It Could Be Said #21 Newcastle Levels Up
A look at what foreign oligarchs and despots buying British football clubs says about Britain as a country
You almost have to admire the Geordie Nation for brooking no compromise with polite opinion. On a day where one might have expected some feigned ambivalence and a mumbled reference to mixed feelings, there was instead a big party at the news that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had finally purchased the club. It was the type of exuberance you might expect at a big Turkish wedding…I mean other than the one that had to be cancelled because Newcastle’s new owner ordered the fiancée to be beheaded and then had Jamal Khashoggi’s body dismembered in the very embassy he had entered to complete pre-martial paperwork.
I have to admit I struggle with fans argument that you have to understand that the Mike Ashley’s ownership has been such an agony that they were just grateful to get rid of him. They said the same thing when Ashley replaced Freddy Shepherd; who they going to get when Mohammad Bin Salman lets them down; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? I think the reality is more simple, fans like to see their club win, and will gladly jump on any bandwagon that might take them to the Promised Land.
Not for the first time I can’t help but wonder whether this is all a bit undignified. Nowadays I’m more a cricket fan than a football fan, but I still follow Leicester City without being fanatical about it. When Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha died in a helicopter crash I remember being distinctly uneasy with the valedictory coverage, not least the attempts to keep secret that his mistress was one of the passengers. It seemed deeply disingenuous to praise a man for his close connection to a city that he spent so little time in that he had to travel to games by helicopter from Southern England. His and his fellow passengers’ death was a tragedy, but surely at some point we can stop to wonder whether it’s right that the lives of dozens if not hundreds of ordinary citizens were put at risk because a billionaire couldn’t be bothered to take the train.
Nor did anyone stop to wonder where the millions he invested in the side and the wider city came from and whether his native Thailand was more deserving of that investment and charity. Likewise, that the duty free business whose name now adorns the football stadium is mired in allegations of corruption, and of supporting the ruling Junta was a moot point. After all the important thing was that they had established City as a force in the Premier League, and somehow helped secured a still incomprehensible title win.
Chelsea fans made a similar bargain when the then Governor of Chukotka brought their club, as did Manchester City fans when Abu Dhabi turbocharged their stuttering push for greatness. You see similar stories up and down the Premier League, and increasingly in the Championship too. What is new is not that football clubs are things that can be bought or sold, that was always the British model for better or worse. No what’s genuinely unusual is that the idea that a British person may buy a football club has gone the way of Kevin Keegan’s perm. It used to be that local businessmen would buy their local club out of genuine affection for the side and a desire to raise their personal profile or earn a few bob (or both!). Newcastle United had their own local boy done good, as John Hall oversaw their rapid resurrection from the third tier to being the glamour side of the mid-90s. He was not an isolated figure, with Jack Hayward spending a fortune in a failed attempt to revive Wolverhampton Wanders whilst Steve Gibson’s money briefly made Middlesborough an unlikely destination for Italian and Brazilian superstars.
It is of course easy to romanticise such men. Yes they were local, and yes they generally loved their clubs, but nobody makes a fortune without getting their hands dirty. I remember being at a friend’s house when Blackburn Rovers owner Jack Walker died in 2000. I nonchalantly remarked that he had done great things for his side only for my friend’s mother to sharply tell me he was no great man, as he had once made her and many others redundant. Maybe their firm deserved the investment he threw at winning the 1995 league title?
The reason we no longer see such industrialists take over football clubs is because they can’t afford them. Even Newcastle United, a troubled Premier League club in an undesirable location, can still command a £300million asking price. It’s surely reasonable to ask what value does the Premier League’s obscene success add to the country if it literally prices British people and communities from owning their own football clubs.
But that brings us back to those triumphalist scenes in Newcastle this week, or indeed those sombre scenes in Leicester nearly three years ago. The fans don’t care. They would rather have success with foreign ownership, no matter how shady, than endure mediocrity with a British owner (who to be fair tended to be pretty shady). Because the reality is that unlike in Spain or Italy, let alone Germany, there was never any genuine warmth in the relationship between owners and fans. If they signed the cheques and the team kept winning then they were tolerated as a necessary evil, whilst the charismatic and controlling Manager enjoyed the real plaudits. As money has become ever more important in football, the owners have gotten more of the credit, but it’s still a highly transactional relationship. Look at FSG in Liverpool, who after not only saving the company from bankruptcy managed to install the team that won the club that illusive nineteenth league title, yet are increasingly hounded for failing to invest in the side further.
So no, the many crimes of the Saudi regime won’t get Newcastle United fans to disavow their new owners. But failure to sign some star players, win games, or play attractive football surely will. And that raises the question what the Saudis have actually purchased with their money. The fear that involvement in sports may help them and other dictatorships launder their reputations, seems plausible, but do we have any evidence that it actually works? Nobody stops to namecheck Mobutu or Marcos when reminiscing about the Rumble in the Jungle or Thrilla in Manilla, and there’s no evidence that recent Middle Eastern investment in sports has made Westerners think more warmly of the ruling regimes there.
So maybe like rich Americans marrying broke Victorian aristocrats, we British are once again shrewdly selling prestige for something tangible. Of course, it says something about a person let alone a country when the only thing it has left to sell is its reputation. And those marriages were an early warning about the shift in power away from Britain and towards America.