Newcastle trying to sell oil to the Saudis

IT didn’t take long for the jokes to start flying around the internet. Hell they practically wrote themselves. Typical Newcastle, went the general tenor of them, just when they’re about to be taken over by a petro-state, the price of oil crashes through the floor.

Events on Monday had a lot of us double-taking at our screens when we saw crude oil prices tumble towards zero and even at one stage below zero. Think about that for a minute. Traders would actually pay you to take oil off their hands, not the other way around. We’re truly through the looking glass when stuff like that happens.

Of course, the crash in the price of a barrel of crude is largely due to the collapse in demand for oil due to the near global lockdown we’re currently experiencing, but it’s also due to a certain amount of hubris on the Saudis part as they flooded the market in the months before COVID-19 gripped the world.

The House of Saud weren’t to know what was coming down the tracks of course, but we can’t help but think it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of lads and we do mean lads quite literally. MBS (Mohammed bin Salman) and his crew are a misogynistic, repressive, disruptive force in the Middle East and across the globe.

You’d like to think that their current difficulties might somehow put a dent in the regime. Somehow we doubt it, however. As we doubt the idea that the current price of crude might scupper the proposed take-over of Newcastle United, which will probably come to the relief of a very healthy majority of Magpies and more’s the shame.

That’s not a poor reflection on Newcastle supporters or on football supporters more generally we’d tentatively suggest, rather it’s reflective of a certain sickness in the game. Football being used as the plaything of dictatorships is nothing new – Manchester City were the pioneers in England – so fans of rival clubs can hardly be expected to unilaterally disarm.

For our part we continue to be sceptical to a certain extent about the effectiveness of sportswashing. Qatar has had nothing but bad press since they won the right to host the 2022 World Cup. The UAE has got plenty of blow-back in the years since they took over City.

Still the Saudis wouldn’t be willing to part with nearly £300m (and that’s just the initial outlay) unless there was something in it for them. Maybe we’ve just got to accept that not everyone is as engaged with the news and world affairs as we are and for the less engaged sportswashing works dispiritingly well.