We are through the looking glass. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which owns Newcastle United, wants to acquire Alexander Isak from Newcastle and pay him £600,000-a-week tax-free to play for Al-Hilal, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
All those Geordies dressed as sheiks, welcoming their new owners, thinking they’d got access to unlimited wealth, did not understand that they were just being set up to be pawns in a game they and we would never win. You dance with the devil and sooner or later you will pay.
If you sell your trousers to yourself, that isn’t a market and you can’t pretend it is. And on football’s food chain, Newcastle United are quite high up – but not the highest – so they’d expect their best players to be in demand from champions and not from the likes of Al-Hilal.
This is how it is now, Newcastle fans. This is your life. Others will suffer similarly without the intervention of the authorities. These owners have ambitions that stretch way beyond Tyneside. If they provide money for players, they can and will take them to another of their investments at any time. You might think it’s unfair. It is. But what did you really expect?
Football’s dalliance with nation state ownership was never altruistic. No one cared at all about Newcastle or any other club in a similar position; if it suits them, they will undermine the club and lure away the best or indeed any players they have bought with promises of great wealth, if not great football success. You don’t want it? Sorry. You’re not relevant. Even if it doesn’t happen this time, just the very idea tells us where we are.
What sort of dystopia have we found ourselves in and why? Is this what anyone wants, as the ceaseless transfer and wage inflation drives everyone into the arms of the petro-state and sports-portfolio people. Do you want this? Because this is just the start. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Everything we enjoy about football on the pitch is being used to hypnotise us into accepting the regime. A regime that will dilute your heritage and replace it with a revolving door of assets, or players as we used to call them. All civic elements of the club are, of course, of no interest to them, beyond lip service, if they don’t further their soft power interests. Those days are gone.
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The worship of money has made the game vulnerable to these people. The only defence against it is to reject it but that, as these types well know, is difficult when your whole life and generations before you have invested so much emotion into the place. And anyway, I’m not convinced they wouldn’t play in empty stadiums. But it’s important to realise that what it was just isn’t what it is anymore.
The glory days of a football club being a valuable and important part of civic society have gone in the top flight; you’ll have to look at smaller clubs for that. Nothing has soul and everything is purely transactional for these owners. The old club has been hollowed out. Outwardly it looks the same or even better but inside it festers in a morally dubious pit of despair, as trying to sell a player to yourself who you already own clearly illustrates.
By being co-opted into it, we are perpetuating the transformation of the top-flight game and feeding a monster that disregards and exploits us but just to sweeten that pill, they will be generous when it suits, just to keep you hanging on. It’s clever and it trades off a knowledge of human nature but it’s ultimately malicious. It’s an abusive relationship. Don’t tell Mummy and Daddy, here’s some sweets.
All we can do is take our focus elsewhere. It’s sad, terrible really, but we’ve done it to ourselves. We bought a nightmare masquerading as a dream and the ghouls will continue to kick us in the balls, call it massage and demand gratitude.
You might not have any regard for the Bible but when it says ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ they were not wrong. Look where it’s taken us: on our knees in supplication to it and to those who have it.
Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter, it’s all just entertainment, who cares who owns and pays for it and why? Such nihilism is certainly the aim. If you feel powerless to affect change, they’ve won. It worked. The takeover of everything from club, to players to culture is complete. Just lube up, the owner will be along soon.
