second one.

So when Kevin Keegan decided that the time was right to sell Andy Cole to Manchester United in February 1995 there was dismay around the club.

As a huge club in a devoted city, Newcastle have always had the set-up for success, but it rarely worked that way. And selling Cole, a man they bought when still in the second tier, seemed more than a little bit negative. For a club with ambition, it was the wrong move.

Even if, before the turn of the new year, Kevin Keegan’s side were out of the title race, perhaps winning the league was still slightly beyond a team who had just come up from Division One just over a year ago. But after a third-place finish in their first season back, they had to avoid becoming just another flash in the pan.

https://video.footballfancast.com/video-2015/fm90sc-newcastle95.mp4

Even after selling Cole to United, the striker still finished as the Magpies’ top scorer in all competitions with 15 goals until his sale. Newcastle slumped to sixth that year, and the decline seemed inevitable.

It’s an event that probably shows that, in football, you can’t have everything. Cole was clearly Newcastle's most effective player, but if a newly-promoted club - perhaps Newcastle themselves this season - came third in their first Premier League season, you’d probably expect their best striker and top scorer to end up at a club like Manchester United.

It was probably also a rude awakening to a new financial reality for many fans. Newcastle had missed out on the first Premier League season as they were in the second tier, and as a result, they’d missed out on a lucrative season in a league that was formed almost solely for financial gain.

And so when Manchester United were prepared to break the British record to sign Cole for £6m plus Keith Gillespie, Newcastle had to try to persuade the fans that if it was a step backwards, the idea was to get a running start.

 

But perhaps the most tragic aspect, looking back, was the Gillespie element. Persuading your fans that the sale of your best player is actually in the club’s best interests is a tough sell at the best of times, but sometimes getting a player in exchange just makes things worse. After all, there’s a reason Gillespie was offloaded by Alex Ferguson - he didn’t want him.

Such exchanges rarely work out, probably because the player you’re getting is never as good as the player you sold. Antonio Nunez came to Liverpool as part of the deal that took Michael Owen to Real Madrid, but rather than star for his new team, he became the subject of ridicule more than anything else.

Gillespie, however, wasn’t that ineffective, and Newcastle weren’t about to flop.

A sixth place finish without Cole meant narrowly missing out on a place in the UEFA Cup, and perhaps the lack of European football was a blessing in disguise for the Magpies. The summer saw the signings of David Ginola and Les Ferdinand, who would team up with Alan Shearer and serve as the ideal replacement for Cole.

Kevin Keegan’s side, in the end, didn’t really lose out by selling their best player, and in some respects they gained, as evidenced by their two second places in a row - their best Premier League finishes ever and their best league finishes since 1927 when they actually won the league for the last time.

Gillespie, too, played over 100 games for the club, assisting two of Faustino Asprilla’s three goals against Barcelona in the Champions League, a game which surely takes pride of place in the memories of Newcastle United fans when they look back on that period of time when Kevin Keegan had taken their club to dizzying heights and shown the footballing world that a newly-promoted team could play entertaining, attacking football and succeed - even if Manchester United somehow managed to overcome the Magpies with a frustrating regularity - and the arrival of Arsene Wenger relegated Newcastle to the supporting cast role in the Premier League.

The idea of selling your best player is always a tough one to take, even when transfer records are broken in the process. But being able to get a running financial start at building a side which could keep the pace at the top of the table for an entire season and possibly even win the league (as Newcastle should have done the next season) is smart business if done right.

When Newcastle sold Andy Cole, that’s what they did, and when Keegan resigned in 1997, the club couldn’t reach those heights again as losing the manager was more problematic than losing their striker.