Why is Saudi money worse than cash from a bunch of white guys in America?
If you wish to know how hollow the Premier League hysteria over Newcastle’s takeover by Saudi Arabia is, consider this: the same clubs had absolutely no problem when it happened at Sheffield United.
Potless Saudis, they can handle. And by any measure of comparison Prince Abdullah bin Mosa’ad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is not at the top table when it comes to wealth in the Gulf. few would mind being a couple of quid behind him, but he’s not scaring the other owners. At the moment, it’s all he can do to keep his club out of League One next season.
Nor do the Premier League’s principled band mind rubbing along with autocratic regimes, given that in 2017 Manchester United agreed a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia’s government-backed General Sports Authority.
The official announcement can still be found on the club website, illustrated with a photograph of a beaming group managing director, Richard Arnold, holding up a shirt beside GSA chairman Turki Al-Shikh. The shirt has AlShikh’s name on the back.
‘The club has a longstanding relationship with Saudi Arabia and has over five million passionate fans in the region,’ Arnold confirms. ‘Our partnership with Saudi Telecom is the longest running of all our commercial partners.
‘Having the chance to help shape the football industry in the Kingdom is a great honour and it is something where we believe we can make a big difference. I hope that this strategic alliance will benefit generations of Saudi footballers, supporters and young professionals looking to work in football well beyond Saudi Vision 2030.’
Yet the promotion of Saudi Vision 2030 — the plan to diversify the country’s economic interests away from oil — is one of the opportunities that has gone down the tubes as a result of rushed Premier League legislation outlawing owner-sponsorship.
The brand Saudi Vision 2030 was a strong contender to be Newcastle’s shirt sponsor, going forward. Now it won’t be. It is fine for Manchester United to use it as a revenue stream, but not for Newcastle, who are owned by the Public Investment fund of Saudi Arabia.
No doubt one of Newcastle’s competitors will come forward to explain how this is just the latest example of financial fair play; or maybe they won’t.
After all, there’s a lot of shady stuff going on, such as 19 clubs in a 20-club league, meeting to discuss how to place limitations on the excluded one. That’s running a cartel. Business experts, not to mention judges, tend to frown on it, which is why Newcastle are taking legal advice.
Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel is the old maxim and the same may apply to someone who sells oil by it, too. One imagines the 19-club meeting won’t look such a smart move in court.
Meanwhile, Kick It Out are troubled by a few excitable Geordies with Poundshop tea towels on their heads, when the real racism is coming from the top. Oil money, Gulf states, petrodollars, you know the lingo by now. Why is investment from one part of the world seen as less preferable to a bunch of white guys from florida or Boston?
It reminds of the time when UEfA sanctioned Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, then didn’t even bother to differentiate between their cases.
They both received fines of £50million without any pretence of distinction because, let’s face it, all these towelheads are the same, so why bother to assess differing business models? Premier League legislation currently being drawn up by panicking executives and those who fear displacement is directly aimed at one sort of owner, one sort of investor, from one part of the world. If Kick It Out are serious about rooting out racism around Newcastle, they should return their Premier League funding and just call it what it is.
The Premier League are allowing clubs to make revisions on the hoof that, long term, could devalue the league and its participants.
Why would any investor wishing to promote a brand — or even a country — buy into the league only to be tied in red tape over what could be displayed on the shirts? If the temporary league legislation regarding owner-sponsorship had been in place a year ago, would Newcastle have been such an attractive proposition?
And this is what is being bought: a project, a vision. Companies like Uber and Deliveroo do not yet show a profit, but people are making billions off them. How?
Investors are buying the future. They are buying a time when every cab is an Uber and Deliveroo calls at every house twice weekly. So how can anyone — and certainly not a jealous rival — set what Newcastle’s shirt is worth?
The sponsor might not be buying into national television exposure, but the regeneration of a city. We now know Manchester City’s Etihad sponsorship, so controversial at the time, takes in a shirt, a stadium and a development project that has transformed East Manchester. Etihad is the branding on that. It wasn’t overvalued at all. So Newcastle’s sponsorship values now bear no relation to the going rate under Mike Ashley.
The club is in the news every day, the owners have big development plans for the city. A sponsor might be buying into that project across a decade.
And who gets to decide what this is worth? If the biggest sponsorship deal in English football was £100m, say, and a Saudi-related firm agreed £300m, that’s different. That’s wrong.
But if the biggest deal was £100m and Newcastle’s matched it, or even went to £110m, that may constitute an investment in where it is believed the club is heading. It cannot be that Manchester United or Liverpool must always have the best deals, by law.
We treat state ownership as dirty, but Boris Johnson doesn’t want to buy Arsenal for the UK, no more than Joe Biden wants the US to own the New York Yankees. That is not the way the west works. But do you seriously believe the Russian state did not sanction the ownership of Chelsea; or that Chinese-backed takeovers progress without the support of the Chinese government?
And if we treat business issues as separate to human rights — and let’s face it, we always do — the PIf of Saudi Arabi is a proper investment group with interests in General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Live Nation, facebook, Disney, Boeing, Citigroup, BP and Uber. Yet the Premier League clubs instinctively treat them like crooks. Maybe that’s why they need the white folk to front this up. Makes it respectable.
Kick It Out are troubled by a few excitable Geordies when the real racism is coming from the top