Saudi takeover of Newcastle leaves Tyne in fog | Newcastle United

The great game of football has always been the expression of the country and the time in which it is played, so the takeover of Newcastle United by a Saudi investment fund radiates the widest possible reflection on the state in which it is played. is England.

On the very day the Prime Minister hailed the collapse of the European Super League breakaway as a triumph of our moral sporting values, the Premier League was preparing to approve an ultra-wealthy Saudi state-funded fund and murderer as a good owner for one of our big clubs.

The reasons why the Premier League approved the deal, after so many delays and disputes, are seriously questionable and appear to stem at least in part from a desire to end the grueling and murderous legal challenge brought by the owner of Newcastle, Mike Ashley, for the right to sell to the Saudis. The key breakthrough now is that the Premier League has accepted a pledge that the state of Saudi Arabia will not have control of the club – even if the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which will buy and control the club, is a sovereign state of Saudi Arabia. heritage fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salman. The Saudi state’s stupendous piracy of sports television broadcasts in the Gulf by BeIN, owned by Qatar, the former submissive neighbor whose rise the Saudis are keenly sensing, becomes immaterial if it can be said that the owner of Newcastle, PIF, is not the State.

Even reciting all this should seem far-fetched in the context of English football – “the people’s game” – and particularly of a club so associated with its local identity and the regional character of its audience. But to be fair, the time is long past to be shocked or even bewildered at the takeover of the large and amiable sports institution Geordie by a notorious and dreaded regime of a country 4,000 miles away.

It would be nice to still be able to say that it is unimaginable, that after the heinous murder by the Saudis of their own citizen, journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, they were allowed to land, from all targets, on the big and beloved Newcastle. United as a vehicle to whitewash their reputation.

But the truth of our game and our England is shocking in the other direction: it is totally imaginable, and it is only a small part of a road traveled by football for decades. Even the fans – the Toon Army, the “Geordie Nation” – agreed with the takeover, euphoric in fact; fan confidence actively campaigned on his behalf. They patiently explained that they are at peace with all the arguments against Saudi ownership, responding that this is how the game went, and that there is one counter-argument that outweighs everything: the club and the austerity-battered, post-Brexit fighters Newcastle city needs the money from the Saudis.

And they’re right that this is where the game has headed. Great English clubs, passionately supported and sentimentally glorified as hotbeds of local belonging, have become valuable assets in football for local owners to cash in and make mega-winnings for themselves, by selling to investors international. Clubs, and sport itself, have also increasingly become invaluable vehicles for the laundering of international image by countries seeking a global projection of soft power. Amnesty International has carefully titled this sportswashing phenomenon.

Through all the fog over the Tyne, the focus must be maintained on Saudi Arabia and Ben Salman’s appalling human rights record. Khashoggi, a prominent journalist who criticized Ben Salman’s crackdown and the horrific war in Yemen, was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in its report that the Saudi state was responsible.

The CIA concluded in November 2018, according to authoritative US reports, that Bin Salman ordered the murder; he denied it. The same crown prince is chairman of PIF, the fund approved to take over Newcastle United. Ashley was so determined to sell the club to the Saudis that he was suing the Premier League for the right to do so, backed by an army of Toons desperate to bring Ashley’s Sports Direct culture out of St James’ Park.

Still, more surprising than the deal currently underway is that the fit and proper people test of Premier League owners and directors has never threatened to block it.

The reasons for doing so were not that it essentially makes no sense to have countries that own and fund individual urban clubs competing in soccer leagues in other countries. This jump was made in 2008 when Sheikh Mansour of the reigning Abu Dhabi family bought Manchester City, then funded them to become Premier League series champions, and in 2011 when a Qatari sovereign wealth fund bought Paris St-Germain, now enriched with an agglomeration of superstars.

In the case of the Saudis, the state was not going to be barred from owning a Premier League club due to Khashoggi’s murder or the Yemen campaign that Abu Dhabi was a partner of, as such atrocities do not fit the specific terms. of a test originally designed to prevent petty crooks from taking control of lower division clubs. Rather, it is the hacking of television coverage that appears to be decisive, if we admit that the Saudi state itself, via its PIF, is indeed the owner of the club.

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

Sports washing, or the construction of the image of a country by associating with the wonders and incomparable sensations of sport, is not a development of recent years; it has a longer history even than Hitler’s Germany which hosted the 1936 Olympics. Locally, the ownership or sponsorship of professional football has always been a way for people or businesses to inflate.

Newcastle’s first takeover for the Premier League era saw shopping and property development mogul Sir John Hall relying on regional rhetoric to stir up affinities in the ‘Geordie nation’, before selling his stake in Ashley in 2007 for £ 55million. Ashley used the big club as a billboard for her Sports Direct retail operation, a disheartening culture shock with fans embracing a romantic and inspiring take on the game. Now, finally, Ashley can fulfill her own ambition , recover her stake, and the English negotiator Amanda Staveley realizes hers, to finally conclude the agreement with the Saudis and the real estate development of the Reuben brothers.

We can still be surprised, but it seems unlikely that after his claimed Super League triumph Boris Johnson will raise an objection to the first major development in English football since then. At the same Conservative Party conference this week, Johnson’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss hailed the Gulf monarchies, but not the 27 democracies in the European Union, as ‘our friends and allies’ with whom we should “forge closer ties”. This is where the national game, and the nation, are today.