Messi and Newcastle have become the two great assets of Saudis’ drive to distract
➤ World’s best player and Premier League strugglers offer different challenges for the kingdom’s global PR
There can be no footballers signed, big names or otherwise, by the new Saudi Arabian owners of Newcastle United before Jan 1, although the kingdom itself already has the most famous of them all playing a key role in the nation’s new drive for global acceptance and investment.
Lionel Messi has agreed a lucrative deal with the Riyadh Season programme, the latest key multibillion-dollar investment in the changing face of a country desperately trying to diversify its economy as part of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 efforts. It might be as close as Messi ever gets to the black-and-white stripes of the Toon, but both of them are to play roles in trying to convince you that Saudi Arabia really is not as bad as you might have heard.
This is now the competing space for Saudi Arabia in the hearts and minds of a Western audience: the bone-saw boys v the Geordie boot boys. Forget the human rights abuses and embrace the beauty of Messi’s career, the greatest current global sporting icon, dinking Panenkas or locked in an emotional embrace with former team-mate Ronaldinho. It no longer feels like sportswashing as we knew it, but an arms race to find the quickest way to rewrite the story of a nation.
Inside Saudi, Messi is the face that stares out from the billboards on the desert highways as one of the icons of Riyadh Season, a cultural and arts super-event laid on by the government’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA) – a serious name for the de facto Ministry of Let’s Have Some (Strictly-organised) Fun. In January, Messi and Paris St-germain will play in Riyadh against a Saudi team managed by Arsene Wenger, who seems to be fairly pragmatic about who he works for these days. Meanwhile, there will be a concert from Pitbull, the US performer approved by risk-averse Fifa for the 2014 World Cup opening ceremony and still not considered too edgy despite a flirtation with Covid-denial.
There are, of course, dozens of Pitbulls out there, mediocre acts that can be hired for the right price. There is only one Messi, and there is only one Newcastle United. With Messi, you buy excellence: a back catalogue of breathtaking goals, drama, triumph, despair and triumph again. A footballer who offers zero in the way of political statements, even when the leaders of Catalonia, his long-term home away from home, were going into exile or being imprisoned by the Spanish government. In fact, you could say that aligning himself with Saudi is Messi’s first serious political act, and who knows where it might take him.
In Messi, the Saudi government has a ready-made, premium-level franchise to hitch its wagons to. The Visit Saudi authority has also approached Cristiano Ronaldo to be the face of its new tourism drive. He declined and perhaps Messi will take that role too as Saudi tries to align itself with the best in class. While the GEA handles Messi, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) has acquired Newcastle for a different kind of public-relations exercise.
Unlike the effortless brilliance of Messi, the Newcastle brand promises something different. The prospect that this will not be easy, and there may be some pain along the way – perhaps even the occasional humiliation. It is a departure from the image the Saudi government seeks to project to its citizens at home of the all-knowing, unchallenged state. The state that stages the slick, shiny, tightly marshalled Riyadh Season production complete with Messi, WWE wrestlers and Wenger in the VIP area, and a Winter Wonderland without the Christmas part.
Instead, Newcastle will offer a little more jeopardy. In doing so, it gives the Saudi brand a chance to tap into the emotion of the English game and so confer on an isolated, secretive state some personality in the eyes of a Western audience. It can be achieved without risking too much, as anyone who has sat through the offering of dismal approved documentaries on football clubs in recent years knows. Whether it is Manchester City, Juventus or Tottenham, the director needs his quota of adversity and tough moments. Play the sad music. Cut to a shot of Daniel Levy looking dejected.
Utter some banalities about how hard it all is. Guarantee the club a veto on anything embarrassing or truly revealing. That way, you give the viewers the pretence of balance without anyone ever having to answer the difficult questions.
That is what Newcastle offer their new masters at the PIF – the soaring highs and plunging lows that soften the edges of the people and the governments involved. But how much will they really tell us about what goes on in these secretive non-democracies? Gary Neville declared on Monday night that Saudi Arabia had never been under a brighter spotlight than the one it finds itself under now. That may come as a surprise to those who recall the G20 in 2018 when Bin Salman was cold-shouldered by his fellow world leaders over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But either way, the nation and its leader will be delighted that the discussion is now focused on whether they can run a football club rather than their role in foreign wars.
Of course, there may well be speculation that the two great assets of Saudi Arabia’s 21st-century PR exercise, Messi and Newcastle, could one day elide and we will see the maestro himself run out at St James’ Park in the No10 shirt before his career ends. Imagine the rapture in the stands, and the corresponding episode of the behind-the-scenes documentary, as the club’s executives stage tense discussions about the pros and cons of bringing Messi to Tyneside. There could scarcely be a more effective distraction.
However hard you try, it would be difficult to look away.
Unlike Messi’s effortless brilliance, Newcastle promises the prospect that this will not be easy