Premier League's lack of standards paved way for Mohammed bin Salman to be Newcastle's de facto owner
Newcastle United fans feel relieved. Their bad owner appears to finally be selling the team.
And Mike Ashley is, and perhaps was, a bad owner indeed. In spite of being a sporting goods billionaire, Ashley didn’t invest nearly enough in the club, betrayed a tempestuous character, squeezed the fans for money and then marginalized them, froze out the media, allowed his club to fall behind in the Premier League’s rapid commercial arms race, twice oversaw a relegation, pushed away every good manager he ever had, and tried to sell the team for almost as long as he owned it. It was, for most of his sorry affiliation with the club, hard to tell why he’d bought it at all.
Instead, the Magpies will get the government of Saudi Arabia, joining the sportswashing party at the expense of another popular soccer club’s reputation. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia will reportedly own 80 percent of the club in a deal worth a total of some $422 million — after Ashley bought it for about $166 million. This means the club’s de facto owner will be Mohammed bin Salman, the chairman of the PIFSA and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He’s also widely considered to be responsible for the gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the relentless bombing of Yemen, pushing millions to starvation, among a large portfolio of human rights abuses.
If the deal goes through, Newcastle will just trade in a bad owner for one who is a different kind of bad. But also one who has the potential to remake it into the top club it once was. For the lack of a domestic title since 1927, Newcastle remains wildly popular in England’s North East.
Depressingly, you can already see how this will turn out. Results will be all that matter, just as Manchester City’s success has glossed over the myriad human rights abuses by its ownership from Abu Dhabi, where stoning and flogging is regularly meted out by its Sharia courts.
If Newcastle finally grows into its long-dormant potential as a mega-club — already equipped with a great stadium, a large following and a major city — all will be forgiven. Qualify for the Champions League and you won’t hear much about the years-long war in Yemen.
Sure enough, Newcastle fans are already creating a permission structure for themselves.
“The involvement of Saudi Arabian wealth in the takeover is not a concern right now and ultimately any new owners will be judged like all owners are judged — by how they treat the fans and how they run the football club,” Alex Hurst, the chair of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust and the editor of its fanzine told The Guardian. “Getting those two things right is the most important thing.”
But then it’s easy for fans to be this callous, because that permission already existed.
It was granted by the Premier League and the Football Association when they allowed one club after another to be taken over by owners whose motives fell, most generously, between questionable and dubious. The Saudis will not be the first ownership group to co-opt the Premier League and the prestige it beams around the globe to sportswash themselves — buying into a universally beloved product to buff up their shaky image.
At this point, it would be hypocritical for the Premier League to turn even someone like bin Salman down, after City was owned by Thaksin Shinawatra, the profiteering, human rights-abusing former prime minister of Thailand, and then the Abu Dhabi government. After clubs were bought in leveraged, hostile takeovers, borrowing against the clubs themselves and forever draining revenues for debt servicing — the way the American Glazer family has siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars out of Manchester United.
This is a problem of the Premier League’s own making. It lacked standards then and so it can’t possibly enforce them now.
Sure, the league had a fit-and-proper test for owners, but it never went any further than assessing conflicts of interest, legal issues and financial solvency. More recently, it adopted an Owners’ and Directors’ Test, but all it added was that candidate-owners “meet standards greater than that required under law so as to protect the reputation and image of the game.” The language is vague and nobody appears to have ever failed it.
After all, the test is administered by the board of a league with a vested interest in wealthy owners passing it. Bin Salman will surely pass it. Perhaps it takes some finessing, but the Premier League hasn’t been known to turn down the wealth of an oil state looking to exert soft power by splashing some of its abundant money over a moribund team.
The Premier League is now just a high-end sportswashing circuit, cash-rich and morally bankrupt.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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