Ajman, United Arab Emirates, November 2007. The hotel worker was Tanzanian and he wanted to know which UK airport I had flown from. The word "Newcastle" prefaced a broad smile. "My life's ambition is to go to St James' Park; they are my team," he said.

And why not? Freddy Shepherd, Newcastle's former chairman once claimed he was in charge of the eighth most popular side in the world. Even if that is no longer quite true, earlier this year, Newcastle broke back into the global top 20 revenue generating football clubs with the only puzzle being why potential buyers are not beating down Mike Ashley's door and persuading the current owner to sell up.

Seemingly Ashley's answer would be yes were any would-be purchaser to come up with around £267m – thereby covering the £134m he paid for Newcastle in 2007 plus more than £150m in interest-free loans he injected to keep everything afloat during the early days of his tenure.

Although the club's most recent accounts, released in March this year, showed that commercial revenue had fallen by £12.7m – perhaps reflecting Ashley's failure to exploit fully overseas markets – Newcastle's accounts were in the black. Unlike many Premier League counterparts they even posted a profit – £1.4m after player amortisation.

Life is full of mysteries but one of the biggest, most enduring, revolves around why no one has stepped in to relieve Ashley of a most attractive toy he would surely be willing to discard. The billionaire sports retailer once reportedly told one of his former St James' Park managers he had no idea why he bought Newcastle in the first place but, now the international credit crunch has eased, the lack of interest in taking it off his hands appears astounding.

Financial types will tell you that wealthy individuals are rarely willing to invest more than 10% of their overall capital in a football club, preferring to borrow the rest. The credit crunch made that tough but now things should be a little less restrictive while the potential rewards of being handed the keys to St James' Park are immense.

For a start the stadium – one of the biggest and best in England – regularly sells out to its 52,000 capacity and, unusually, it enjoys a prime city centre location within walking distance from scores of restaurants, hotels and shops.

If the fact you can be shopping in Fenwick or John Lewis minutes before attending a match may seem slightly irrelevant, the ground's peerless location boosts the club's value in the corporate function market appreciably.

Derek Llambias, Newcastle's former managing director under Ashley, used to suggest that people on Tyneside did not have sufficient money to help maximise such revenue streams but his opinion was perhaps coloured by earlier decades spent working in the high-rolling world of Mayfair casinos.

Granted there are areas of deprivation in Newcastle – as in all cities. Yet judging by the amount of brand new expensive cars flying around the area, the invariably packed restaurants, busy shops and some eye-wateringly steep house prices in certain suburbs, Llambias did not grasp the whole picture in what remains a regional capital.

Glenn Roeder, sacked as Newcastle's manager shortly before Ashley's arrival, used to say potential buyers dismissed it, ignorantly, as simply too far north and, even though that sounds absurd in such a small country as England, he may well have a point. After all, people who have never been to the north-east do often have rather distorted ideas about the region.

It seems Manchester City's current owners did discreetly arrive from Abu Dhabi to explore the possibility of buying Newcastle before heading south and west to Manchester but since then little substantive sales talk has gone on.

Everton, a club Bill Kenwright has made clear is up for grabs, may represent a rival interest for anyone looking for a Premier League stake but to truly prosper Everton need to leave Goodison Park and finding a new home has proved an enormous problem.

Newcastle, then, should be top of any self-respecting billionaire's shopping list. But if someone really is serious about buying Ashley out the overwhelming likelihood is that – as happened with Manchester City – no media outlet would have an inkling of anything happening until the formal, bombshell, announcement. Clues will not be scattered and advance warnings should not be expected.

Maybe that is what will happen at St James'. We will wake one morning to an early club statement and later discover that, unnoticed, a delegation representing the new owner flew into Newcastle airport on a private jet from Russia or the United States. Or perhaps on the daily Emirates service from Dubai, possibly having connected from elsewhere in the Middle East, east Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

There was a time, a few years ago when the club was very publicly for sale, that a group of Malaysian – or at least that's where they were supposed to be from – businessmen stepped out of Emirates business class and were whisked the few miles to St James' and then the training ground for a less than private tour. New owners? Of course not, just a bizarre publicity stunt or perhaps a little joke on Ashley's part. No one ever appeared quite sure.

One day though it will happen for real. Sooner or later? No one knows … but Newcastle United are a very big prize waiting to be claimed.