Saudi Arabia has a lot in common with the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi. which also own football clubs. Saudi Arabia is the second biggest producer of oil in the world. The United Arab Emirates is the eighth. The UK is the 21st largest.
Most of the oil in the Emirates is held in Abu Dhabi, which on its own is the 12th largest producer of oil in the world. That’s where the money comes from – at least until we stop using oil.
Thus Newcastle United now becomes the third state-owned football club alongside PSG and Manchester City. PSG is owned by Qatar Sports Investments. Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. Newcastle is owned by Saudi Arabia. This chart might help you see what’s going on…
| Club |
Country |
TV |
War / Dispute |
| Manchester City |
UAE |
|
Man C v Uefa |
| Newcastle United |
Saudi Arabia |
BeOutQ |
2nd Arab Cold War |
| PSG |
Qatar |
BeIn |
2nd Arab Cold War |
Now the reason for Newcastle United being bought by Saudi Arabia becomes a little clearer. Saudi Arabia is in dispute with Qatar – a dispute we covered recently in the issue of the pirate TV channels run by Saudi Arabia which take broadcasts from Bein, uncode them and broadcast them on free channels.
These matters of course do not concern most football supporters nor many (if any) football journalists, but they are interesting because what we are seeing here is a series of power struggles between countries being fought out via football. Behind it all is a power game; in fact, football now has little to do with it.
All this, of course, passes most football journalists by, although to be fair the Guardian has made a very good stab at noting just what sort of country Saudi Arabia is, and none of the countries owning these clubs is actually known for human rights.
Indeed all this comes at a time when football in England has still not managed to deal with historic child abuse in clubs. And on that score you may note that in November 2017, a year after the child sex abuse scandal in football emerged the sports minister Tracey Crouch announced changes to the law to make it illegal for sports coaches to have sex with 16- and 17-year-old children in their care. You might be surprised that this was not already the law. You might be interested to note that the law has still not been changed.
So with football in England still doing very little about child sex abuse, football is gradually being handed over as a political weapon to countries where human rights legislation of any type do not exist.
Not that all football supporters are concerned – Newcastle fans, like Manchester City fans and PSG fans, welcome the takeover of their clubs by anti-democratic, anti-women’s rights, anti-human rights in general, countries.
These countries are dictatorships. Mike Ashley might have used zero-hours contracts in his sports shops, just as Buckingham Palace (home of the UK royal family) use zero-hours for their summer staff and that is pretty awful. But Saudi Arabia recently beheaded 37 men in a single day and murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi.
Football is slowly being taken over by murdering dictators who have no concept of human rights. That is bad enough but for this to be welcomed by the fans of clubs shows just how far away from sanity football is drifting. And yes I know that Arsenal are fundamentally sponsored by the Emirates, and I have done such tiny, tiny things as I can to argue against this such as not using the airline, persuading my daughters not to use the airline, calling it Arsenal Stadium, not the name given by the airline. Tiny, tiny things and they took me a while to get there I admit, but I am not sure what else I can do other than raise the issue here.
The broader move in England is to accept that football is now where the battle between evil fanatical repressive dictatorships which do not care a jot for human rights is being fought out.
There is one perspective that is missing. The PL depends on TV revenue for most of its budget. Now a new member of the PL is a regime that is at war with the regime owning another memeber AND paying hundreds of millions for PL rights that are pirated on a rand scale by the regime of the new memberbe going down for lack .
Wonder how that is going to pan out when money coming from broadcast right are going to be less….
He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon .
That phrase goes back many years and is just as pertinent today as it was when it was first coined. However this is not just a football problem it is one of society as a whole.
From an Arsenal perspective, I’d say it is better the owner is a person/company who does part of his business with sports and whose earnings depend in part on the results of the clubs. As for countries or billionnaires getting a club for prestige or powerplay, they will drop it anytime if it does not fit their interests anymore.
So to paraphrase @porter, I’d say our devil seems less dangerous then the others…
I was talking about society in general not purely The Arsenal . We have as a country and possibly the Western world allowed ourselves to be taken over by other regimes not necessarily under our control.
According to the BBC in 2015, foreigners own £122 billion ($185 billion) in property in the UK, via offshore holding companies:
More than 100,000 UK property titles are registered to overseas companies, with more than 36,000 properties in London owned by offshore firms.
Then there are our utilities ,private companies etc . Over the last thirty years or so we have been slowly but surely selling ourselves out . Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Foreign ownership is not an issue as that can be nationalised in one swoop. The sad thing about all the distribution of wealth is the corrupt getting open house while the honest pay taxes and get abuse. Non domiciles get all the benefits and none of the burdens.
Let us hope that life improves with the lessons of the current pandemic and social justice becomes a norm rather than a dream.