If you’re a Newcastle United fan, any sort of Newcastle United fan, you most likely agree with all other Newcastle United fans on one specific thing: Mike Ashley is a scourge upon your existence and any entity willing to scrape him off the ceiling of your general consciousness, not to mention from the underside of a table in the front office. Well, not so great news for you, you still might get your wish in the form of questionable Middle Eastern money!
Apologies, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. Certainly, almost all money that occurs in those sort of magnitude is questionable, regardless of who possesses it. I firmly believe that the number of millionaires and billionaires in the world who would end my life if it meant they kept their money far outweigh the ones who would not. And Mike Ashley has indeed been just a gelatinous cube in the front office, absorbing everything he can and giving precious little back. It takes a special kind of person to change the name of your century-old stadium to the name of your sportswear retailer, but that’s exactly what he did! And if I was a Newcastle fan, I would want to be rid of him as soon as possible as well.
The problem here is… well, everything, from the content of the story to the timing of putting out yet another story like this.
Let’s start with the timing of the story and clear any meta objections out of the way first: posting this story now, with basically no real new information, smacks of playing on Newcastle fans hopes for content during a work stoppage. What is, actually, the news here? That the Saudi Consortium informed the Premier League of a proposed takeover, a step towards taking over the club which originally was reported would happen in January. Is it, technically, a step forward? Yes, in the same way that signing up for your road test is a step forward to earning your driver’s license. It is not, as the French say, “le hard part.”
Then, you have the actual prospect of this takeover happening. Yes, finding a random oil baron to come rescue your club from mediocrity is the modern football equivalent of an episode of Touched by an Angel. But now, you also get to be a part of that consortium’s sports-washing campaign!
And I’m not saying that Yasir Al-Rumayyan specifically has blood on his hands, I’m saying that he’s so tight with the Saudi royal family that they just made him the head of the national oil company, and that same royal family’s most famous moment in the past couple of years was ordering the murder of a journalist. Now, your historic team gets to be the front-facing geopolitical handshake for that family pretty much everywhere you go!
But isn’t that the problem with almost any mega-rich prospective owner that has the sort of money and free time on their hands to purchase a club? Personal image rehabilitation by means of spending an absurd amount of money on sports stars and returning a once-great team to former glory? Sure. That doesn’t have to mean you like or support it. My guess is, however, that if the deal goes through, and this consortium does start spending dumb cash on Newcastle, and the big six clubs become something of a Large Seven, not many people will care. It will be successful. But it will be anything but black and white.
Let’s check in with Ronaldinho
I presume this is an actual game of volleyball and not some cheeky health minister’s informative video on how a virus spreads from person to person.
Trivia Time: Before and After
Back to before and after, the game show where you have to combine two or more people’s names into one longer name. So, this queen has been absent at Manchester United for some time now, dealing with injuries and irritated fans. But with the season perhaps indefinitely on hold, will it be a race to get back, or will they be gone forever? Who is this player?
Yesterday’s Trivia: Paw-Low Duh-Ball-Ahhh, or Paulo Dybala, for short.