DISGRACE: Newcastle United taken over by Saudi Govt
The English Premier League football club Newcastle United have suddenly become the richest club in the world, with the group that now own in being connected to war criminals in the Saudi government
Full disclosure here: I am a Liverpool fan, so Newcastle United becoming the richest club in the world does hurt me on an emotional level, because it could harm our chances of winning trophies. That may or may not be part of the reason why this hurt me to the point of going all the way of doing a piece on it.
However, I feel that we can’t ignore this, for two reasons. The first is that the crimes of the Saudi Arabian government are being whitewashed, and the second is the disastrous impact of billions upon billions of dollars in the beautiful game, something that is partly the fault of my beloved club.
So, just so that we are all on the same page, let’s go over what has happened at a pretty shit but widely supported English Premier League club, which are yet to win this season in 8 games.
Since 2007, Newcastle United have been owned by Mike Ashley, one of the worst men in England. There has been extensive reporting that working conditions at his company, Sports Direct, are utterly appalling, and that he pays his workers less than the legal minimum wage, which isn’t exactly high in the UK in any circumstance anyway, with it being £6.70 an hour in 2016, the equivalent of $9.20 in US currency.
Ashley’s response, rather than beginning to pay his workers a decent wage and give them good conditions, was to sue Labour MP Iain Wright, who led the inquiry into Ashley’s conduct. Awful actions.
This is not to mention that, as Newcastle owner, he has driven the club to relegation once and never won them a trophy, despite the fact that they have the 7th biggest stadiums and one of the most passionate fanbases in the country. A club like that should be regularly finishing in the top half, not barely surviving relegation - or worse.
However, with all those problems with Ashley, he is still better than the new owners, the PIF, or the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.
The chairman of this company happens to also hold the role of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, meaning that everything that the Saudi Arabian government has done over the last few years is fair game in criticism of the new owners of Newcastle United.
The three most obvious examples of the crimes of the current Saudi Crown Prince concern Yemen, women’s rights and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Let’s deal with those in order.
Yemen is currently undergoing a genocide. That is not hyperbole. Genocide of Yemeni people. And it is Saudi Arabia to blame for this, as they are carrying it out.
Human Rights Watch considers the current situation in Yemen to be “largest humanitarian crisis in the world,” with thousands of thousands civilians dying every year in drone strikes, while hundreds of thousands die of hunger annually, with 20 million of the nearly 30 million people in the country experiencing serious food insecurity, with 10 million at very real risk of famine. Famine.
This is happening because the Sunni government of Saudi Arabia didn’t like their neighbours having Shia leadership. That’s it. Not because of some kind of perceived threat from Yemen, but simply because they didn’t like the strand of Islam that was believed in by the leaders of their neighbours.
As a result, they teamed up with the UAE government and a coalition of Sunni’s in Yemen to take out the old government in a coup and install them with Saudi puppets.
However, since 2017, these alliances have fractured slightly, which much of Northern and Central Yemen controlled by Shia Houthi forces and the Saudi-led Sunni coalition holding much of the South. The effective war between the two groups is causing disastrous impacts for the people of Yemen, the vast majority of whom don’t know when their next meal is coming.
Human Rights watch have counted at least 90 entirely illegal deadly airstrikes from Saudi-led forces, causing the deaths of thousands of people, over the last few years, and more than 20,000 total since the conflict began. Targets have included hospitals, school buses, mosques, markets, farms, bridges, detention facilities and factories, including massive coordinated attacks on Houthi detention facilities in August 2019, killing over 200 people, the deadliest attack.
There has also been over 3000 child soldiers under the age of 18 involved in the war, 64% of whom were fighting for the Houthis. Using child soldiers is one of the most abhorrent things a group can do, and all sides in this war are doing it.
All sides in this war have been found to have tortured countless prisoners, especially the UAE and the Houthis. Prisoners formerly detained in Houthi facilities have detailed being beaten with iron rods and rifles as well as being hung from walls with their arms shackled behind them.
Saudi forces, and Houthis to a lesser extent, have also blocked significant aid for civilians, which is why I called this a genocide. Not only are they starving or bombing the people of one of the poorest countries in the world, but they are also stopping kind-hearted people’s aide from coming through to these poor civilians who haven’t done anything wrong.
The final thing I’ll mention here, given that it feeds nicely into the next topic we’ll be discussing, is the abuse of women and girls in Yemen. While Yemen was certainly no paradise for women before the conflict, it has become significantly worse since the Saudis invaded, with one part of evidence for this being the significant increase in child marriages, a practice that was already prevalent before the conflict. It has got worse.
There is also rampant sexual abuse of women and children in Yemen, although reporting of it is highly stigmatized and often punished so numbers are not available to detail the problem. What is evident, however, is that this is happening more over the last few years.
Of course, conditions are similar for women in Saudi Arabia, which is the second crime we wanted to cover from the new owners of Newcastle United.
Now, things have improved slightly for women during bin Salman’s reign. They are now allowed to get their own passports and travel without a male guardian, otherwise known as things that women have been able to do for a hundred years in America. Big fucking deal, especially when you look at the details that the western mainstream media tends to bury, an important part of which is that women can only travel without a male guardian when they are part of a group. So much for the regime of change for women.
Women also have to wear long, tight-fitting clothing, with any part of their body other than their face being shown being discouraged, see-through clothing being prohibited and make-up considered inappropriate. In other words, you can’t wear things that just about every Western woman takes for granted.
Saudi Arabia is also exceptionally gender-segregated, with even light interaction between men and women illegal in public until 2005, and it is still heavily discouraged.
To get an abortion, a woman must get permission from their male guardian, because it is of course the man who knows what’s best regarding an abortion.
Over the course of bin Salman’s leadership, there have been public beheadings in the public square of women due to adultery, as in what a significant number of women do without a fear of death every day.
The final crime that I want to mention is the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul.
You all probably know the story in reasonable detail. Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist who was quite critical of the bin Salman regime.
Basically bin Salman ordered the death of the journalist, his operators did it in a very over the top way, and then, after they denied it with about 47 different stories as to what happened, all of them contradicting the last, before international investigators confirmed that it was bin Salman who ordered it. Many of the people involved in the assassination have been photographed with the Crown Prince in the past and are known to have a direct line of contact with him.
Of course, the Saudis receive millions of dollars in weapons deals from Western governments, particularly the United States. These weapons go towards the disaster currently taking place in Yemen in most cases. However, on top of that, many more go directly to radical Islamist groups such as ISIS and the Taliban. American weapons are going to ISIS and the Taliban.
This all comes back to the fact that the Premier League have allowed the very people committing these heinous acts to own one of the most popular football clubs in the world, which has the added effect of ‘sportswashing’ the actions of the Saudi owners. There are now millions of Newcastle United fans who probably aren’t willing to learn about or criticise the actions of this awful regime.
The second problem that we want to deal with here is the impact of money in football, something all the big clubs are at fault for, including the one that I whole-heartedly love, Liverpool Football Club.
This is shown by the fact that two clubs in the city of Manchester each have spent $1.4 billion USD on their current squads, not to mention all the money that has gone into previous ones. $1.4 billion each.
In the city of Manchester, there are over 3500 homeless people. Two players based in Manchester rake in over £20 million annually whilst thousands of people in that city are food insecure.
Manchester City is owned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, who have pretty much the same problems that Saudi Arabia does. However, thanks in part to the sportswashing of the crimes of the UAE and in part because of the connections they have with the mainstream media (Adam Johnson did excellent journalism about the relationship between the UAE and CNN recently), nobody really knows or cares about what the UAE government are doing, especially Manchester City fans.
The fact of money dominating football became more evident than ever before earlier this year when 12 of the biggest clubs in football attempted to break away from the rest of the football leagues to create a European Super League, in which the top teams would play each other every week with no fear of relegation out of it, a slap in the face to teams outside the top tier.
This was deeply unpopular with fans. The percentage of supporters who agreed with this idea was in the single digits in most polling done on it, because it doesn’t allow any chance for smaller teams to surprise big ones, given they’ll never play each other.
Not only did the fans not like it: the players and managers despised the idea as well.
The only people who didn’t hate it were the executives and owners of the clubs who stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars.
The problem here is that the game that is supposedly the sport of the working class is now completely owned and operated by offshore billionaires with no interest in the game.
The owners of the top 6 English clubs last year are from the UAE(Manchester City), the United States (Manchester United and Liverpool), Russia (Chelsea), Thailand (Leicester) and Wales (West Ham - no problem with this). None of those countries, with the exception of Wales, have a deep love for the game of football. It means nothing to them. The owners of these clubs by and large, supported by millions of working class people, only view the club as a business venture. They receive tens of millions of pounds every single year from working class people that go straight into the pocket of the elites that own these clubs.
The thing that I want to see on this is the so-called 50+1 rule, which means that the club’s members, who are mainly working and middle class genuine fans, own half the club. this stops the kind of elitist dictatorship of football currently going on.
The only major footballing country to have implemented this recently is Germany, and it is part of the reason why no German clubs joined the now-curtailed European Super League project.
In the meantime, we need to simply protest the existence of these owners. Chelsea fans did it excellently last season, as did Manchester United supporters. Let’s all follow suit.