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Takeover Thread - July 1st statement, Staveley letter to Tracey Crouch (and response) in OP


Yorkie

Will the takeover be complete by this summer?  

312 members have voted

  1. 1. Will the takeover be complete by this summer?

    • Yes
      87
    • No
      183


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Finally got this off my chest earlier on when my lass pestered me to find out what was wrong with me, and ashamed to say I broke down in tears. Not the defiant image we should be upholding at this point so I sought to remedy that by dropping the Premier League a (futile) message on their website.

 

I blatantly spoiled our wedding anniversary the other day by being quiet all night and passed it off as being tired when in reality I was going over every report I’d read in my head looking to assign blame while drastically clinging to some sort of hope it’ll be resurrected. I’m 33 ffs and sat in a mood while out for a meal.

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Guest reefatoon

Swamping every post The Premier League do on social media similarly to how we went after SD accounts would be a start.

 

Don't let this wash away in 2-3 weeks/months.

 

It’s already happening fella, go take a look, it puts a smile on your face.

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Finally got this off my chest earlier on when my lass pestered me to find out what was wrong with me, and ashamed to say I broke down in tears. Not the defiant image we should be upholding at this point so I sought to remedy that by dropping the Premier League a (futile) message on their website.

 

I blatantly spoiled our wedding anniversary the other day by being quiet all night and passed it off as being tired when in reality I was going over every report I’d read in my head looking to assign blame while drastically clinging to some sort of hope it’ll be resurrected. I’m 33 ffs and sat in a mood while out for a meal.

 

I do not post much on here as I never really have the time. I can not put into words how I feel about this. I feel I have finally lost any connection I had with professional football. I have run out of ways to convince myself to enjoy it still. I am lucky though I still have grassroots football, watching my U9 girls team brush a side other teams gives me the same pleasure I used to get from professional football. It helped a lot last night to get out of my mood. I can`t recommend it enough if anyone is looking for a football fix. Clubs are crying out for women's football coaches, all courses paid for. 

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Really well put

 

What he's saying is good but what the fuck is going on with the editing (?) on the video and the chopping and changing, seemingly zooming in and out all the time. Made it unwatchable for me. Had to close my eyes and pretend it was a podcast.

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How can the PL sit back and watch the PIF buy Milan like? So they will just want £100s of millions get pumped into a rival league instead of their own then? Also did I read that right that the PL rights are up for negotiation in the middle east in 2022? What happens then if the PIF gets the rights or are the Saudis not allowed to even bid for them? Honestly its pathetic.

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Really well put

 

What he's saying is good but what the fuck is going on with the editing (?) on the video and the chopping and changing, seemingly zooming in and out all the time. Made it unwatchable for me. Had to close my eyes and pretend it was a podcast.

 

Pretty common with YouTueb vloggers. Annoys the hell out of me but 95% of the videos I watch are the same.

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Really well put

What he's saying is good but what the fuck is going on with the editing (?) on the video and the chopping and changing, seemingly zooming in and out all the time. Made it unwatchable for me. Had to close my eyes and pretend it was a podcast.

Pretty common with YouTueb vloggers. Annoys the hell out of me but 95% of the videos I watch are the same.

Really? I'm well out of that world then. Would drive me crazy watching too much of that.

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https://theathletic.com/1965132/2020/07/31/newcastle-takeover-saudi-arabia-qatar-piracy-bein/?source=weeklyemail

 

Why the Premier League couldn’t let Newcastle’s Saudi takeover happen

 

By Matt Slater Jul 30, 2020  247 

There will be no celebrations at beIN Sports headquarters in Qatar at the collapse of this takeover: they know this will only make things more difficult in terms of their attempt to resume normal service in Saudi Arabia, one of the most important markets they operated in until June 2017.

That is when most of Qatar’s closest neighbours withdrew diplomatic ties with the small but wealthy Gulf state and started an economic blockade that was always going to have a significant impact on one of the country’s most high-profile companies. Qatar’s critics, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to the fore, accused the country of fostering terrorism and destabilising the region.

Some of this was to do with Qatar’s long-standing policy of trying to be a mediator in the Gulf, which meant being more friendly with Iran than the Saudis or Emiratis would like, and some of it was to do with the company that gave birth to beIN, Al Jazeera, the news channel that broadcast every detail of the Arab Spring protests and rebellions that brought down governments across the region between 2010 and 2012.

The fact that any of this has anything to do with English football should be absurd. But it does and, like the dispute in the Gulf, it is very much about television. Within weeks of Saudi Arabia sealing its borders with Qatar, attacking its currency and halting exports, one of the biggest heists of intellectual property rights started in the kingdom and it has never stopped.

BeoutQ, a play on the name of its prey, looks like a legitimate sports broadcaster, with its branded set-top boxes and electronic programming guide, and it certainly has all the premium entertainment and sports content you could ever wish for. So much so that you would immediately wonder how on earth they are making any money when they are charging so little for this box of delights.

It is very simple really: they are stealing it. Mainly from beIN but also from broadcasters around the world. And because they are stealing the content that beIN has paid huge sums of money for, they are also stealing from almost every major sports league in the world, including the Premier League, a competition that was created to take advantage of the satellite TV revolution. The league and its broadcast partners have grown up together very nicely. And when one of those partners has a problem, as beIN has had in Saudi Arabia for three years, the Premier League has come to fight for them.

 

Nine times it has tried to start legal proceedings against beoutQ in Saudi Arabia, as per the global rules on intellectual property rights, and nine times those attempts have failed to get anywhere near a court. In the meantime, beIN has spent a fortune combatting the piracy while shedding jobs in Doha and returning rights to sports and leagues it feels have not done enough to stand up to Saudi. Barred from the Saudi courts, Qatar has been forced to effectively sue Saudi Arabia on beIN’s behalf, recently winning a landmark case at the World Trade Organisation.

Saudi Arabia, however, also claimed victory, which was news to the WTO and most neutral observers, as well as the Premier League. It, of course, had been in negotiations with another part of the Saudi state for three months by that stage, as the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, was trying to buy one of its clubs. The seller was happy and the money was never going to be a problem — but the stealing was.

Football’s Owners’ and Directors’ test is not the world’s toughest examination and several very underqualified people have sailed through it. But it is quite strong on people who have been pirating the league’s broadcasts, ignoring the league’s pleas to stop doing that and then pretending that the league had never asked them to intervene. Not that the piracy had anything to do with them, anyway.

The bottom line, once you get past all the nonsense about “no red flags”, “we’ve provided everything that was asked of us” and “we’ll be in charge by Wednesday”, is that a PIF-led deal to buy Newcastle United could never pass the Owners’ and Directors’ test without the Saudi government really shutting down beoutQ, lifting its temporary ban on beIN, compensating beIN for three years of damages and promising the Premier League, and every other leading sports competition in the world, that it would never steal their content again.

What did it do? It claimed victory at the WTO, pirating the WTO’s logo on bogus government press releases, banned beIN permanently and sent letters, including one from a PIF director, to British politicians telling them everything was hunky-dory and what is the hold-up with Newcastle?

Which of those bizarre moves — and there were others — was the final straw is hard to know but they added up to the same thing: post-Brexit trade policy, the desire to regenerate a neglected city, the promise of a huge Saudi TV deal to come… none of it would be enough to convince the Premier League to do anything but the right thing, the thing that it had been trying to do for three years, which is protect the business model that has made it the most successful football league in the world.

You might read this and ask why it took this issue to stop the takeover. What about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, described here in this piece by James Montague? The reality is that Britain does a lot of business with Saudi Arabia, meaning it would have been very difficult for the government or anyone else to ask the takeover to be stopped on those grounds and be taken seriously. That is a deeper, more complex conversation that goes far beyond football. But the piracy was something the Premier League could set strict rules on.

It is certainly not the league’s fault that this has taken so long to collapse. The league was giving Saudi Arabia as much time as it needed to get out of its own way and get the deal done. “This was 1,000 per cent about piracy,” says one source. “Forget all the other excuses. The deal has been dead in the water ever since Saudi responded to the WTO decision by doing exactly the opposite of what was required. The Premier League told them nearly a month ago that the PIF was the state and the state has been stealing from them, and that must stop or the deal is stuck.”

And now it is off and Newcastle United, their fans and Mike Ashley are stuck.

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The bottom line, once you get past all the nonsense about “no red flags”, “we’ve provided everything that was asked of us” and “we’ll be in charge by Wednesday”, is that a PIF-led deal to buy Newcastle United could never pass the Owners’ and Directors’ test without the Saudi government really shutting down beoutQ, lifting its temporary ban on beIN, compensating beIN for three years of damages and promising the Premier League, and every other leading sports competition in the world, that it would never steal their content again.

 

What did it do? It claimed victory at the WTO, pirating the WTO’s logo on bogus government press releases, banned beIN permanently and sent letters, including one from a PIF director, to British politicians telling them everything was hunky-dory and what is the hold-up with Newcastle?

 

 

Neither PIF or the PL were ever going to budge.

 

Which makes me wonder how and why Staveley was allegedly privately assured it would go through...?

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https://theathletic.com/1965132/2020/07/31/newcastle-takeover-saudi-arabia-qatar-piracy-bein/?source=weeklyemail

 

The bottom line, once you get past all the nonsense about “no red flags”, “we’ve provided everything that was asked of us” and “we’ll be in charge by Wednesday”, is that a PIF-led deal to buy Newcastle United could never pass the Owners’ and Directors’ test without the Saudi government really shutting down beoutQ, lifting its temporary ban on beIN, compensating beIN for three years of damages and promising the Premier League, and every other leading sports competition in the world, that it would never steal their content again.

 

What did it do? It claimed victory at the WTO, pirating the WTO’s logo on bogus government press releases, banned beIN permanently and sent letters, including one from a PIF director, to British politicians telling them everything was hunky-dory and what is the hold-up with Newcastle?

 

They're clowns who've never learned how to placate or negotiate or strategise or be diplomatic - the oil money has always bailed them out.

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I don't understand why anyone would be clinging on to the hope of when the club is eventually sold to someone else. Simple fact is that we would still ultimately be under the jurisdiction of the corrupt organisation who denied the club and the city a once in a lifetime opportunity to progress. It doesnt matter what happens from here on. I wont be able to forget the events of the last 4 months so the game is now forever tainted. Having a classless, penny pinching owner is one thing that can eventually be moved on from. But the PL organisation will always be there to remind us of what they did to us in 2020. The Premier League have done something that even Ashley could not achieve - permanently remove all hope for the future.

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I don't understand why anyone would be clinging on to the hope of when the club is eventually sold to someone else. Simple fact is that we would still ultimately be under the jurisdiction of the corrupt organisation who denied the club and the city a once in a lifetime opportunity to progress. It doesnt matter what happens from here on. I wont be able to forget the events of the last 4 months so the game is now forever tainted. Having a classless, penny pinching owner is one thing that can eventually be moved on from. But the PL organisation will always be there to remind us of what they did to us in 2020. The Premier League have done something that even Ashley could not achieve - permanently remove all hope for the future.

 

This is true. The only type of future owners I can envisage will be the Del Boy yank types like Mauriss who would probably look to screw us tighter than Ashley. Perhaps in a couple of years time when Covid has passed on or a cure has been found, the game will start to recover, but I expect the PL to bring in new rules before then to ensure there will never be owners with state backing to challenge those already enshrined at the top like Chelsea and Man City.

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Just out of interest, could anything stop them taking a 49% stake in the club? Would they still have to go through all the tests?

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