The bravado of last summer has long since dissipated and right now the club would be thrilled to finish fourth-bottom of the Premier League

As manifestos go it was positively audacious. Newcastle United were intent on ending the season in the top eight of the Premier League and had determined to throw everything at winning a cup. In Steve McClaren they had just appointed a head coach described as “a perfect fit” by Lee Charnley, the club’s managing director. Charnley was so confident of an upward trajectory that he neglected to insert so called “relegation clauses” in players’ contracts.

It was last July and McClaren had invited those excluded from his official June “unveiling” attended only by Newcastle’s “preferred media partners” Sky and the Daily Mirror, to lunch at the training ground. Afterwards everyone repaired to the Strategy Room, where the former England coach outlined a brave new blueprint.

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Despite being close to losing his voice after a morning spent drilling his new players, he seemed in good shape. Still tanned from a holiday in Crete, the 54-year-old revealed that he had “wanted this job for years” and saw no reason why the top eight and a long elusive trophy were unattainable. It seemed churlish to point out that sometimes you really do need to be careful what you wish for or that Newcastle had not proved that hot at strategy in recent years.

Eight months on it appears set to end in tears for McClaren. Whoever leads the team into forthcoming games at Leicester City on Monday evening and at home to Sunderland the following Sunday will harbour a solitary ambition: to finish fourth bottom and top a relegation mini league also featuring Aston Villa, Norwich City and Sunderland.

Yet when Sam Allardyce’s players arrive at St James’ Park on Sunday week their mission to record a seventh successive win against Newcastle can be only further incentivised by the knowledge that their own contractual “relegation clauses” dictate they will automatically forfeit 50% of their incomes should they drop into the Championship.

The failure to make similar arrangements on Tyneside seems foolish in the extreme for a club relegated in 2009 and who only narrowly survived dalliances with the drop in 2013 and 2015. This oversight does not reflect well on Charnley, who has risen rapidly through the ranks since joining the club in a junior administrative capacity.

Considering £80m has been spent on squad-strengthening this season, the relegation skirmish would surely never have happened had the recruitment strategy not been so flawed.

Mike Ashley, the owner, pursues a fairly rigid policy of signing only players aged under 26, leaving the team low on leadership and experience. Such traits were supposed to be supplied by the 28-year-old Seydou Doumbia, who arrived on loan from Roma in January as a rare exception to the general rule, but the striker is far from match-fit.

Then there is Newcastle’s habit of selling the club as “a stepping stone” to greater things. This appears to have given players such as the France midfielder Moussa Sissoko delusions of grandeur. Sissoko’s representatives are forever linking him with teams in the Champions League but the 3-1 home defeat by Bournemouth on Saturday, which left Newcastle second bottom of the table, was not the first time he received two out of 10 from newspaper reporters.

If McClaren – clearly a far better coach than man-manager – must take some share of blame for the failure of Gini Wijnaldum, the Holland attacking midfielder, to make his undoubted talent count, the squad remains horribly unbalanced. Only £8m of the £80m spend was invested on reinforcing a defence which has been vulnerable for years. Damningly McClaren has been deprived of a fit specialist left-back for much of the season while Chancel Mbemba – an £8m buy from Anderlecht last summer and his best centre-half – appears to have fallen victim to the club’s injury jinx.

If there was a prize for topping the Premier League’s injury charts Newcastle would win it. McClaren has frequently been without around a dozen senior squad members this season, with the inordinate number of non-impact/soft-tissue injuries provoking behind‑the‑scenes friction between Alessandro Schoenmaker, the fitness coach, and Steve Black, the club’s motivational speaker cum additional-conditioning coach.

While a record of six wins in 28 Premier League games this season is still appalling, McClaren’s apologists argue that he is paying an inevitable price for a lack of control over transfers.

Although he has a seat on the board this is purely semantics – (McClaren frequently acknowledges he has no contact with Ashley and has never established the trust with the owner he initially envisaged developing). The alarmingly ineffective Aleksandar Mitrovic and Florian Thauvin (joint cost £27m) would certainly not have been on the shopping list of a coach who hoped to address the team’s enduring goal-scoring problems by importing Charlie Austin from Queens Park Rangers last summer.

By January the sense of impending crisis did see him permitted to acquire Jonjo Shelvey and Andros Townsend from Swansea City and Tottenham Hotspur respectively. While Townsend has succumbed to hamstring trouble, a thoroughly frustrated Shelvey devoted the Bournemouth game to wagging admonitory fingers at underachieving team-mates signed by Graham Carr.

As Newcastle’s all powerful chief scout and de facto director of football the 71-year-old won plenty of plaudits a few years ago when his apparently peerless French contacts facilitated the acquisitions of Yohan Cabaye and Mathieu Debuchy. Since then, though, Carr seems to have lost his touch. He has a weakness for the type of player capable of shining on a sunny afternoon in Monaco but with a tendency to fold in Manchester.

Thauvin, Rémy Cabella, Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa, Sylvain Marveaux, Siem de Jong, Manu Rivière, Yoan Gouffran and, most recently Henri Saivet, rank among those who have failed to make the desired impact on Gallowgate. Alan Shearer says Carr has made “a right pig’s ear” of recruitment.

Indeed it is hard to disagree with the former Newcastle captain and manager’s assertion that this most dysfunctional, disconnected, club is an utter mess from “top to bottom”.