The "delighted Ashley has gone, but uncomfortable with Saudi ownership" thread

[geordiesteve710]

2 minutes ago, The Prophet said:

 

Was the standard to a legal requirement? Or just to satisfy the PL Owners and Directors test?

 

It all got a bit murky in the end- if you read the PLs statement on the takeover, it I'd carefully and painfully worded so as to avoid any admission of separation being proven.

 

They've received "assurances" that the state won't control the club and decided to come to an agreement to allow the sale.

 

Imo they got the carrot of the Saudis compensating Bein for piracy and the stick of the CAT hearing backing them into a corner and made the best decision for themselves.

[Tiresias]

yes because if someone in football administration says something is totally above board it is definitely totally above board. The premier league would never let anything happen just because it makes them richer, never!

 

Just go google who the chairman of PIF is. That's all you need to do to see through that particular complicated well disguised chirade. 

[Kid Icarus]

11 minutes ago, Yorkie said:

 

It's a bit vague. He could be (and probably is, imo) referring to what they are doing in terms of human rights abuses etc. I don't think he means the vast majority of fans are against long overdue investment and respect towards the football club. 

 

I don't feel strong enough about it to stand and protest with them, which is why I didn't, and didn't even particularly look into it, but what I think is totally wrong is calling them embarrassing or not Newcastle fans. 

 

Literally what he was referring to.  It turns out solely being able to read isn't owt to show off about.

[The Prophet]

Ultimately, every NUFC fan will have their own subjective take on our majority owners, guided by their own morals and principles. There's a discussion to be had, but there isn't particularly a right or wrong answer.

 

Telling other fans to fuck off and questioning their loyalty is at best childish. 

 

The only thing that bothers me is when fans come out to bat for KSA (vindicating the blockade and bombing of Yemen, abusing Khashoggi's Mrs, etc). It suggests that sportswashing is alive and well.

[Wallsendmag]

17 minutes ago, Tiresias said:

yes because if someone in football administration says something is totally above board it is definitely totally above board. The premier league would never let anything happen just because it makes them richer, never!

 

Just go google who the chairman of PIF is. That's all you need to do to see through that particular complicated well disguised chirade. 

 

The Premier League literally did everything in their power to stop it!

[St. Maximin]

15 minutes ago, The Prophet said:

Ultimately, every NUFC fan will have their own subjective take on our majority owners, guided by their own morals and principles. There's a discussion to be had, but there isn't particularly a right or wrong answer.

 

Telling other fans to fuck off and questioning their loyalty is at best childish. 

 

The only thing that bothers me is when fans come out to bat for KSA (vindicating the blockade and bombing of Yemen, abusing Khashoggi's Mrs, etc). It suggests that sportswashing is alive and well.

I agree on the subjectivity and ultimately I’m happy for people to care more or less than I do. 
 

Don’t really agree on the sportswashing though. At least I think the sportswashing people are concerned about is on a much bigger scale. These are a small minority of our fanbase, let alone the UK as a whole and thus their impact is minimal. They are morons and you find those in every fan base. This has just given them a voice. I try not to worry too much about them. 

 

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by St. Maximin

[Tiresias]

5 minutes ago, Wallsendmag said:

 

The Premier League literally did everything in their power to stop it!

 

The premier league wouldn't let it pass because of the damage the piracy issue was causing to the value of the brand and their ability to sell it in the middle east. The premier league only cares about money, once that was cleared they waved it through. My objection is not now and never will be that the premier league didn't apply their own rules correctly, I think it is fundamentally wrong for football clubs to be owned by nation states to be soft power political footballs to kick around. It's just wrong the same way lots of thing are wrong that just are and we can't always really avoid them all the time like pornography and birmingham.

[Jaqen]

The idea that thier Sportswashing works because a handful of knackers on twitter posted a few daft tweets never makes much sense to me. 

 

They could have achieved the same thing without spending hundreds of millions on a football club and investing a hell of a lot more over the coming years. 

 

The protesters would probably be better off served taking action down parliament asking why we are desperate to do business with the Saudis and supplying them weapons.

[AyeDubbleYoo]

51 minutes ago, Wallsendmag said:

Ultimately we have to take the takeover at face value. PIF had to legally prove separation from the State before the Premier League could rubber stamp the takeover.

 

I still don't see what the fuss is about.

 

Well we don't, we all know PIF is intimately connected to the Saudi state.

[Abacus]

4 hours ago, Yorkie said:

Said it in the other thread but I think TL came across like an idiot tbh. "I challenge" these fans. Eh? Why challenge them at all? Investigate and find out what the craic is sure, but there's absolutely no need to paint them in a negative way. 

 

I agree and think the Tyneside Life guy came across badly in this.

 

I especially liked his "gotcha" where he told the guy that the Saudis hadn't signed up to the Human Rights Convention. Err that's right, agreed the guy suspiciously, clearly wary that he was being lured into some kind of clever trap.

 

Before finding out it was nothing of the sort and it was the questioner who had just made a prat of himself instead. You highlighted that earlier, but at that point my own cringe factor was so high that I had to switch it off.

NB I didn't agree with the protests themselves, even if I agree with many of the issues they protest about. Regardless, I thought he was reasonable and afterwards I thought fair enough to him, he's made his case.

 

He was always entitled to do that of course, but whilst you can always say what you want, he at least earned the right to be listened to by how he went about it.

[Yorkie]

6 minutes ago, Abacus said:

I especially liked his "gotcha" where he told the guy that the Saudis hadn't signed up to the Human Rights Convention. Err that's right, agreed the guy suspiciously, clearly wary that he was being lured into some kind of clever trap.

 

Before finding out it was nothing of the sort and it was the questioner who had just made a prat of himself instead. You highlighted that earlier, but at that point my own cringe factor was so high that I had to switch it off.

 

Fwiw I challenged TL about this very statement in the YouTube comments (a corner of the web I almost never venture to, but was so energised I couldn't help myself!) and he just said that I was twisting his words and took them out of context. I mean I clearly wasn't - I quoted him verbatim - so, yeah, I guess that was that. I was more bothered about the presentation of these Newcastle fans than I was the subject behind their protest anyway. 

 

It all boils down to what I was saying earlier really. People offending the owners means people offending NUFC which means people offending me. Result: let's challenge these 'fans' and stoke toxicity on social media!

 

(In fairness to Eddie he did correct the sharp lads in the comments saying the protesters were Mackems/not Newcastle fans).

[Barnes23]

1 hour ago, Yorkie said:

 

It's a bit vague. He could be (and probably is, imo) referring to what they are doing in terms of human rights abuses etc. I don't think he means the vast majority of fans are against long overdue investment and respect towards the football club. 

 

I don't feel strong enough about it to stand and protest with them, which is why I didn't, and didn't even particularly look into it, but what I think is totally wrong is calling them embarrassing or not Newcastle fans. 

 Depends on if you feel it's reasonable to level claims of human rights abuses at the door of our owners specifically rather than the Saudi state itself. The framing of that statement on his part is deliberately provocative and misleading in that respect, I would say. 

[AyeDubbleYoo]

12 minutes ago, Barnes23 said:

 Depends on if you feel it's reasonable to level claims of human rights abuses at the door of our owners specifically rather than the Saudi state itself. The framing of that statement on his part is deliberately provocative and misleading in that respect, I would say. 

They are basically the same people, the 80% that comes from PIF anyway. 

[ponsaelius]

3 hours ago, TheBrownBottle said:

Sitting on massive reserves of oil and gas has meant that society in KSA has had no need to evolve.  It’s still an atavistic form of govt which retards progress, built upon a vicious brand of conservative religious values and completely at odds with what most would consider reasonable.  It is for good reason that every time some fucker commits a religiously-inspired atrocity in the name of Islam, said fucker will have been ultimately funded or influenced by the Wahhabist Salafist lunatic strain of the religion which KSA has birthed and has poured money into spreading.

 

Note that the elites in KSA don’t feel any compunction to follow the rules that they set.  They’ve been living it large for years, with their billion-dollar yachts with gold-plated bogs.  A mate of mine who worked in KSA - and drank in the embassies over there - noted that the elites didn’t exactly follow the laws that the hoi polloi had to suffer, under the literal threat of the lash for imbibing a drop of alcohol. 

 

Any notion that there will be a cultural cross-pollination via NUFC is laughable.  The entire purpose of ME despots buying sports clubs is the soft power that they offer.  It’s got nothing to do with profits, and nothing to do with ‘sportswashing’.

 

The only thing that will free the people of KSA will be the people of KSA overthrowing a vicious dictatorship.

 

No-one should feel any guilt whatsoever for enjoying watching their football club - but anyone who wants to raise concerns re KSA has my support.  

 

Good post. Wahhabism is the most destructive of ideologies and it is birthed and spread by the Saudi state. Enforcing it both in terms of ideology and laws is key to allowing the dictatorship to retain control over the populace. PIF is undisputably the direct investment arm of the state - with the dual purpose of diversifying their economy away from oil and gaining soft power globally. The idea that some kind of holistic cross-pollination of ideas through PIF's investment in global capitalism will lead to advances in KSA society is fanciful in the extreme. It is by design far more likely to tighten the regime's grip on power and further entrench the status quo.

 

It is in most NUFC fans interests to turn a blind eye to the above because lets honest the last thing any of us want to do is 'scare' away such investment in something we love. My way of rationalising it is a combination of fully appreciating the involvement of those owners directly involved in running the club (Staveley, RB, even PIF employees) - and convincing myself there is actually little we can do as individuals to stop the cold hand of investment in a global market (if it wasn't us - there's no doubt it would be somebody else).

[Tsunami]

From memory the PL backed themselves into a corner. They’d been sharing info, the Big 6 had been sticking their oar in and the CAT outcome paved the way for a January reveal that the PL didn’t want to happen. 
 

The actual approval came very quickly in the.

 

Fans of other clubs forget that the govt petition wasn’t about getting approval, it was about transparency and steadfast refusal of the PL to make a decision.

 

If the PL had gone about preventing the takeover in a transparent way and within their own rules then it wouldn’t have gone through.

 

The takeover had all but been approved months earlier until all and sundry got involved.

 

I’m no fan of RSA but the PL fucked up and everyone tried to do us over.

[Barnes23]

15 minutes ago, AyeDubbleYoo said:

They are basically the same people, the 80% that comes from PIF anyway. 

I don't think it's such a straightforward question in practice, even putting to the side the fact that separation between the two was scrutinised at length as part of the takeover process. Both the distance between PIF and the Saudi state (lesser) and the distance between NUFC and the Saudi state (greater) are significantly underestimated by those looking to protest imo, it's a kind of category error. Like Ronaldo said, the appropriate channels are political ones. 

[St. Maximin]

For the record I think a lot of the Saudi apologists among our fanbase (a very small minority) are smart enough to realise the potentially difficult moral position of supporting a team owned by KSA, so are almost justifying it to themselves by pointing out things like death sentences being carried out against terrorists etc.

 

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by St. Maximin

[Ronaldo]

2 hours ago, Yorkie said:

 

It's a bit vague. He could be (and probably is, imo) referring to what they are doing in terms of human rights abuses etc. I don't think he means the vast majority of fans are against long overdue investment and respect towards the football club. 

 

I don't feel strong enough about it to stand and protest with them, which is why I didn't, and didn't even particularly look into it, but what I think is totally wrong is calling them embarrassing or not Newcastle fans. 

Our owners aren’t abusing anyone’s human rights though.

 

And there’s this:

 

”We’re confident the majority of the fans are good people and don’t support the ownership.” 

 

Clowns.

 

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by Ronaldo

[Chicken Dancer]

I can't lie, just being able to support Newcastle again and feel the energy in the city is probably my overwhelming emotion when it comes to this.

 

Do I agree with what goes on in Saudi Arabia? Of course I don't. It's medieval, barbaric and frankly terrifying. 

 

Would I rather we were owned by somebody else? Definitely. I take my hat off to the lads protesting, but they really were pissing in the wind. Good on them for standing up for what they believe in - certainly more than I have done. I'm a fickle bastard who just wants to enjoy football for what it is, and I guess that that's how most of us feel. KSA owning us - directly or not - does make me a tad uncomfortable, but not enough for me not to enjoy what's happening now. There's a lot of good people involved in NUFC now, including AS (at face value anyway)/

 

That probably makes me a bastard but it is what it is. Like I say, I'm probably fickle and naive.

[geordiesteve710]

35 minutes ago, Tsunami said:

From memory the PL backed themselves into a corner. They’d been sharing info, the Big 6 had been sticking their oar in and the CAT outcome paved the way for a January reveal that the PL didn’t want to happen. 
 

The actual approval came very quickly in the.

 

Fans of other clubs forget that the govt petition wasn’t about getting approval, it was about transparency and steadfast refusal of the PL to make a decision.

 

If the PL had gone about preventing the takeover in a transparent way and within their own rules then it wouldn’t have gone through.

 

The takeover had all but been approved months earlier until all and sundry got involved.

 

I’m no fan of RSA but the PL fucked up and everyone tried to do us over.

 

Yep, this seems similar to my recollection of events.

 

I don't know what piece of evidence the club had got hold of, but it was clearly something big and clearly something that the PL really really really didn't want in the public domain.

 

This is purely speculation on my part, but I reckon that if it ever does come out then the PL might decide that the "legally binding assurances" of no Saudi control have been breached and try to fuck us over again.

 

The whole episode shone a light on how dodgy an organisation the PL is and how it is not fit for purpose of regulating issues like who gets to own football clubs. Just because we got our own way doesn’t mean the system doesn't need wholesale reform.

[Slim]

I seen it as the Saudis were pirating the premier league.  They then paid a huge amount of money and said they would stop doing it.

[Stifler]

I’m pretty sure that it was reported that West Ham, and possibly Man City gave Newcastle evidence that the Premier League were sending emails to the other 19 clubs. Then the face slipped and it was widely reported that they had phone calls etc with the other 19 clubs and that certain clubs were actively encouraging the Premier League and other clubs to force the takeover to be rejected. I think it’s all this which the Premier League were fucked against during the court case.

I’m also pretty sure that we evidence that the Premier League weren’t exactly unaware and against the ESL proposals as they made out and that this was going to be made public during the court case.

 

At one point wasn’t the judge even dismissing the Premier League’s arguments out of hand? What was going to be released during that court case is what forced the takeover through and it had fuck all to do with piracy being dealt with or assurances over ownership that the media and the Premier League made it out to be.

[AyeDubbleYoo]

26 minutes ago, Slim said:

I seen it as the Saudis were pirating the premier league.  They then paid a huge amount of money and said they would stop doing it.

I this is pretty much it. So Qatar stopped applying so much pressure against the deal. 
 

Not saying the other clubs didn’t also want to stop the deal, obvs. 

 

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by AyeDubbleYoo

[Tsunami]

I’m firmly of the opinion that the PL were getting pressure to reject the takeover but were reluctant to make an official decision. That would allow PIF to challenge and the PL would have to argue what part of the O&D test had failed. At one point the PL wanted individuals to take the test knowing that would never happen. They hoped procrastinating would make PIF walk away again. The PL didn’t follow their own rules and that was their downfall.

 

At the time everyone seemed to be of the opinion that Legal Counsel must have told the PL that the game was up, tell RSA to settle with BEIN and they could then approve the takeover and get themselves out of a hole. As said, the judge presiding over the CAT case, almost laughed at some of rabbit holes the PL lawyers were trying to lead him down. 
 

As hard as it may seem, the correct decision was made albeit in favour of a barbaric regime. But, the PL said early on that separation between PIF and the State wasn’t actually an issue. 
 

We should be the last of the State takeovers but I’m not aware of any tightening of the rules so far? 

[The Prophet]

I think you'd have to be pretty blinkered to not recognise PIF as an integral part of the Saudi state like.