It’s possible to think that PIF ownership has been a necessary stage in this club’s development, while not wanting them to stay around forever.
Nobody else was in the running to buy the club from Ashley, and we will never know how low we’d have gone if PIF hadn’t bought us in 2021. We’ve enjoyed good times - great times, even - under their ownership. Winning a cup (finally) and qualifying for the CL twice. This can’t be denied, nor do I think the author is trying to deny it.
We will always have these memories, even if PIF were to sell up. Nobody can take those away.
The question is whether this all means PIF are the “right” owners for us, from 2025 onwards. I think reasonable people can disagree on that.
Good point on time, place, and opportunity, Yousef. And other successes aside---the club is worth soooooo much more than when the FCB sold up, so that can only be a good thing
Excellent and cogent argument which is difficult to argue against.
There is an alternative and that isn’t another billionaire ghoul of slightly less horrific background. The owners of Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man U et al are less bloodthirsty than Saudi but no less ruinous for the wider health of football.
It’s fans owning their own clubs and if that was ever achieved for as prominent a club as Newcastle United, it’d be a bigger prize than any trophy.
But there was no real appetite for it - several of us via NUST for years for it and we failed to galvanise the wider support. The media which has published article after article in opposition to PIF and lambasted us were nowhere when we needed their support.
The tragedy is fans can’t see their clubs belong to them and allow various sets of leeches take them from them without bothering to even understand it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’ve said it before; in an ideal world, we’d be owned by a retired, local multi-billionaire whose only interest was Newcastle United. He’d bring all the aforementioned to SJP and we’d all live our lives like it’s a Disney movie (who were owned by a similarly rich American good old boy).
No fan with any conscientious can be genuinely happy about our ownership. So you’ve two options:
1. Continue to support the team and accept that every achievement is just that little bit tarnished.
2. Shut up. Stop going. Stand outside of the ground on match days and make your protest.
Football as a whole has become a world of corruption, of big-money, billionaires, corporations you name it whose only purpose is to make loads of money off the back of the game, the players. the staff, football fans regardless of their nationality, background, origins.
PIF I will never be comfortable with them owning our club because of Saudi's record on many things, same with the Rebuens and their background, their donations to the Tories and their business they operate in.
Just as Ashley make me cringe with his sweatshop empire and zombie running for 14 years, Freddy Shepard, a local lad with his grubbyness, disrepect of Alan and his treatment of Sir Bobby along with Douggie.
Sir John for all his local roots, was first and foremost a businessman and made the decision to sell to Mike because it made business sense for him, not the club.
Unless we see an Enron type collapse of Football, or a crash in human society that causes a massive reset at all levels that can take football.
We will be at the mercy of PIF, of whoever comes after them.
It's to a point where fans have to ask how much are they willing to trade, to bear to continue following their football clubs and if there is a breaking point where they decide no more?
It's the same for the players, the managers, their staff, people that work at the football clubs. It's a question no doubt they have and will ask themselves on.
Because I think its onlygoing to get more challenging as the game continues it descent into corporate waters, appealing to influencers, pricing out working class people and catering to the elites.
Yes, absolutely, Jack, that is the big gaping hole which I'm all too happy to concede! I don't really have any answers but a few thoughts at least.
1. The opinion was very consciously "I'd be happy if PIF sold up" rather than specifying what next. That's a cop out, of course, but speaks also to our impotence as fans. We take what we're given and make the best of it. And it's still a significant opinion insofar as the vast majority of nufc fans would I suspect be grief stricken if they woke up to that news. I'd be ok with it.
2. As plenty have pointed out and as you imply, there are no good alternatives out there, at least not at the level at which we're operating and aspire to operate. I don't know anything about his background, but I read that the US owner at Bournemouth at least seems to understand the traditions of a football club and the importance of community but obviously that's a different scale financially. Does that mean it would be preferable to settle for less than the very top of the PL? That's an unpopular opinion for another day but I'm more sanguine about that after 16 March this year. That's truly all I've ever wanted. I can accept whatever comes next.
A game that has moved from working class with owners that exploited players to an elitist game that is a business model that regularly makes young men millionaires having barely kicked a ball in anger hardly seems a suitable arena to be parading moral viewpoints. It's a cesspit that has gone from on the pitch thuggery to boardroom corporate skullduggery. Against the full backdrop of the history of Professional Football the PIF seem less significant as something of particular concern. Unless that is your left wing leaning and need to find something to be upset about to make you feel less tainted and distract you from the fact that you are addicted to and therefore contributing to a game based on greed that sometimes brings out the best but more often the worst in people. Hows that for an unpopular opinion ?
Left wing? I feel it's the capitalist liberals (centrists) who wring their hands on PIF. For this leftist, state-owned means of production is preferable!
Why the kneejerk reaction to "state ownership?" The PIF saved us from the horrific prospect of being bought by amerikkkan vulture capitalists. Spoiler alert: these private wealth consolidation entities ARE the mechanism of state control in oligarchies like the U.S. (see also Russia). I'd rather be owned by a socialized national public interest fund than the Todd Boehlys of the world. I'm not a Saudi apologist. I know what it's like. I have lived there. But the way in which some give "private ownership" a free pass as if it is neutral is maddening. The people wealthy enough to own a football club in the U.S., to continue the example of that country, are the entities that have propped up the biggest purveyor of global hegemony and misery for the last 75 years. The KSA is a client state of that purveyor. So to be clear, it's about opportunity cost and the "devil I know." Sure, the gov't of the KSA is loathsome, but no more so than that NY Jets fascist that is buying crystal palace. At least the former won't destroy the club.
Good question and one which I struggle to answer rationally and intellectually. Broadly speaking I'm very much in favour of state/ public ownership. In fact if all PL owners were expropriated and their clubs put in public hands to be run by their fans that would be the dream! But of one individual football club? By another nation state?
I suppose one way to answer it would be to say that I would have been furious if the UK government was lobbying to have the takeover of another club by a foreign state (say, Villa) pushed through for reasons of diplomatic influence/ trade etc But that's exactly what was happening with PIF and us. Surely that's not right? And fwiw I don't disagree about the pernicious effects of US hegemonic capitalism. Better or worse than KSA? I honestly don't know.
A football fan with a moral conscience. Wow, well done Matthew.
On the football side: "No stadium, no training ground, no Director of Football, no CEO, no commercial deals, no right winger, no right-sided centre back, no second striker, no transfers, no decisions, no communication, no urgency, no interest."
How long would his Eddiness have lasted if he'd performed this poorly?
If you look at most 'big' clubs the owners will have something in their business dealings, or even the way they operate the club itself, as being either not totally ethical or somewhat self-serving, Glazers/Radcliffe at Manure, Chelsea and their fiddling around to dodge PSR and so on.
As was mentioned earlier, money determines everything along with the influence/corruption that comes with this. Look at the Club World Cup and everything that looks shady connected to it and there is a feel that there is some hypocrisy being touted around; You could argue this is just smoke and mirrors to deflect from the things that certain other clubs are up to their necks in.
Having said that, PIF are what they are and their connections cannot be denied, which means that there is always going to be a talking point and differences of opinion.
Football and politics don't mix, right? Ideally no but in the world of global connections, money and power its pretty inevitable.
Also, who would replace PIF? You might just been jumping from the frying pan into the fire and end up mixed up with someone else who is more like he who shall not be named. Can you imagine going back to that way of running a club, it was hardly run by a paragon of virtue after all.
So let's be aware of the potential issues and be honest about them, while also comparing against the other owners with a view to dispelling some of this spurious indignation.
I feel at this point if your moral compass is that strong, football isn't the sport for you. The fact is the game is very different, from the style of play, the crowds, the ownership. If you want to "compete", and I use that term loosely as PIF has been prevented from really going overboard, its big bad owners from big bad places. 2 CL qualifications and 2 finals (1 won) is a seismic shift from what went before when our fan base (most) were like zombies and most people would take that. The bigger point really is that the whole game is ruined. Look at this world club nonsense.
Look, it’s a bit like when a war-torn military dictatorship gets ousted by a beneficial victor from abroad. You know, like, err the Brits did in…Germany?
Or when the nice Americans got rid of those nasty Japs after WWII…or when we turned Australia into a…civilised country?…
It’s a necessary evil, for a bit.
Until we show we’re able to manage on our own again.
We’re by no means defined by it, whatever all them daft football watchers say (only online like, not to me face). There’s something tragic about the fact that the North-East has the backing of Croesus now, and is still not permitted to “level up”. It’s an economic disgrace more than a football one really. Sick of reading about “the North”, frankly. I thought that was us, but clearly I was mistaken and we live in a sort of limbo-land, geographically and politically. Ah fuckin good.
Football seems to dramatise the North-South divide, which is still existent despite these last sixty years of arguing. I’m quite a calm man really, but Billy Furious is on his hols so someone has to take up the cudgel:)
I feel at this point if your moral compass is that strong, football isn't the sport for you. The fact is the game is very different, from the style of play, the crowds, the ownership. If you want to "compete", and I use that term loosely as PIF has been prevented from really going overboard, its big bad owners from big bad places. 2 CL qualifications and 2 finals (1 won) is a seismic shift from what went before when our fan base (most) were like zombies and most people would take that. The bigger point really is that the whole game is ruined. Look at this world club nonsense.
like an alternative dimension, my compass stops working when I'm navigating nufc; and good point about the larger context, e.g., club world cup professional wrestling. If someone/thing in 2025 is able to buy a top football club, they are inevitably wrong 'uns b/c there is nothing neutral or pro-social about billionaires existing.
Ha, yes, my compass also fails as soon as I set foot in St James' or an away end. Very nicely put. And I wrote at length about the Club World Cup last week, which is an absolute abomination and of course funded by PIF to the tune of $1 billion. There are no good answers out there
It’s possible to think that PIF ownership has been a necessary stage in this club’s development, while not wanting them to stay around forever.
Nobody else was in the running to buy the club from Ashley, and we will never know how low we’d have gone if PIF hadn’t bought us in 2021. We’ve enjoyed good times - great times, even - under their ownership. Winning a cup (finally) and qualifying for the CL twice. This can’t be denied, nor do I think the author is trying to deny it.
We will always have these memories, even if PIF were to sell up. Nobody can take those away.
The question is whether this all means PIF are the “right” owners for us, from 2025 onwards. I think reasonable people can disagree on that.
Good point on time, place, and opportunity, Yousef. And other successes aside---the club is worth soooooo much more than when the FCB sold up, so that can only be a good thing
Excellent and cogent argument which is difficult to argue against.
There is an alternative and that isn’t another billionaire ghoul of slightly less horrific background. The owners of Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man U et al are less bloodthirsty than Saudi but no less ruinous for the wider health of football.
It’s fans owning their own clubs and if that was ever achieved for as prominent a club as Newcastle United, it’d be a bigger prize than any trophy.
But there was no real appetite for it - several of us via NUST for years for it and we failed to galvanise the wider support. The media which has published article after article in opposition to PIF and lambasted us were nowhere when we needed their support.
The tragedy is fans can’t see their clubs belong to them and allow various sets of leeches take them from them without bothering to even understand it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’ve said it before; in an ideal world, we’d be owned by a retired, local multi-billionaire whose only interest was Newcastle United. He’d bring all the aforementioned to SJP and we’d all live our lives like it’s a Disney movie (who were owned by a similarly rich American good old boy).
No fan with any conscientious can be genuinely happy about our ownership. So you’ve two options:
1. Continue to support the team and accept that every achievement is just that little bit tarnished.
2. Shut up. Stop going. Stand outside of the ground on match days and make your protest.
Couldn’t agree more . Like it or not we are where we are because of PIF. If they sell then to who? PIF is the devil we know.
*conscience
I was always under the impression that we, the fans, owned Newcastle United. Owners come and go. None of them very nice. But the 50,000 continue.
Interesting article though Matthew.
Football as a whole has become a world of corruption, of big-money, billionaires, corporations you name it whose only purpose is to make loads of money off the back of the game, the players. the staff, football fans regardless of their nationality, background, origins.
PIF I will never be comfortable with them owning our club because of Saudi's record on many things, same with the Rebuens and their background, their donations to the Tories and their business they operate in.
Just as Ashley make me cringe with his sweatshop empire and zombie running for 14 years, Freddy Shepard, a local lad with his grubbyness, disrepect of Alan and his treatment of Sir Bobby along with Douggie.
Sir John for all his local roots, was first and foremost a businessman and made the decision to sell to Mike because it made business sense for him, not the club.
Unless we see an Enron type collapse of Football, or a crash in human society that causes a massive reset at all levels that can take football.
We will be at the mercy of PIF, of whoever comes after them.
It's to a point where fans have to ask how much are they willing to trade, to bear to continue following their football clubs and if there is a breaking point where they decide no more?
It's the same for the players, the managers, their staff, people that work at the football clubs. It's a question no doubt they have and will ask themselves on.
Because I think its onlygoing to get more challenging as the game continues it descent into corporate waters, appealing to influencers, pricing out working class people and catering to the elites.
You make some good points Matthew but what's missing is of course an alternative.
Who else?
Yes, absolutely, Jack, that is the big gaping hole which I'm all too happy to concede! I don't really have any answers but a few thoughts at least.
1. The opinion was very consciously "I'd be happy if PIF sold up" rather than specifying what next. That's a cop out, of course, but speaks also to our impotence as fans. We take what we're given and make the best of it. And it's still a significant opinion insofar as the vast majority of nufc fans would I suspect be grief stricken if they woke up to that news. I'd be ok with it.
2. As plenty have pointed out and as you imply, there are no good alternatives out there, at least not at the level at which we're operating and aspire to operate. I don't know anything about his background, but I read that the US owner at Bournemouth at least seems to understand the traditions of a football club and the importance of community but obviously that's a different scale financially. Does that mean it would be preferable to settle for less than the very top of the PL? That's an unpopular opinion for another day but I'm more sanguine about that after 16 March this year. That's truly all I've ever wanted. I can accept whatever comes next.
A game that has moved from working class with owners that exploited players to an elitist game that is a business model that regularly makes young men millionaires having barely kicked a ball in anger hardly seems a suitable arena to be parading moral viewpoints. It's a cesspit that has gone from on the pitch thuggery to boardroom corporate skullduggery. Against the full backdrop of the history of Professional Football the PIF seem less significant as something of particular concern. Unless that is your left wing leaning and need to find something to be upset about to make you feel less tainted and distract you from the fact that you are addicted to and therefore contributing to a game based on greed that sometimes brings out the best but more often the worst in people. Hows that for an unpopular opinion ?
Left wing? I feel it's the capitalist liberals (centrists) who wring their hands on PIF. For this leftist, state-owned means of production is preferable!
Why the kneejerk reaction to "state ownership?" The PIF saved us from the horrific prospect of being bought by amerikkkan vulture capitalists. Spoiler alert: these private wealth consolidation entities ARE the mechanism of state control in oligarchies like the U.S. (see also Russia). I'd rather be owned by a socialized national public interest fund than the Todd Boehlys of the world. I'm not a Saudi apologist. I know what it's like. I have lived there. But the way in which some give "private ownership" a free pass as if it is neutral is maddening. The people wealthy enough to own a football club in the U.S., to continue the example of that country, are the entities that have propped up the biggest purveyor of global hegemony and misery for the last 75 years. The KSA is a client state of that purveyor. So to be clear, it's about opportunity cost and the "devil I know." Sure, the gov't of the KSA is loathsome, but no more so than that NY Jets fascist that is buying crystal palace. At least the former won't destroy the club.
Good question and one which I struggle to answer rationally and intellectually. Broadly speaking I'm very much in favour of state/ public ownership. In fact if all PL owners were expropriated and their clubs put in public hands to be run by their fans that would be the dream! But of one individual football club? By another nation state?
I suppose one way to answer it would be to say that I would have been furious if the UK government was lobbying to have the takeover of another club by a foreign state (say, Villa) pushed through for reasons of diplomatic influence/ trade etc But that's exactly what was happening with PIF and us. Surely that's not right? And fwiw I don't disagree about the pernicious effects of US hegemonic capitalism. Better or worse than KSA? I honestly don't know.
A football fan with a moral conscience. Wow, well done Matthew.
On the football side: "No stadium, no training ground, no Director of Football, no CEO, no commercial deals, no right winger, no right-sided centre back, no second striker, no transfers, no decisions, no communication, no urgency, no interest."
How long would his Eddiness have lasted if he'd performed this poorly?
If you look at most 'big' clubs the owners will have something in their business dealings, or even the way they operate the club itself, as being either not totally ethical or somewhat self-serving, Glazers/Radcliffe at Manure, Chelsea and their fiddling around to dodge PSR and so on.
As was mentioned earlier, money determines everything along with the influence/corruption that comes with this. Look at the Club World Cup and everything that looks shady connected to it and there is a feel that there is some hypocrisy being touted around; You could argue this is just smoke and mirrors to deflect from the things that certain other clubs are up to their necks in.
Having said that, PIF are what they are and their connections cannot be denied, which means that there is always going to be a talking point and differences of opinion.
Football and politics don't mix, right? Ideally no but in the world of global connections, money and power its pretty inevitable.
Also, who would replace PIF? You might just been jumping from the frying pan into the fire and end up mixed up with someone else who is more like he who shall not be named. Can you imagine going back to that way of running a club, it was hardly run by a paragon of virtue after all.
So let's be aware of the potential issues and be honest about them, while also comparing against the other owners with a view to dispelling some of this spurious indignation.
Not an opinion I share.
In my fifties and looking forward to the new season with all the excitement of a 10 year old!
What a time to be a Newcastle United supporter.
I feel at this point if your moral compass is that strong, football isn't the sport for you. The fact is the game is very different, from the style of play, the crowds, the ownership. If you want to "compete", and I use that term loosely as PIF has been prevented from really going overboard, its big bad owners from big bad places. 2 CL qualifications and 2 finals (1 won) is a seismic shift from what went before when our fan base (most) were like zombies and most people would take that. The bigger point really is that the whole game is ruined. Look at this world club nonsense.
Look, it’s a bit like when a war-torn military dictatorship gets ousted by a beneficial victor from abroad. You know, like, err the Brits did in…Germany?
Or when the nice Americans got rid of those nasty Japs after WWII…or when we turned Australia into a…civilised country?…
It’s a necessary evil, for a bit.
Until we show we’re able to manage on our own again.
Inshallah, ya naa…
We’re by no means defined by it, whatever all them daft football watchers say (only online like, not to me face). There’s something tragic about the fact that the North-East has the backing of Croesus now, and is still not permitted to “level up”. It’s an economic disgrace more than a football one really. Sick of reading about “the North”, frankly. I thought that was us, but clearly I was mistaken and we live in a sort of limbo-land, geographically and politically. Ah fuckin good.
Football seems to dramatise the North-South divide, which is still existent despite these last sixty years of arguing. I’m quite a calm man really, but Billy Furious is on his hols so someone has to take up the cudgel:)
I feel at this point if your moral compass is that strong, football isn't the sport for you. The fact is the game is very different, from the style of play, the crowds, the ownership. If you want to "compete", and I use that term loosely as PIF has been prevented from really going overboard, its big bad owners from big bad places. 2 CL qualifications and 2 finals (1 won) is a seismic shift from what went before when our fan base (most) were like zombies and most people would take that. The bigger point really is that the whole game is ruined. Look at this world club nonsense.
like an alternative dimension, my compass stops working when I'm navigating nufc; and good point about the larger context, e.g., club world cup professional wrestling. If someone/thing in 2025 is able to buy a top football club, they are inevitably wrong 'uns b/c there is nothing neutral or pro-social about billionaires existing.
Ha, yes, my compass also fails as soon as I set foot in St James' or an away end. Very nicely put. And I wrote at length about the Club World Cup last week, which is an absolute abomination and of course funded by PIF to the tune of $1 billion. There are no good answers out there
“Nor do 50,000 people come together in one place every other week to agonise and glory in Disney’s success or failure.”
No, it’s 160,000 every day visiting Disney parks.