Newcastle United

[Exiled_red]

If it's legal its not dodgy. Up to the Premier league to adjust its regulations.

Which it won't do because they need the league to be competitive and Newcastle are their new hope.

That's like saying tax avoidance schemes aren't dodgy because they are technically legal but I think most people would suggest otherwise.

They are benefiting from their owners investment elsewhere to benefit the club, it isn't all that different from what City did by the owners company giving inflated sponsorship deals, the difference here is that rather than the owners intervention giving them money to buy a player the owners intervention gets them the player directly.

[Shaggy]

Looking close now - v good signing

https://twitter.com/jameshorncastle/...54215754203139

Let's hope he turns out your usual Italian PL fodder.

[BobTheCharmer]

I think this Saudi thing has caught the whole football World out.

Neves being linked to a loan move to Newcastle.

Clubs clearing their debts by offloading players for huge sums.

It's all gone messy very quickly. Which is ironic as Messi rejected the opportunity to instead follow the American dream.

[spud_gun]

I think this Saudi thing has caught the whole football World out.

Neves being linked to a loan move to Newcastle.

Clubs clearing their debts by offloading players for huge sums.

It's all gone messy very quickly. Which is ironic as Messi rejected the opportunity to instead follow the American dream.

The rot started long before the Saudi's got involved.

City Football Group is the most egregious example of one owner owning multiple different football teams

[Doc_Piptorious]

Doesn't sound dodgy at all, Owners have 2 clubs one is subject to FFP rules, so the other club who isn't buys the player and loans him to the first club, obviously not a FFP dodge

They own four clubs in Saydi and the players they are buying for Saudi agree personal terms, the selling club accepts a bid from PIF, and only then does the player decide which of the four Saudi clubs he is joining.

So the selling club does not even deal with another club throughout the sale process.

What is also very shady is Chelsea's current fire sale and the massive spending they did last season now that it has come to light that the same guys, PIF, that own Newcastle also have a financial interest in Chelsea.

[Irishnev]

They own four clubs in Saydi and the players they are buying for Saudi agree personal terms, the selling club accepts a bid from PIF, and only then does the player decide which of the four Saudi clubs he is joining.

So the selling club does not even deal with another club throughout the sale process.

What is also very shady is Chelsea's current fire sale and the massive spending they did last season now that it has come to light that the same guys, PIF, that own Newcastle also have a financial interest in Chelsea.

60% investment in Clearlake I think…… this might’ve been the plan all along. As one of the lads said there is no rule to stop Newcastle loaning players from Saudi clubs (might be limited to 2) to help them and overcome FFP.

It stinks and if United goes to Qatar it’ll be even more ****ed. I hate what football has become but I’m still v invested in Liverpool but it’s hard to see how we can succeed against all of this

[RedReet]

From the Athletic yesterday:

It has been in my emails, my direct messages, the comments below my stories, the virtual newspapers on my metaphorical breakfast table, my Father’s Day card, a note on my pillow, inside a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant on Friday and, eventually, my editor’s head.

“When are you going to explore the links between Chelsea, their majority owner Clearlake Capital and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF)?”

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The idea that Chelsea may be “cheating” football’s financial fair play (FFP) rules by selling their surplus stars for inflated fees to PIF-controlled Saudi Pro League (SPL) clubs — and that PIF is happy to pay those fees because it “protects” its investment in Clearlake — appears to have taken hold among a broad constituency of fans and rival teams.

The evidence submitted is as follows:

Chelsea posted a pre-tax loss of £121million ($154m today) for the 2021-22 season, having lost £153m the previous season
Since being bought last year by a group led by US billionaire Todd Boehly but mainly funded by Clearlake, a California-based private-equity firm, Chelsea have spent £600m on new players
PIF, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has invested with Clearlake and has also teamed up with one of Boehly’s businesses to put money into a hotel chain
PIF has recently bought majority stakes in the four biggest clubs in the Saudi Pro League, as well as pouring millions into other sports-related projects
N’Golo Kante has signed for one of those Saudi clubs, Al-Ittihad, and Chelsea are in talks about the possible transfers to the league of six more high-earners in their squad they no longer want: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Kalidou Koulibaly, Romelu Lukaku, Edouard Mendy and Hakim Ziyech.
Elsewhere on The Athletic…

Mbappe’s mother and the rise of one of football’s toughest dealmakers
The ‘devil baby’, three Chelsea footballers and the scars left by a stalker
James McClean, the footballer who suffers ‘more abuse than any other in England’
So, we have a club who badly need to move on some of their well-remunerated reserves and potential buyers who seem to share a deep-pocketed backer with the aforementioned club.

One hand washes the other, right?

“It’s an interesting one, indeed, and that is part of the issue with investment funds,” says Christina Philippou, a principal lecturer in accounting, economics and finance at the University of Portsmouth and an expert on the business of football.

“In most industries, conflicts of interest relate to both actual and perceived issues, and that is why there are often declarations required in such circumstances. This is why the requirement for football clubs to declare their ultimate beneficial owners made its way into the recent White Paper on football governance.”




For what it’s worth, Chelsea have declared their ultimate owners. As you climb the corporate structure on the Companies House website, you find Boehly, the other individual investors in the consortium and Clearlake’s co-founders and managing directors Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano all present and correct.

The company at the top of the tree is Blues Partners Limited, a joint venture between Boehly and the Clearlake duo. The latter have provided about 60 per cent of the £2.5billion it cost to buy the club last year and fund the subsequent splurge on players. There is no dispute, then, that Clearlake has gone big on Chelsea.


Boehly, right, and Eghbali, left, have overseen significant spending at Chelsea (Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
The dispute, if that is the right word, has always been about whose money Clearlake is actually investing, which is where the questions about PIF come in.

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Established in 1971, PIF spent more than four decades investing some of the Gulf state’s fossil-fuel wealth in domestic industries. It was all a bit dull until 2014, when the Saudi government gave PIF permission to invest in overseas firms and then, a year later, it came under the control of Mohammed bin Salman, the seventh son of King Salman, Saudi’s ruler since 2015.

MBS, as he is more commonly known, was just the deputy crown prince and defence minister back then but has been crown prince since 2017 and the kingdom’s de facto boss. And PIF has played a significant part in his rise to power, as he has used it as the private bank for his plans to diversify and modernise the Saudi economy. Under his watch, PIF has grown in size, profile and ambition, with sport becoming a key part of its portfolio. For example, it bought a majority stake in Premier League club Newcastle United in 2021.

Follow the summer transfer window with The Athletic…
Transfer blog — live updates
Latest transfer news
Based in Santa Monica, a seaside suburb of Los Angeles, Clearlake was founded in 2006 by Eghbali, Feliciano and their former partner Steven Chang, who left the business in 2015.

It focuses on the consumer, industrial and technology sectors and, over the past decade, has become one of the happiest shoppers for upwardly-mobile, midsized American companies. It borrows about two-thirds of the money it uses to buy these firms, helps their management teams with strategies to grow and then sells them a few years later, hopefully for significantly more than it paid for them.

That is the plan, anyway, and it has been working. With bells on.

Clearlake has made approximately 450 different investments in its 17-year history and currently has about $75billion (£59billion) of assets under management. When Eghbali and Feliciano sold 20 per cent of the business to three investment funds in 2018, Clearlake’s own valuation was $4billion but the firm has grown impressively since then.

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This month, trade title Private Equity International placed Clearlake 14th in its global rankings of private-equity firms and its most recent fund, Clearlake Capital Partners VII, was oversubscribed, raising $14billion for its next shopping spree. It attracted 300 institutional investors — banks, family offices, insurance companies, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds — from more than 40 countries across six continents.

And this is where we get to the nub of it. Those investors can reveal where they are investing if they want to but Clearlake will not (we did check) and neither do any of its rivals. What it will say is that no single investor can account for more than five per cent of a single fund and the average investor has less than one per cent of a fund.

Has PIF invested in Clearlake? Almost certainly.

Does this mean it will write a fat cheque so its Saudi Pro League clubs can give Chelsea £100million for £50m worth of footballers to get the west London club off the FFP hook?

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Explained: What the overhaul of Saudi football means for the transfer market and beyond

“This feels like a nothing-burger,” says a partner at a different US-based private-equity firm, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relations and business interests. “Clearlake is an incredible firm — they’ve made a ton of money for their investors. I’m not sure if PIF is a big investor but anyone who has been has been well rewarded.

“Wouldn’t PIF be using Newcastle United if this was their plan, not Chelsea? The reality is all the sovereign-wealth funds are in all the big, global private-equity funds, from Australia to Abu Dhabi, Canada to PIF.”


Yasir Al-Rumayyan is Newcastle chairman and has been involved in the recent Saudi Pro League changes (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Jordan Gardner is the former managing partner of a group that invested in Danish side FC Helsingor and is currently a consultant with sports consultancy Twenty First Group.

“People are reading way too much into the connections between PIF, Clearlake and Boehly,” Gardner says. “PIF is one of many, many investors in the entire portfolio of investments with Clearlake. At this level, there are many close relationships between various private-equity funds, sovereign-wealth funds and high-net-worth individuals.

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“While the optics don’t look great, I’m sure this entirely comes down to existing relationships between these parties and has nothing to do with PIF’s investment in Clearlake. I don’t see any conflict of interest or conspiracy here whatsoever.”

That is the view in academia, too.

“The allegations don’t tally with the PIF’s modus operandi,” says Dr Christopher Davidson, an expert on the Middle East at the European Centre For International Affairs and the author of several books on the Gulf region. “While the Qatari sovereign-wealth funds have historically been more assertive and willing to use such multi-layered intermediaries, the Saudis are more traditional.

“In regards to why Gulf funds invest in American private-equity firms, the consensus is they are mostly after a more adventurous component for their portfolios beyond ‘safe’ investments in Western blue-chip companies, UK real estate and so on.”

And Philippou, who made the earlier point about “actual and perceived” conflicts of interest, believes this one is more the latter than the former.

“Yes, Chelsea have clearly been getting creative recently, such as longer contracts for amortisation purposes, but it’s also the case that a number of clubs — not just Chelsea — have been trying to shed some of their players for a while,” she explains.

“However, these sellers have faced difficulties as there are a very limited number of clubs able to afford them. It’s mainly been other Premier League clubs and a handful of the usual European suspects. But then Saudi Arabia declared that it is now a buying market and its clubs may be open to buying some of these unwanted but expensive players.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Is Saudi Arabia football's new dumping ground - or a new frontier?

Neither the club nor the Premier League wanted to comment on the speculation about why SPL clubs might be looking to buy Chelsea players but both parties wanted to make it clear that the new owners at Stamford Bridge were carefully vetted for potential conflicts of interest by the league last year as part of the usual change of control process, and both the club and Clearlake have repeatedly, but privately, said no Saudi money was involved in the takeover.


Ziyech is among those linked with a move from Chelsea to Saudi Arabia (Photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
It should also be noted that under Premier League rules, all transactions, whether they are between associated parties or not, over the value of £1million are now checked to make sure they do not exceed “market value”. So, if one club were lucky enough to convince another to spend three times as much money on a player as the market thinks he is really worth, they could be told they cannot accept that windfall.

So, to recap, once we have actually considered the evidence properly, we probably have a sovereign-wealth fund investing in a very successful private-equity firm, along with lots of other sovereign-wealth funds and big global investors. This investment might be a big number but it will be a small percentage of the total pot and Saudi Arabia does not have a reputation for bossing private-equity firms about.
We have a club who are very popular in the Middle East and have several well-known players they badly need to get off the books, and we have a newly-flush league that is desperate to attract recognisable stars to raise the overall standard and profile of its competition.

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Is this not a very straightforward tale of willing seller meets willing buyer, with the asset they are trading being pretty happy about the transaction, too?

Maybe, maybe not.

During the time it has taken me to write this piece, former Manchester United defender and current Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville has weighed in, and he ain’t happy.

“Any chance the Premier League can look into this Saudi trading like NOW!!!” the co-owner of League Two club Salford City wrote on his Instagram feed. “Get a Regulator in asap that’s agile enough to stop these things at source! If it doesn’t look right it’s probably not right! Independence is required asap. The Governance of our game is a mess!”

No arguments about that last point, Gary; which is probably why, when the club we love is not enjoying the same good fortune as our rivals, we automatically assume it is the swindle of the century.

Sometimes it might be, but most times it is probably just their turn.

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Saudi Arabia, football's big disruptors. The story of the money, the motive and the hidden disputes

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)

[Doc_Piptorious]

60% investment in Clearlake I think…… this might’ve been the plan all along. As one of the lads said there is no rule to stop Newcastle loaning players from Saudi clubs (might be limited to 2) to help them and overcome FFP.

It stinks and if United goes to Qatar it’ll be even more ****ed. I hate what football has become but I’m still v invested in Liverpool but it’s hard to see how we can succeed against all of this

The limit that can be loaned in from the same club is 1, but as PIF own four Saudi clubs they could skirt that.


A premier league club can loan in two players at a time but can loan in four over the course of the season, so in theory a PL club could get one player from each Saudi club over the course of a single season and get them two at a time for a half season loan each time.

Or get one player from two of those clubs for season long loans.

Loans between Premier League clubs and other English counterparts are officially called temporary transfers.

Under the rules in the Premier League Handbook 2022/23 ( https://resources.premierleague.com/...L_23.05.23.pdf Download PDF, size: 16MB), there are restrictions on how many players Premier League clubs can loan from other Premier League/English clubs.

They are:
- Premier League clubs may not register more than two players on loan at any one time.
- The maximum number of loans registrable in the same season is four, and, under no circumstances, shall more than one be from the same club at any one time.
- Premier League clubs cannot loan to another Premier League club a player they have acquired in the same transfer window.
- A Premier League club may loan not more than one of its goalkeepers to another Premier League club.

With the exception of Welsh clubs competing in the competitions listed under Rule V.6.2, loans from a club in membership of another National Association do not count towards the above quotas.

https://www.premierleague.com/news/464747

[Fivex]

From the Athletic yesterday:

It has been in my emails, my direct messages, the comments below my stories, the virtual newspapers on my metaphorical breakfast table, my Father’s Day card, a note on my pillow, inside a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant on Friday and, eventually, my editor’s head.

“When are you going to explore the links between Chelsea, their majority owner Clearlake Capital and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF)?”

ADVERTISEMENT


The idea that Chelsea may be “cheating” football’s financial fair play (FFP) rules by selling their surplus stars for inflated fees to PIF-controlled Saudi Pro League (SPL) clubs — and that PIF is happy to pay those fees because it “protects” its investment in Clearlake — appears to have taken hold among a broad constituency of fans and rival teams.

The evidence submitted is as follows:

Chelsea posted a pre-tax loss of £121million ($154m today) for the 2021-22 season, having lost £153m the previous season
Since being bought last year by a group led by US billionaire Todd Boehly but mainly funded by Clearlake, a California-based private-equity firm, Chelsea have spent £600m on new players
PIF, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has invested with Clearlake and has also teamed up with one of Boehly’s businesses to put money into a hotel chain
PIF has recently bought majority stakes in the four biggest clubs in the Saudi Pro League, as well as pouring millions into other sports-related projects
N’Golo Kante has signed for one of those Saudi clubs, Al-Ittihad, and Chelsea are in talks about the possible transfers to the league of six more high-earners in their squad they no longer want: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Kalidou Koulibaly, Romelu Lukaku, Edouard Mendy and Hakim Ziyech.
Elsewhere on The Athletic…

Mbappe’s mother and the rise of one of football’s toughest dealmakers
The ‘devil baby’, three Chelsea footballers and the scars left by a stalker
James McClean, the footballer who suffers ‘more abuse than any other in England’
So, we have a club who badly need to move on some of their well-remunerated reserves and potential buyers who seem to share a deep-pocketed backer with the aforementioned club.

One hand washes the other, right?

“It’s an interesting one, indeed, and that is part of the issue with investment funds,” says Christina Philippou, a principal lecturer in accounting, economics and finance at the University of Portsmouth and an expert on the business of football.

“In most industries, conflicts of interest relate to both actual and perceived issues, and that is why there are often declarations required in such circumstances. This is why the requirement for football clubs to declare their ultimate beneficial owners made its way into the recent White Paper on football governance.”




For what it’s worth, Chelsea have declared their ultimate owners. As you climb the corporate structure on the Companies House website, you find Boehly, the other individual investors in the consortium and Clearlake’s co-founders and managing directors Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano all present and correct.

The company at the top of the tree is Blues Partners Limited, a joint venture between Boehly and the Clearlake duo. The latter have provided about 60 per cent of the £2.5billion it cost to buy the club last year and fund the subsequent splurge on players. There is no dispute, then, that Clearlake has gone big on Chelsea.


Boehly, right, and Eghbali, left, have overseen significant spending at Chelsea (Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
The dispute, if that is the right word, has always been about whose money Clearlake is actually investing, which is where the questions about PIF come in.

ADVERTISEMENT

Established in 1971, PIF spent more than four decades investing some of the Gulf state’s fossil-fuel wealth in domestic industries. It was all a bit dull until 2014, when the Saudi government gave PIF permission to invest in overseas firms and then, a year later, it came under the control of Mohammed bin Salman, the seventh son of King Salman, Saudi’s ruler since 2015.

MBS, as he is more commonly known, was just the deputy crown prince and defence minister back then but has been crown prince since 2017 and the kingdom’s de facto boss. And PIF has played a significant part in his rise to power, as he has used it as the private bank for his plans to diversify and modernise the Saudi economy. Under his watch, PIF has grown in size, profile and ambition, with sport becoming a key part of its portfolio. For example, it bought a majority stake in Premier League club Newcastle United in 2021.

Follow the summer transfer window with The Athletic…
Transfer blog — live updates
Latest transfer news
Based in Santa Monica, a seaside suburb of Los Angeles, Clearlake was founded in 2006 by Eghbali, Feliciano and their former partner Steven Chang, who left the business in 2015.

It focuses on the consumer, industrial and technology sectors and, over the past decade, has become one of the happiest shoppers for upwardly-mobile, midsized American companies. It borrows about two-thirds of the money it uses to buy these firms, helps their management teams with strategies to grow and then sells them a few years later, hopefully for significantly more than it paid for them.

That is the plan, anyway, and it has been working. With bells on.

Clearlake has made approximately 450 different investments in its 17-year history and currently has about $75billion (£59billion) of assets under management. When Eghbali and Feliciano sold 20 per cent of the business to three investment funds in 2018, Clearlake’s own valuation was $4billion but the firm has grown impressively since then.

ADVERTISEMENT

This month, trade title Private Equity International placed Clearlake 14th in its global rankings of private-equity firms and its most recent fund, Clearlake Capital Partners VII, was oversubscribed, raising $14billion for its next shopping spree. It attracted 300 institutional investors — banks, family offices, insurance companies, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds — from more than 40 countries across six continents.

And this is where we get to the nub of it. Those investors can reveal where they are investing if they want to but Clearlake will not (we did check) and neither do any of its rivals. What it will say is that no single investor can account for more than five per cent of a single fund and the average investor has less than one per cent of a fund.

Has PIF invested in Clearlake? Almost certainly.

Does this mean it will write a fat cheque so its Saudi Pro League clubs can give Chelsea £100million for £50m worth of footballers to get the west London club off the FFP hook?

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Explained: What the overhaul of Saudi football means for the transfer market and beyond

“This feels like a nothing-burger,” says a partner at a different US-based private-equity firm, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relations and business interests. “Clearlake is an incredible firm — they’ve made a ton of money for their investors. I’m not sure if PIF is a big investor but anyone who has been has been well rewarded.

“Wouldn’t PIF be using Newcastle United if this was their plan, not Chelsea? The reality is all the sovereign-wealth funds are in all the big, global private-equity funds, from Australia to Abu Dhabi, Canada to PIF.”


Yasir Al-Rumayyan is Newcastle chairman and has been involved in the recent Saudi Pro League changes (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Jordan Gardner is the former managing partner of a group that invested in Danish side FC Helsingor and is currently a consultant with sports consultancy Twenty First Group.

“People are reading way too much into the connections between PIF, Clearlake and Boehly,” Gardner says. “PIF is one of many, many investors in the entire portfolio of investments with Clearlake. At this level, there are many close relationships between various private-equity funds, sovereign-wealth funds and high-net-worth individuals.

ADVERTISEMENT

“While the optics don’t look great, I’m sure this entirely comes down to existing relationships between these parties and has nothing to do with PIF’s investment in Clearlake. I don’t see any conflict of interest or conspiracy here whatsoever.”

That is the view in academia, too.

“The allegations don’t tally with the PIF’s modus operandi,” says Dr Christopher Davidson, an expert on the Middle East at the European Centre For International Affairs and the author of several books on the Gulf region. “While the Qatari sovereign-wealth funds have historically been more assertive and willing to use such multi-layered intermediaries, the Saudis are more traditional.

“In regards to why Gulf funds invest in American private-equity firms, the consensus is they are mostly after a more adventurous component for their portfolios beyond ‘safe’ investments in Western blue-chip companies, UK real estate and so on.”

And Philippou, who made the earlier point about “actual and perceived” conflicts of interest, believes this one is more the latter than the former.

“Yes, Chelsea have clearly been getting creative recently, such as longer contracts for amortisation purposes, but it’s also the case that a number of clubs — not just Chelsea — have been trying to shed some of their players for a while,” she explains.

“However, these sellers have faced difficulties as there are a very limited number of clubs able to afford them. It’s mainly been other Premier League clubs and a handful of the usual European suspects. But then Saudi Arabia declared that it is now a buying market and its clubs may be open to buying some of these unwanted but expensive players.”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Is Saudi Arabia football's new dumping ground - or a new frontier?

Neither the club nor the Premier League wanted to comment on the speculation about why SPL clubs might be looking to buy Chelsea players but both parties wanted to make it clear that the new owners at Stamford Bridge were carefully vetted for potential conflicts of interest by the league last year as part of the usual change of control process, and both the club and Clearlake have repeatedly, but privately, said no Saudi money was involved in the takeover.


Ziyech is among those linked with a move from Chelsea to Saudi Arabia (Photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
It should also be noted that under Premier League rules, all transactions, whether they are between associated parties or not, over the value of £1million are now checked to make sure they do not exceed “market value”. So, if one club were lucky enough to convince another to spend three times as much money on a player as the market thinks he is really worth, they could be told they cannot accept that windfall.

So, to recap, once we have actually considered the evidence properly, we probably have a sovereign-wealth fund investing in a very successful private-equity firm, along with lots of other sovereign-wealth funds and big global investors. This investment might be a big number but it will be a small percentage of the total pot and Saudi Arabia does not have a reputation for bossing private-equity firms about.
We have a club who are very popular in the Middle East and have several well-known players they badly need to get off the books, and we have a newly-flush league that is desperate to attract recognisable stars to raise the overall standard and profile of its competition.

ADVERTISEMENT

Is this not a very straightforward tale of willing seller meets willing buyer, with the asset they are trading being pretty happy about the transaction, too?

Maybe, maybe not.

During the time it has taken me to write this piece, former Manchester United defender and current Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville has weighed in, and he ain’t happy.

“Any chance the Premier League can look into this Saudi trading like NOW!!!” the co-owner of League Two club Salford City wrote on his Instagram feed. “Get a Regulator in asap that’s agile enough to stop these things at source! If it doesn’t look right it’s probably not right! Independence is required asap. The Governance of our game is a mess!”

No arguments about that last point, Gary; which is probably why, when the club we love is not enjoying the same good fortune as our rivals, we automatically assume it is the swindle of the century.

Sometimes it might be, but most times it is probably just their turn.

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

Saudi Arabia, football's big disruptors. The story of the money, the motive and the hidden disputes

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)

I’m not reading all that.

Pleased for him though.

Or sorry to hear it.

[Harv]

I’m not reading all that.

Pleased for him though.

Or sorry to hear it.

[danperkins]

I’m not reading all that.

Pleased for him though.

Or sorry to hear it.

[Doc_Piptorious]

The Transfer show on Sky trying to paint Newcastle as a club having to be careful with what they spend as they have to account for every penny, and saying they are a club that spends little to get a lot.

Making out like they are a plucky club that will spend almost nothing this summer.


Then 20 minutes later on the same show. Newcastle spending 75m on Tonali.

[Fosterbloke]

The question for me is why the **** would you want to go to the Saudi league in the first place. Are they that seduced by wealth? It's not like they're poor right now.

[Tribute]

The question for me is why the **** would you want to go to the Saudi league in the first place. Are they that seduced by wealth? It's not like they're poor right now.

It's not just big money, it's ludicrous amounts of money... plus, they could get loaned back to the PL anyway so just end up much, much richer and back in the league they wanted to stay in.

It's a massive loophole - legal or not, idk - but there seems to be an increasing number of players looking to have one final 'massive cash-out' payday by leveraging this while they can. Likely gets slammed shut at some point, so everyone is diving in while they can.

Feels like that ****ty YouTube influencer drink 'Prime' all over again... limited supply, create fever pitch demand, charge the earth, crying fans who cant access it, more limited supply, hyper-inflated prices, fad wanes and you can now buy as many as you want for £1 a can in Morrisons.

[Cerbie]

60% investment in Clearlake I think…… this might’ve been the plan all along. As one of the lads said there is no rule to stop Newcastle loaning players from Saudi clubs (might be limited to 2) to help them and overcome FFP.

It stinks and if United goes to Qatar it’ll be even more ****ed. I hate what football has become but I’m still v invested in Liverpool but it’s hard to see how we can succeed against all of this

Where did the 60% figure come from??

If that is correct, then it is a controlling stake isn't it? Even if it is 60% in Clearlake and nothing in Chelsea, it gives them huge control.

I only skimmed the portfolio earlier in the week but all the Energy related companies were USA centric and hardly household names.