Newcastle United: Rob O'Connor says Saudi takeover marks the final stage in football's pursuit of money at all costs
The point of no return for Newcastle United’s takeover by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has likely already been passed. The Rubicon has been bridged, the i’s and t’s are almost certainly dotted and crossed.
All that remains is the confirmation – both the 'breaking news' kind and the formal ushering-in to whatever dark covenant this famous old club has pledged its soul to. Then finally can begin the doleful, searching inquest into how the game came to be in permanent league with such characters.
And yet how agitated or disturbed can we really expect the authorities to be about an acquisition that, at this advanced stage in the game, can only be seen to make the situation incrementally worse?
The salami tactics that have seen ownership of the game in England eaten up by foreign interests happened so gradually that at no one point did it seem serious enough for anyone to insist on action, until it was too late.
Let’s go back to 2003. Anyone who had kept the most cursory eye on the way in which Russia encouraged a tiny domestic elite to become unimaginably wealthy during the 1990s whilst the country froze and starved, plainly saw that the riches that made Chelsea Europe’s most upwardly mobile club were of doubtful moral origin.
But in the early 00s, Russia was not the authoritarian pariah it is now in Western eyes, and besides much of the really nasty material – the extra-judicial rough stuff and bloody underbelly of Moscow’s Mafioso world – happened largely out of sight.
The Russian nouveau riche was plausibly integrating itself into London’s high society. The 'Chelski' revolution was the definitive jewel in its crown. The blood-stained gold rush that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union was shunted into the wings by Jose Mourinho’s dashing looks and wicked tongue.
When Sheikh Mansour took control of Manchester City in 2008, the UAE wasn’t near the top of the UK’s list of international villains. The tyrants that would be toppled during the Arab Spring were still at large across North Africa and the Gulf, and there was small appetite for picking a fight with comparatively friendly commercial partners.
There were a few dissenting voices here and there, but neither the newspaper press, nor the on-air pundits or the early social media voices threw their weight against the hoovering up of one of England’s established clubs into the arms of a foreign autocracy.
Which brings us, via a relatively recent escalation in the scrutiny provided by fans, writers and broadcasters, to now. The really serious stuff – the woeful scale of Saudi human rights abuses; the long, unrepentant history of ruthless autocracy based on an absurd, hyper-conservative religious-moral code – is where the arguments over the Newcastle takeover have centred.
But the current situation, the one where football clubs pass freely into the hands of the highest bidder with minimal processes in place for tracing and vetting the source of wealth, is only the culmination of football’s changing relationship with the people that finance it.
Ever since the game first turned professional in 1885, against a wave of protests from idealists who fought hard to keep football amateur, there has been a compromise agreed between what is best for the sport and what suits the financial interest of individuals.
The very concept of players swapping teams on the promise of better pay, the structure of the transfer system that lets teams funnel privately acquired wealth into transfer fees to tempt rivals into releasing players against their sporting interests, places football and finance in direct opposition.
When Tottenham became the first English club to list on the Stock Exchange in 1983, they circumvented FA rules by creating a holding company, of which the football club subsequently became a subsidiary.
The purpose of the rules had been to prevent people from buying into clubs and extracting wealth from them, which prior to the transformation of the game at the beginning of the Premier League era had never been a promising route towards making money anyway. The FA failed to intervene in Spurs’ tinkering with the regulations, and in that act cast the game’s ambitions forever in the direction of the accumulation of wealth.
The opening up of the game to foreign markets – media, merchandise, even the widespread acquisition of overseas playing talent – is not in itself the salty part of the equation, though it represents a point on the graph of football’s great mutation. Exposing English football to the world necessarily meant the weakening of the link between clubs and their communities.
The more disparate and spread-out are the clientele the club has to cater for, the smaller the fraction of the club that is left for local people. Likewise, a clutch of owners and directors plucked from the global talent pool sets a club necessarily on a tangential path away from its physical roots and towards the club’s supporter diaspora. Fans of Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool have all protested vocally to this end in the last decade.
But the Saudi takeover represents something else.
The direct link to the rotten core of the country’s ruling clan, unencumbered in this instance by third parties or bridging companies, is a last resounding statement from those who vet and monitor who owns football in England that they finally no longer care.
The fit and proper persons test, to any practical extent, has passed into history. The cat’s out of the bag; English football is for sale to the highest bidder – no caveats, no equivocations. No waiting!
The fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Hatice Cengiz, framed the Newcastle takeover in the context of the 2018 killing of the dissident journalist by Saudi assassins.
"The proposed acquisition is not just ‘business’ for the crown prince and the Saudi authorities, but an attempt to evade justice and international scrutiny for an unconscionable act," Cengiz’s lawyer, Rodney Dixon QC told the Guardian.
"It would emasculate the Premier League’s core principles and rules, and ruin its good reputation and character, to allow the crown prince and the Saudi authorities to use this acquisition to seek to repair their international standing."
It’s taken less than a year for the House of Benitez to fall into the arms of the House of Saud, but football’s journey to this place has been a long one. There is no turning back now.