Given what’s going on in the UK and the world at the moment (Pandora papers, anyone?) we shouldn’t be surprised that the Newcastle deal has been sanctioned. I see that the other PL clubs are now raising their eyebrows - maybe the big boys don’t want to have to compete with another big spending club.
It's pretty obvious that these Football Club purchases are mere vanity projects for their new owners and as has been talked about above an attempt to buy love. They all hate me and say horrible things so if I buy some affection from somewhere that will make all the horrible stories go away.
On a serious note we all saw what happened when our local Journalists upset the hierarchy at MFC. Can you imagine being a Journalist working for the Chronicle while the Toon have been underperforming?
Good Post RR and you are not alone with your perception of Football today and all the corruption and hype that goes with it.
The onset of Covid caused many of us to stop watching football even when it was later televised from ok empty stadia.
After supporting Boro for over 55 years it seems strange for me not to be going to see them play live. I did promise myself that if Boro made the playoffs and even the final itself! I would go and see them. As there is no chance of that happening this season I can remain safe at home watching from afar.
As a Newcastle born lad who moved to Middlesbrough when a toddler, my dad used to take me to see Newcastle play and my first memory is seeing George Eastham play in their reserves when he has just signed and I believe there was 20,000 people went to that game.
I did get my own back on my Dad as when I became a fervent Boro supporter I used to drag him moaning and groaning to Boro games to see a “real” football team. Standing in the “chicken run” it felt great to be part of it and really involved. I remember one game he criticised one of our star players and said he was rubbish! That particular player was “Graeme Souness” and the game was against Sheffield Wednesday. We won 8 0 and Souness scored a hat trick! My dad never lived that down as I always ribbed him about it.
So why am I telling all this? Well like most true football supporters we always try and support local teams and hope they do well (except Sunderland!) No only joking!
All the family from my mother and father still live in Newcastle and I rang my cousin this week to get his view on the Saudi takeover. It would appear that most Newcastle fans don’t care about who’s taken over they are just so relieved to get rid of of Mike Ashley.
The high level promotion and slick advertising will gloss over any bad news and ensure that the new owners of Newcastle Utd will be seen in a positive light.
By the same token I see in blogs and news stories today that some of Neil Warnocks former players have come out and supported him in the style of play and what a great manager he is. I wonder if the Boro PR Team are working behind the scenes to paint him in a positive light so that all the rumblings from the fans dissipates?
Or is that me just being cynical?
UP THE BORO ITS OUR TEAM !
OFB
Mr Shearer has been approached by the new owners of Newcastle United to be part of the new generation of ownership and management.
So it is not surprising that he has no adverse comments to make about the new owners.
OFB
Now that must be about money or am I being a cynic? Plus he's on the BBC and that's PR for them to help with the gloss. Cynical? No not me.
UTB,
John
I guess it's only a matter of time before Ant and Dec are involved in the project - possibly with a new series of "I'm a overpaid trophy signing get me out of here" - where failed signing are voted off the Newcastle squad from a secret pre-season location camp in Saudi Arabia. Though unfortunately for the Geordie supporters only Bin Salman is allowed to vote...
Maybe Cheryl (Tweedy/Cole) could get involved too.
I wholeheartedly agree with all that has been said on this blog about the country that has bought Newcastle United. Personally, I don’t blame Mike Ashley at all because he saw an opportunity to sell an asset he didn’t want and successfully concluded a deal.
But what about the football authorities? They could have stepped in and stopped the deal happening. They didn’t because they were seduced by the scale of the organisation behind the money being offered (and who knows what else may come out about this deal in the furniture) and so they found a tenuous excuse of a reason as to why their rules about proper ownership were not being broken. They should be ashamed of themselves and their lack of proper governance over the sport. They are ethically and morally bankrupt and a disgrace to the game.
….it won’t be in the furniture but more likely in the future. Don’t you just love spellcheck?
Indeed they are Boroexile. Not only are they so, but they are also spineless cowards, afraid to uphold so many aspects of the rules they make themselves.
….it won’t be in the furniture but more likely in the future. Don’t you just love spellcheck?
Who knows what else will crawl out of the woodwork...
It seems what clinched the approval was Saudi Arabia's decision to stop blocking Qatar's BeIN sports network from being broadcast in the country. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that football is now driven by business over moral issues.
Newcastle United's new owners have reportedly identified Middlesbrough favourite Gareth Southgate as someone they would like to be their new manager.
Newcastle acquired new owners this week when a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) bought the club from Mike Ashley, making them the richest football club owners in the world.
And with such a significant wealth, thoughts on Tyneside have immediately turned to the future and building the squad to compete at the top end of the Premier League, with the new owners even targeting Champions League qualification in time.
The Southgate link sounds nothing more than lazy journalism - he's under contract with England until the end of 2022 and if we know anything about him as a man he'll not break that contract.
Besides, the job of Newcastle manager is with the current players, who are yet to win a game this season and it's going to take quite a few transfer windows before they have a squad capable of challenging at the top of the PL - even if they persuade other clubs to sell their best players.
It's just the start of all the hype - the reality is that Newcastle will do well to avoid relegation this season and the January window normally doesn't see the best players move clubs.
Perhaps you should look at Man City as an example - they were bought by Sheikh Mansour in 2008 and it took them three years to win the league - though they actually finished in 9th the year before they were bought. Since he bought the club he has spent £1.3 billion on 70 players.
It's arguably a harder task today to 'buy' the title as there are already quite a few billionaire owners now competing for the same players - plus Newcastle are starting from a much lower base and can't offer Champions League football and there's also Financial Fair Play rules that prevent them just throwing money around.
Though we shouldn't forget that Man City's two-season ban from Europe for breaching FFP was reduced to just a €10m fine on appeal - which is barely small change for a club that spent £1.3bn on players!
Southgate would be mad to take on that job. He is perfect for the England job. He has got the press eating out of his hand (rightly) he stamped out club rivalry, brought in togetherness as a big factor, tries to bring through new Boys in a gradual way, and is not stuck with the big clubs players, being quite ready and willing to pick the best player for the position. Our football is now too centralised, and I say that in spite of the three teams from Manchester and Liverpool. We are lucky that they exist, or London would have cornered the whole shooting match. It seems too me that if you can Corner the money you can Corner the game. So, I am in favour of any club who can, should grab the money and make hay while the sun shines.
Having recently finished watching the Netflix production "The English Game" , which I enjoyed very much, I do wonder what Lord Kinnaird would make of the Newcastle takeover.
Netflix portrayed Old Etonion player Kinnaird as a fair person who persuaded the FA to turn a blind eye to back hand payments to two Northern players when the game was still an ameteur sport.
I know the series is not entirely factual but it does give an insite into the governance of the sport at that time.
Kinnaird realised that the game was changing, could no longer be centralised in London and the South, and the Northern upstarts would eventually win the FA cup. And that meant northern players being paid as they did not have the wealth/means to regard football as an enjoyable passtime as Kinnaird and his Old Etonians did.
This lead to Blackburn Olympic beating the Old Etonions in the 1883 final. (Sure Ken remembers this!).
Interesting that no Ameteur team ever won the cup again.
Kinnaird appeared in nine FA cup finals, a record that surely can never be broken. So will he be rolling in his grave or will he be happy how football has "evolved".
Whilst agreeing with Anthony Vickers that the Riverside Stadium is a magnificent stadium and there have been more exciting matches and that arguably on the whole the standard of football has been higher, we are now left with one of the poorest Boro teams in my lifetime. Towards the end of it’s life Ayresome Park was not fit for purpose except for one thing, the pitch. It was nearly always in pristine condition and recognised as the best playing surface in the country outside of Wembley. Also for people of my age although rarely looking like winning the First Division Championship, there were some exciting seasons especially evening floodlit FA Cup matches - there was always something special about 40,000 plus crowds under the lights. The Brian Clough era when Boro rarely lost at home with goals aplenty, and the Jack Charlton promotion season were stand-out periods for me and my pals and will never be forgotten.
Talking of Old Etonians... We already know that current UK PM Boris Johnson is a former pupil of the elite school but I was interested to read that The Times reported in 2019 that the new Saudi Arabia ambassador to London and loyal cousin to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud, is also an old etonian. According to The Times, he is also well connected in British Society and is married to Lucy Cuthbert, the granddaughter of the 10th Duke of Northumberland.
Interestingly, when his father was ambassador to the United States for 20 years, he was in a three-year relationship with the then model Vanessa Trump, before she met Donald Trump Jr (who she since divorced). They were due to marry but the relationship ended on 9/11 when his father was suspected of having indirect ties to the hijackers they quickly returned to Saudi Arabia.
Also one of the other main actors in the deal, Amanda Staveley, is another person with good connections. She was born near Ripon in North Yorkshire and like her mother was a keen show-jumper and went on to study Modern Languages at Cambridge. Stavely also did quite a bit of modelling and after Cambridge she borrowed £180,000 to buy a restaurant near Newmarket, which is where she became friends with the Al Maktoum family of Dubai, who owned the Godolphin Racing stables. In 2000, she closed the restaurant and open a £10m conference centre in a joint venture with Trinity College Cambridge with one of the investors being King Abdullah of Jordan.
Incidentally, in 2003 she was dating Prince Andrew but eventually married a British-Iranian businessman called Mehrdad Ghodoussi and they moved to Dubai. She set up a company in 2008, which the Financial Times described as: acting "via offshore private equity affiliates" as a vehicle for the investment of Middle Eastern money, with Staveley acting as an adviser on those deals.
She actually brokered the Man City takeover by Sheikh Mansour - from which she reportedly earned £10m. Staveley was also part of deal that had attempted to buy Liverpool but when that failed they switched their attention to Newcastle. She has a ten percent stake in the deal worth £30m - which if you consider Man City is now valued at around £2.5bn after being bought for £210m then she could stand to see that stake increase ten-fold.
Anyway, whether any of this has any relevance in the Newcastle deal is a matter of speculation but following the initial failure to approve the Saudi takeover of the club, Bin Salman had requested that Boris Johnson should intervene. The Guardian reported in April that: The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, warned Boris Johnson in a text message that UK-Saudi Arabian relations would be damaged if the British government failed to intervene to “correct” the Premier League’s “wrong” decision not to allow a £300m takeover of Newcastle United last year.
At the weekend, the BBC revealed that the Foreign Office had held two meetings on the issue with the Premier League in May and June to "discuss the matter". The BBC had filed a Freedom of Information request to discover what was discussed in these meetings but only received a redacted copy of the agenda of the first and a redacted copy of the minutes of the second but failed to respond to provide a list of attendees of the meetings.
A statement from government officials said it wouldn't reveal details of what it told the Premier League about the Saudi-backed takeover of Newcastle United as it could harm relations with Saudi Arabia.
So it's quite possible that the UK government leant on the Premier League at Bin Salman's request in order to pressurise them to approve the deal in which we are seemingly now told he has no involvement with.
However, the The Public Investment Fund that financed the Newcastle deal, is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and is regarded as one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with total estimated assets of at least $500 billion. It has been described as among the least transparent sovereign wealth funds in the world. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal noted that none of the fund's investments were named. Oversight of this fund is managed by the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA) and is chaired by Mohammad bin Salman.
It almost sounds like one of those conspiracy theories with an intertwined web of well known people and middle-eastern business men across the world. Perhaps it's just the nature of elites - they all end up rubbing shoulders where the money is as they look to wheel and deal and live the high life. Football it seems is now part of that scene!
@werdermouth Very interesting but not at all surprising I’m afraid. We don’t do politics on Diasboro but if we did I might say a bit more about how I feel about this country at the moment.
Can we get Boris to intervene with the League in Marc Bola's social media scandal and charge. The whole lot, the Premiership, League, UEFA and the World Cup crew are a cabal of thieves, the two actors who have bought Wrexham FC need more respect from all football supporters.
As my grandmother would have said 'going to hell in a handcart'.
UTB,
John
Is there a fit and proper person test to see if you can be Prime Minister I wonder 🙄 ?
🤐
Perhaps Boris was thinking about ways to help ensure the Blue takeover of the Red Wall endures and really the Barcode's deal is all part of the great Levelling Up we hear so much about that has only become possible because we have reclaimed our Sovereignty so those jolly rotten foreigner types in Brussels can't stop the United Kingdom of Greater England and the DUP making highly profitable deals with anyone we bally well want to, especially with good old boys of the Alma Mater that are all properly inculcated in the ancient and noble doctrines of Mutual Backscratching and Unequivocal Entitlement...
Public Investment Fund .... hah, that is where our leader's favourite word PIFfle derives then...
The ballot perhaps
I wondered if that would count as well Billy, but clearly it is as imperfect a test as the FA's own fit and proper test is !!
If it is the biggest sovereign wealth fund (I think that's a given)then it is invested in many many giant companies, so a sport company is the last thing we should be worried about, at least that will Bring a lot of happiness to a lot of people (not only football supporters) and not only in the north.
The ballot perhaps
I wondered if that would count as well Billy, but clearly it is as imperfect a test as the FA's own fit and proper test is !!
By the way, for the avoidance of any doubt my previous comments are only me poking a bit of fun at and and not me making an overtly political statement of opinion about our PM. Other political leaders, educational establishments and football clubs are available as subjects for humuorous and satirical observation 🤐
If anyone finds there is any truth in any of what I said, that is purely coincidental !!!
There are certainly issues for the UK government to answer on this matter but it appears they prefer to hide behind the notion that it is a sensitive issue that can't be made public out of fear of damaging relations with a country that is an ally and important business partner.
Though with the revelations from the Pandora papers showing large sums of money are flowing in and out of the UK with some of that essentially being laundered, it's surely up to the regulators involved to ensure football doesn't become a useful means to cleaning and investing receipts from dodgy gains.
I listened to a File on Four documentary yesterday about the Pandora Papers and what was interesting is that the UK has become one of the main destinations for investment by those looking to both clean their money and keep it safe from others who may grab it off them back in their own countries.
What we are now seeing in football is that clubs are being bought essentially by states, who once they've acquired the club are then spending hundreds of millions on new stadiums, training complexes and high-profile players - plus community regeneration projects too. This money comes from funds normally set up in a complex string of offshore accounts and has become hard to trace back to its ultimate origins.
It's not that all of this money is likely to be from dodgy deals but the documentary argued that perhaps 5-10% of money can easily be buried and mixed with legitimate funds, which becomes almost impossible to disentangle and trace once it has been invested.
I would suggest nobody can be sure that football is not part of this money legitimising process and it seems there is little chance of anyone being particularly interested in finding out. It appears the order of the day is don't ask questions and lets just reap the benefit of the investments from these new 'white knights'.