The club may not have picked up a significant trophy since their Fairs Cup success in 1969, but Newcastle's readiness to invest in new summer signings has always made this a city of hope as a new season looms.

A club anxious to sell season tickets has traditionally encouraged such pre-season anticipation - even though more cynical supporters point to the fact that abject disappointment has always ensued.

This season, though, there has been a subtle change of emphasis, which has come as an unpleasant surprise for many fans who expected Newcastle to match the Premier League's biggest spenders.

Sam Allardyce arrived as manager to replace Glenn Roeder and was swiftly followed by a new owner in Mike Ashley, who paid 133 million pounds to wrest control from the previous regime of Freddy Shepherd and Sir John Hall.

A billionaire owner and a manager keen to get his hands on the sort of financial muscle that was not available at his former club Bolton represented a dream scenario for those supporters.

However, the talk at St James' Park is not of the quick-fix that was forecast.

Ashley's right-hand man Chris Mort - the new chairman - soon discovered the club's finances were far worse than they believed at the time of the takeover.

Ashley may be one of the United Kingdom's wealthiest men, but he clearly demands that Newcastle United will be run as a business.

That means Mort will have to reduce the club's 80 million pounds debt, while Allardyce attempts to compete with the likes of Chelsea in the transfer market.

If the proverbial sleeping giant of football is to be aroused, it will not a sudden awakening.

"It's not a short-term project for Mike Ashley or myself. I want to put that to bed straightaway," commented Mort.

"He has bought an entire asset here and the plan is to devleop it over a lengthy period of time, not turn things round quickly and sell it on again.

"We are here for the long-term and we are looking at how to take the club forward over various timescales."

However, the importance of hitting the ground running in the new campaign has not been entirely lost on Mort, who has no previous experience of top-level football.

Allardyce, no doubt, has given him a a swift introduction to the realities of a world that is vastly different to the one he experienced as a leading lawyer in London.

Mort has responded by making money available for players, although it is not the bottomless pot of gold that many envisaged at the start of the new era and there is a suspicion that Allardyce was disturbed that some of them arrived with only a week to prepare them for the new season.

Troubled England midfielder Joey Barton, veteran Cameroon international Geremi, Czech star David Rozehnal and Australian international striker Mark Viduka were shrewd signings by Allardyce before the players reported for pre-season training.

Since then he has added Manchester United's Alan Smith and Brazilian international Clauydio Cacapa to give more depth to his squad.

Smith, in particular, generated more of that traditional feelgood factor in Newcastle's famous Toon Army, but it should be tempered by Mort's cautious vision of the future.

He says: "Our ambitions are to take the club back into Europe, but this is just the first step forward.

"We are getting the foundations in place in the first team, but also across the whole of the club.

"We are not focusing too much on what happens in the first few weeks or months."

Some will regard that as a sensible approach, but it will be fascinating to discover if Newcastle's supporters are quite so sanguine about the opening weeks.

As Glenn Roeder and Freddy Shepherd discovered last season, their patience has been eroded by those years of under-achievement.

Allardyce, who speaks of a five-year plan for Newcastle, and Mort are taking the long-term view, yet the demands of those fans will bring short-term pressure.

Time is most definitely not on Allardyce's side, which will ensure, as usual, that life at St James' Park will not be dull.