AyeDubbleYoo

I assumed most of the local journos don’t even have any contacts with real knowledge. They just tweet stuff that sounds vaguely plausible.

Even his haircut has matured.

Limp by limp?

I’m sure the club aren’t thinking like that.

I would buy Phillips in a heartbeat if the price was right. Gallagher I’m not sure about, loads of energy but looks very random and raw to me. Possibly being at Chelsea hasn’t helped or course.

Didn’t we score loads of goals last season? Well 68, not bad.

Having more good players might lead to more rotation too, he’s never exactly had lots of options.

Important to remember it’s just a test.

That suggestion is effectively abolishing offside. There’s almost never a case where the whole body is off. Obviously there would be if that rule came in, since attackers would start running mega early. Happy it’s just a test.

Get them off club property FFS.

Guy floats through a season in a dire team, does basically nothing and gets a transfer to the runners up and a massive pay rise. Football is weird.

Miggy is vastly underrated by this forum, especially in a Howe team. If you sold him you’d need to buy two right wingers.

I’m not going to downplay racism in any way, but that conclusion is too extreme to even debate.

Sorry but that’s mental.

I would say Ashley had a significant part in ruining a large part of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Of course if you compare the two people there's no contest in the world outside of football. But as a football fan, having your club taken away by a parasite and systematically destroyed is about the worst thing that can happen. We're very lucky we didn't end up in league one.

And Wullie's for being such a sarcasm ponce.

Aye, Abu Dhabi.

That doesn't really answer the question of whether any amount of football success would be worth doing that. I don't think there's any doubt the club will benefit immensely.

From my uneducated view, Qatar aren't as evil and don't have quite as many high-profile crimes. Also they've been around longer. I don't think media will be able to keep this up for decades, eventually it won't be a story anymore.

I do think it's a valid point though. Mike Ashley was actually killing the thing itself, and destroying the point of being a football fan. That's happening immediately to us, it's something that causes us real daily pain. Of course what KSA do is many times worse than anything Mike Ashley has done in his life, we all know that. But it never came with the same sort of conflict that this situation does. Also, I think if KSA had taken over from a decent owner we would have had a lot more protests at the time.

Exactly, we are all hypocrites to some extent. And of course we're victims of capitalism and the market we're forced to live in. I shouldn't buy books from amazon because they don't pay tax, but I want the cheap books. Meh, I don't know what my conclusion is really, I would just rather the link to Saudi was kept low-key. But obviously that doesn't suit the owners themselves... why would it.

The way I can sleep at night is basically, I don't choose where the money comes from, I wish it came from somewhere better. Thinking of PIF as a financial investment fund who invests the money on Saudi Arabia provides a bit of separation, then the likes of Staveley provide even more. Also, the PL is full of dodgy money, so why shouldn't we have some. Also, fans are locked in and their club is something that can never belong to anyone but them. It's not exactly a coherent position and I know maybe I should step away. But basically I can't, so I would rather the link to KSA was as remote as possible.

We should all be more ethical consumers ideally, in all areas where we spend money. But football fans are particularly badly-placed to withdraw support, especially in our case since the ownership is going to make us massively successful I do feel slightly weird that I was ready to completely walk away under Ashley, but now I'm 100% back in. Obviously because Ashley was destroying the club itself. But I did prove that I was prepared to walk away over ownership, he just made that particularly easy.

Hosting the Saudi team and wearing the Saudi kit is unfortunate IMO. Even seeing Yasir talk was a bit uncomfortable, maybe just because he looks more like a Saudi diplomat. It doesn't change the underlying situation that we are funded by a horrific regime, but it does make the link more explicit. That said, it also doesn't change the fact that what Saudi do is nothing to do with Newcastle fans. We both shouldn't feel the need to defend them and shouldn't be blamed for supporting our club.

They just seem to want endless hybrid forwards. Be interesting to see how he does, shame it's not with us.