Why the Saudi takeover of Newcastle is nothing to celebrate?
Author - Edward Howard
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you are familiar with the recent takeover of the football club Newcastle United by the Saudi Arabia based firm Public Investment Fund from its former owner Mike Ashley, the founder of Sports Direct.
For most – especially the fans in question, who have been consistently let down by persistent failings at the club over the last decade or so – this is great news, and could see a struggling club return to new heights in later years. Famed football pundit Alan Shearer called the day the Saudis took over a ‘special’ one for the club. Brian Davis (better known by his YouTuber alias True Geordie) felt it paid off the ‘hope’ of fans and was like a ‘dream’ to him. Perhaps most sadly, there were loyal fans who wore mock Saudi outfits to celebrate the takeover.
But all of this comes at a price: that of morality and of human capital.
This is because, for whatever faults Mike Ashley may have had as its former owner, it was certainly preferrable to that of Saudi ownership – especially by a company which is directly owned by Mohammed Bin Salman, the country’s current Crown Prince.
This is because Saudi Arabia, by most metrics, is a very questionable country to be doing any sort of business with – and that’s being polite about it. Consider the country’s atrocious human rights record, lack of freedom of the press and speech, a neanderthal attitude towards women and the LGBT community, its very strict punishments for stuff like criticising the government or drinking beer and incredibly corrupt and hypocritical ruling class. Meanwhile, since its founding in 1932, it has been exporting its radical form of Islam – that being the Wahhabi variant of the Sunni sect of that religion – through soft power like mosque building and more blunt means like supporting and funding various groups who back their cause, like Al Qeada and the former Emirate of Afghanistan under Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
On top of this, there is also evidence to suggest that the country funded Islamist terrorist groups, most notably that of ISIS – the most damning of which came back in 2016, whereby when Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked, they accused both the Saudis and Qatar of funding the terror organisation. And that’s not even going into the more recent controversies surrounding the state – from its alleged war crimes during its participation in the Yemen Civil War, its hand in crushing the Bahrain rebellion during the Arab Spring and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (of which to be fair, some protestors have highlighted in recent Newcastle games). From this, it isn’t hard to agree with the assessment of Quotidien d’Oran columnist Kamel Daoud when he called the country ‘an ISIS that has made it’.
Meanwhile, this further reliance on the Saudis for Britain is also arguably a detriment to the important debate about Islamic extremism and how to tackle it. Out of the many reasons much of the political class of Britain is seemingly unable to take Islamic terrorism seriously is its cosy geo-political and financial relationship with fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia, among many others in the Gulf region. Why be honest about such a problem when it may offend one of our supposed allies in the Middle East – despite it undoubtedly using both soft power and brute force to further its goals of spreading the influence of its radical variation of Sunni Islam across the globe? With them buying Newcastle, it gives the Saudis more soft assets in Britain which gives it more control over important cultural institutions, of which will undoubtedly deter any serious attempts to criticise either the country or the problems of Islamic terrorism of which it does so much to fuel.
Finally, it also represents a wider problem, not just for English football, but for European football too: the conquest of the beautiful game by foreign oligarchs.
In Britain, this is particularly bad; 70% of the Premier League clubs are foreign-owned, while the Championship has a nearly identical amount. While there’s no doubt that many of these owners have worked wonders for their respective clubs, there are many others who remain heavily controversial for their seeming non-caring attitude, seemingly using them as an asset, akin to an expensive property or stock.
This problem began in the early 2000s, when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003. As a fan, he has been a very good owner; turning what was once an underperforming club known more for its violent rivalries with the likes of Millwall and Leeds and was hugely debt-ridden into a global powerhouse, hiring a succession of great players and managers, cleaning up the club’s image and helping it to win the Champions League twice in the span of less than a decade. None of this would have been possible without his cut-throat attitude and business sense, of which while often the butt of many jokes – especially in terms of manager changes – gains results. He stated that he bought the club as he wanted a ‘new challenge’, of which has clearly paid off, and clearly shown his love for it ever since then.
However, like other good things, such as the advent of social media and the opening up of the American media in the late 1980s, what started out strong has turned out to be sinister in the long term, as his buying of Chelsea paved the way for other less caring foreign owners to fill the vacancies at other clubs. Take for example the collapse of West Bromwich Albion from 2016 onwards under its Chinese ownership. Or how Wolverhampton Wanderers suffered a series of embarrassing defeats under its first international owner, the Norwegian Ståle Solbakken, who only lasted six months due to his incompetence. And how Arsenal under the infamous YouTube American billionaire Stan Kroenkehas allowed for consistent failure partially by keeping managers who are beyond their sell by date.
It's a clear mess of corruption, incompetence and lack of care that these oligarchs bring that show that unlike Roman Abramovich, these owners don’t care for these clubs at all, and use them as cynically as many Chinese property businesses do when buying Western housing stock. Abramovich himself warned of this back when he bought Chelsea in 2003, noting that his action would ‘signal is the arrival of overseas sugar daddies’ and that it would be ‘interesting to see how the fans react to it’. To say that the reaction by fans has been mostly negative would be the understatement of the year. The fact that the British regulators have taken a laissez-faire attitude to all of this despite the socio-cultural and political damage that they do whether it be the Saudis buying Newcastle and the other aforementioned examples (their last significant ban was against Rupert Murdoch when he tried to buy Manchester United in 1998) is a huge slight against them.
It also explains perfectly why many of these clubs seem to not care about many of their fans and often despises them when they dare to complain, something not simply limited to issues about losing several games either. One needs only to look at the ‘Take A Knee’ gesture that has dominated the sport for the last 18 months or so, in support of Black Lives Matter and the anti-racism movement following the death of George Floyd.
Any sincerity that the move may have had quickly degenerated into self-parody when it clearly became a chance to virtue signal and patronise their own fans about supposedly being ‘anti-racist’ and how anyone who questioned it was bigoted – all the while many of the elites in football who endorsed this had little to say about the Philippine slaverygoing on in Qatar to help in that country’s World Cup next year, among many other things one may care to mention.
They could get away with this of course while fans weren’t in the stadiums due to lockdown rules, only venting their fury on social media. Very tellingly, once allowed back inside, fans showed their displeasure by loudly booing thegesture. Instead of these teams rethinking their strategy, they instead decided to double down, continuing to do the gesture and dismissing fans as bigoted if they dared complain. If that didn’t convince casual fans of the disdain for the clubs that their owners have, it’s hard to think what else could.
Meanwhile, the recent controversies over the European Super League further showed this – the fact that these owners were happy to make their fans even more irrelevant for the sake of mere profit and their own personal greed speaks volumes of how little they view them. Following much backlash, the thing was cancelled, although them attempting such a stunt speaks very poorly of them in the first place. This isn’t even considering the fact that they will no doubt try to pull a similar stunt in the future – it’s not surprising therefore that there is much pressure by these clubs and their representatives to tackle alleged abuse online, no doubt a cynical attempt to silence critical fans, of who used social media to bring down the League in the first place.
No doubt that the Saudi situation here will only make such a problem worse – something already indicated by how the police are investigating a banner shown by Crystal Palace fans during a recent game between the two teams which rightly called out the barbaric regime of Saudi Arabia due to it being supposedly ‘offensive’. Indeed it is, to those who benefit from such a corrupt and cynical partnership in the first place.
That is why the Saudi Arabian takeover of Newcastle United is nothing to celebrate. It allows a country with a hideous human rights record to own more soft assets in the UK all the while undermining our fight against radical Islam in the process, and of course aiding the foreign oligarch takeover of football that has turned the sport from a once working class stronghold to a plaything of the world’s most corrupt elites.
Sure, the fans may claim to have gotten their club back, but in doing so, have paid a moral cost, with the blood money being retrospectively not worth the price for something as petty as who owns their local football team.
And how has Saudi ownership done so far for Newcastle United? They have won one game in the current Premier League, and have lost more games than they have drawn on. Meanwhile, they’re currently joining the likes of Burnley and Norwich City in the relegation zone.
It seems that on this occasion, this Faustian bargain was definitely not worth it.