Newcastle United

[S-RED]

Bet Neverton fans are gutted TBH, oil money going somewhere else must be gutting for them as they cannot compete for mid table at present

[Buzzo]

Good point though. Shows it’s not as easy as all that

[Scratch]

Which country is Xavi a manager in?

[Fivex]

Qatar innit?

[Irishnev]

Qatar innit?

He’s waiting for them to hit rock bottom before coming in as a saviour - Ronnie the Red can drag them lower still

[Scratch]

Yeah...wondered if maybe they had him lined up as manager....still might do, his loyalty isn't to Qatar I guess.

[wiw]

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/st...89512258613254

Why would anyone bother with FFP?

[danperkins]

It's how it will start yes, players looking for one big pay day. But if those players can take them to the CL, then others will join for the football (and the money). They will follow a similar path to City...still, looking forward to City and Newcastle being done for corruption/bribery at some point, as the battle between the 2 'not state owned' clubs becomes bigger than the game itself.

They will have to over spend initially, they will want big name draws. If they keep spending year on year.. they'll eventually get it right at some point. Newcastle fans won't give a flying **** about who owns the club, I often wonder would we care if our loyalty was bought with Mbappe/Haaland type signings. Newcastle fans will be absolutely smitten with the owners when they start bringing in names who wouldn't have ever even heard of Newcastle previously. Football has started to take a horrible turn in recent years and I suspect it will only get worse.

[Irishnev]

In the words of Theoden...... so it begins

[ame="https://twitter.com/jburttelegraph/status/1446231589973864449"]https://twitter.com/jburttelegraph/status/1446231589973864449[/ame]

[Exiled_red]

They will have to over spend initially, they will want big name draws. If they keep spending year on year.. they'll eventually get it right at some point. Newcastle fans won't give a flying **** about who owns the club, I often wonder would we care if our loyalty was bought with Mbappe/Haaland type signings. Newcastle fans will be absolutely smitten with the owners when they start bringing in names who wouldn't have ever even heard of Newcastle previously. Football has started to take a horrible turn in recent years and I suspect it will only get worse.

I don't think these types of owners would be in for a club like us. Look at the clubs that have been taken over by these types of owners: Newcastle, Man City and Chelsea. When they were bought the closest to being successful was Chelsea who had won a couple of FA Cups and the Cup Winners Cup in the 90's IIRC. Aside from that it was 50 years since they had any real success. City's previous successes were in the 60's, similar story for Newcastle. These owners come in and want to make their mark, they can do this turning a club that hardly ever won anything into a powerhouse of the league, they will be the person/people who 'made' Man City or Newcastle or Chelsea. The fans will of course be universally grateful.

Clubs like ourselves, Man Utd or Arsenal who have had eras of dominance in the league aren't as attractive as we've done it before, they might be able to turn recent fortunes around and get them back to where they were but there is no opportunity to scale new heights and the fans won't be as grateful as they have seen league wins or CL wins before.

[Buzzo]

Saudi takeover of Newcastle leaves human rights to fog on the Tyne

Link

The great game of football has always been an expression of the country and times in which it is played, so the takeover of Newcastle United by a Saudi Arabian investment fund radiates the widest of reflections about the state that England is in.

On the very same day that the prime minister hailed the collapse of the European Super League breakaway as a triumph for our moral sporting values, the Premier League was preparing to approve a fund financed by the super-rich, murderous Saudi state as a fit and proper owner for one of our great clubs.

The Premier League’s reasons for approving the deal, after so much delay and dispute, are seriously questionable, and appear to spring at least partly from a desire to end the exhausting, bruising legal challenge brought by Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, for the right to sell to the Saudis. The key breakthrough now is that the Premier League has accepted a commitment that the state of Saudi Arabia will not have control of the club – even though the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which will buy and control the club, is a Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi state’s prodigious piracy of sports TV broadcasts in the Gulf by BeIN, owned by Qatar, the formerly subservient neighbour whose rise the Saudis intensely resent, becomes irrelevant if it can be said the owner of Newcastle, PIF, is not the state.

Even to recite all this should seem outlandish in the context of English football – “the people’s game” – and particularly a club so associated with their local identity and the regional character of their crowd. But being honest, the time has long passed to be shocked or even bemused at the takeover of the great, amiable Geordie sporting institution by a notorious and fearsome regime of a country 4,000 miles away.

It would be nice to still be able to say this is unimaginable, that after the Saudis’ heinous murder of their own citizen, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, they have been allowed to land, of all targets, on grand, beloved Newcastle United as a vehicle to launder their reputation.

But the truth of our game and our England is shocking the other way: this is very much imaginable, and is only a small further stretch on a journey football has been taking for decades. Even the fans – the Toon Army, the “Geordie nation” – are fine with the takeover, euphoric actually; the supporters’ trust has actively campaigned for it. They have patiently explained that they are at peace with all the arguments against Saudi ownership, responding that this is how the game has gone, and there is one counterargument that trumps it all: the club and the struggling, post‑Brexit, austerity-battered city of Newcastle need the Saudis’ money.

And they are right to say that this is where the game has been headed. Great English clubs, passionately supported and sentimentally glorified as homes of local belonging, became in football’s moneyed times assets for local owners to cash in and make mega-gains for themselves, by selling to international investors. Clubs, and sport itself, have also increasingly become priceless vehicles for international image-laundering by countries seeking global projection of soft power. Amnesty International has neatly titled this phenomenon sportswashing.

Through all the fog on the Tyne, the focus needs to be maintained on how appalling Saudi Arabia’s and Bin Salman’s human rights records are. Khashoggi, a distinguished journalist who wrote critically of Bin Salman’s repression and the horrendous war waged in Yemen, was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in its report that the Saudi Arabian state was responsible.

The CIA concluded in November 2018, according to authoritative US reporting, that Bin Salman ordered the murder; he has denied it. The same crown prince is chairman of the PIF, the fund approved to take over Newcastle United. Ashley was so intent on selling the club to the Saudis that he was suing the Premier League for the right to do so, backed by a Toon army desperate to get Ashley’s skinflint Sports Direct culture out of St James’ Park.

Still, more surprising than the deal now being waved through is that the Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ fit and proper persons test ever threatened to block it.

The grounds for doing so were not that it is essentially mad to have countries owning and funding individual city clubs competing in football leagues in other countries. That leap was made in 2008 when Sheikh Mansour of the Abu Dhabi ruling family bought Manchester City, then funded them to become serial Premier League champions, and in 2011 when a Qatari sovereign wealth fund bought Paris St-Germain, now enriched to an agglomeration of superstars.

In the case of the Saudis, the state was not going to be barred from owning a Premier League club owing to the Khashoggi murder, or the Yemen campaign in which Abu Dhabi was a partner, because such atrocities do not fit the precise terms of a test originally designed to bar small-time crooks from taking over lower-division clubs. Instead it was the piracy of the TV coverage that appeared to have been decisive, if it was accepted that the Saudi state itself, via its PIF, was indeed the owner of the club.

Observers of the resolution to this Newcastle impasse, that the Saudi state is not the owner of the PIF, can see the centrality of the PIF to the state’s whole national strategy, set out in Vision 2030, to diversify its economy beyond a reliance on oil, as all the Gulf states must strive to do. The vision pledges to expand sport, entertainment and cultural life in Saudi Arabia and “transform the Public Investment Fund into the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund”.

Sportswashing, or building a country’s image through associating with sport’s incomparable wonder and excitements, is not a development of recent years; it has a history longer even than Hitler’s Germany hosting the 1936 Olympics. Locally, professional football ownership or sponsorship has always been a vehicle for people or companies to puff themselves up.

The first Newcastle takeover for the Premier League era saw the shopping and property development magnate Sir John Hall piling on the regional rhetoric to stir the affinities of the “Geordie nation”, before he sold his stake to Ashley in 2007 for £55m. Ashley has used the great club as a billboard for his Sports Direct retail operation, a dispiriting culture clash with the fans’ adherence to a romantic, inspirational vision for the game. Now, finally, Ashley can realise his own ambition, to recoup his outlay, and the English dealmaker Amanda Staveley achieves hers, of finally pulling off the deal with the Saudis and the property developing Reuben brothers.

We may yet be surprised, but it seems unlikely that after his claimed triumph of seeing off the Super League, Boris Johnson will raise any objection to English football’s first major development since then. At the same Conservative party conference this week, Johnson’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, hailed the Gulf monarchies, but not the 27 European Union democracies, as among “our friends and allies” with whom we should be “forging closer ties”. This is where the national game, and the nation, are today.

[Buzzo]

Newcastle’s Saudi takeover will cause faux morality of football to collapse

Link

Welcome, Mohammed bin Salman, to the billionaire boys club. No need to wipe your feet. Although maybe, on reflection, do wash your hands. Those damned spots, eh? In the meantime pull up a chair, deploy the comms team, fire up the transfer multiplier. We’ve been expecting you. And for quite some time as it happens.

It is worth noting that the arrival of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as owner of Newcastle United is by no means the kingdom’s first involvement with English football. That came during the black gold rush of the late 1970s, as Saudi was transformed by the world’s thirst for its natural resources, regeared almost overnight into a shining new global frontier.

In the spirit of which the Saudi sports authority decided to apply a similar process to its national football team by hiring Jimmy Hill and David Icke.

There were, sad to say, problems from the start. Icke was an early casualty. “Often tearful, he found it impossible to adjust to the Muslim environment,” Hill wrote in his autobiography, a mouthwatering intersection of the tides of global weirdness that gets pretty much buried by Hill’s greater excitement at persuading his hosts to build him a squash court.

The Saudis wanted Brian Clough and Bob Paisley. Hill got them Ronnie Allen, who, rather than learn his players’ “difficult” names, simply shouted their squad numbers at them across the canteen and training pitch. A point of no return arrived when Hill was filmed aggressively swatting away a fly during a TV interview, deeply offending his employers. “Apparently there was a huge fly problem in Saudi Arabia, of which I was completely unaware.”


No matter. Fast forward four decades, scroll past the Premier Leagues’s first wave of overseas owners – photogenic oligarchs, nation-state brand builders, baseball-capped vulture capitalists – and that journey has now been made the other way. The House of Saud is in the house. The bone-saw boys are at the door. And while Saudi ownership may raise some obvious – how shall we put it? – moral quandaries, nobody out there gets to act surprised by any of this.

The most obvious point is that Mike Ashley’s departure is a hugely welcome turn. Ashley’s ownership of Newcastle brought stasis, inflammatory managerial appointments, two relegations and worst of all a kind of viciousness, a showboating arrogance in his dealings with the club’s support. The grossest offence of the Ashley era was its joylessness, the capacity to make people who love football and love their club feel estranged, disdained and commodified. He will not be missed.

And yet, while we’re telling it like it is, there is also something wretched, hypocritical and deeply depressing in English football’s willingness to welcome into its elite members’ club the blood-soaked, repressive, deeply discriminatory Saudi state.

In this light the comparison with Ashley, the assumption that Newcastle has finally found its prince, seems to involve a degree of cognitive dissonance. Infuriating tracksuit vendor v blood-stained dictatorship. Zero-hours sport-shop contracts v beheading 37 people in a single day. Hiring Dennis Wise v bombing Yemen. Is it really obvious that one of these – the beheading one – is so much more desirable than the other?

There will of course be a hostile response to such observations, if only because football, and indeed all human experience, has become so aggressively tribal. There is a genuine conviction out there that uneasiness over a Saudi presence in English football is based in hostility towards Newcastle United. In reality the opposite is true: it is an expression of respect for the club as something of value.

Yet there is also an undeniable logic in the argument that this is nobody else’s business; that the world is bent a certain way; and that it isn’t Newcastle’s job to fix it.

Welcome to English football 2021, a place where nobody is really clean. From the first stirrings of the Deep Thatcherite model, to the Scudamore globalism years, to laundromat finances, hidden investors, blood money at three removes, the Premier League hasn’t just thrown its moral compass overboard. It never actually brought one on deck in the first place.

And so we arrive at a place where there can be no good owners, no white knights, no sane model capable of competing, or even any way of fixing this. Why should Newcastle alone carry that flag? Why don’t we all just dive in and gorge ourselves on the entrails?

There are two points worth making about this. First, there is still such a thing as a question of degree. Walk arm-in-arm with the Saudi state and the faux morality around football simply collapses. By way of example, the chief operator behind the fund that will act as the Premier League’s newest member, is, according to US intelligence, personally responsible for ordering the murder of a Saudi citizen who was dismembered.

Is that going to work? How closely does this – bone-sawing your political opponents – fit with that idea of governance, of integrity, of benevolent control of the national asset? What is the correct response here? Apart, obviously, from “Announce Mbappé”?

Another awkward area. Homosexuality is punishable in Saudi Arabia by public whipping or chemical castration. How does this play out with Rainbow Laces day? Are we still against all forms of discrimination? Because it might start to look as though we don’t actually mean all this. How about the treatment of foreign workers? How about Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-level antisemitism? How exactly does that square with no room for racism?

English football is stocked full of fine words on these topics, mixed with a baffling level of impotence when it comes to getting things done, to genuinely challenging those barriers and prejudices in our own society. Here, right at the top table, fit and proper, unbuckling its wallet, is a presence that directly challenges those platitudes. But then, as ever, money writes its own rules.

In reality it is possible to impose a little regulation. There was a great deal of performative dismay around the European Super League. The Premier League realised, as its business was being taken out from under its feet, that it was in fact a community entity. The British government discovered that it wanted to regulate football. We are awaiting the results of a fan-led review that seems likely to suggest a “regulator”, which may mean something, or anything, or nothing.

It is surely worth factoring in why this is happening. It’s not about sport. It’s not even about money. English football is not a vast global industry or a good bet for a handsome return. Newcastle United’s annual turnover is a relatively minuscule £170m. So why go through this mill?

[Oberon]

In other news:
Steve Bruce is the new favourite to be the first manager to be stoned before Christmas..

[spud_gun]

In other news:
Steve Bruce is the new favourite to be the first manager to be stoned before Christmas..

[peterbread]

How long until the international round is back in play. But rather than all around the world just the Middle East. Then a few rounds and then when we get a few more owners from that region why not relocate? It’s all about the money so does it matter where they play just as long as the stadiums full and you get top money from TV deals.