After thirteen years of hostility and failure, Mike Ashley's acrid ownership of Newcastle
United looks like it is finally over. There will be few Newcastle fans unhappy to see
the back of the hard drinking, self-made billionaire, who will likely be replaced by very different
owners: the Public Investment Fund, a Sovereign wealth fund from Saudi Arabia chaired by the
country's crown princeMohammed bin Salman and worth $320 billion.There was near universal
joy at the news that Ashley's tenure was at an end. There's a long list of transgressions.
Two relegations. The traducing of club legends like Alan Shearer and Kevin Keegan. The renaming
of St James Park the Sports Direct Arena. Thirteen years of financial drought that reduced
the team to a life of mediocrity. Many supporters felt that Ashley had used the club as little
more than an advertising hoarding for his retail empire, whilst putting in the absolute
minimum amount of investment needed to keep the Premier League's TV riches rolling in.
Finally, though, after years of embarrassment, it looks like Ashley is on his way.
Enter Newcastle's prospective owners. Saudi Arabia has the second largest oil reserves
in the world so, overnight, the purchase made Newcastle United the richest club in the world,
owned – effectively – by one of its richest men. Yet most people have seen a different
face to the bid. It's being led by Amanda Staveley, a British-born, Dubai-based deal
maker. Born into a wealthy Yorkshire family, Staveley has made a name for herself thanks
to a bulging contacts book that, today, has her trusted by some of the Middle East's richest
men. Famously, Staveley helped broker the 2008 deal that saw Sheikh Mansour buy Manchester
City. A few months later, Staveley and her PCP Capital Partners helped broker a deal
that brought Sheikh Mansour to Barclays Bank. The financial crisis was in full swing and
Barclays were desperately trying to raise funds to avoid being part-nationalised. Staveley
brought Sheikh Mansour to the table, who invested £3 billion (alongside investment from Qatar)
which saved the bank from having to go cap in hand to government. Sheikh Mansour walked
away with close to £3billion profit. Staveley made £30 million but she felt that wasn't
enough. Currently, PCP is suing Barclays Bank for three quarters of a billion pounds worth
of fees they feel they are still owed. Still, Staveley will be more than just a broker for
this deal. PCP is set to take a ten per cent stake in Newcastle and will likely run the
day-to-operations of the club.David and Simon Rueben, who are worth £18.664 billion and
sit in second place on the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List, will also take 10 per cent. But
the other eighty percent, and effectively the club's true beneficial owner, will be
Mohammed bin Salman, known universally as MBS. Last October, Staveley flew to MBS' £500
million mega yacht – the Serene – to resurrect a deal which, at the time, seemed to be losing
momentum. Unsurprisingly for a man who controls a bottomless pit of cash and the levers of
power in the desert kingdom, the deal was quickly brought back on track but with the
powerful backing of PIF When MBS was anointed crown prince in 2017
he was initially hailed by allies in the region and theWest as a moderate and as a reformer
who wanted to quickly ween the country's economy off oil dependency, while loosening the tight
social and religious restrictions on its growing young population.
70 per cent of its 28 million population are under 30. Here was a young ally who loved
Margret Thatcher and was inspired by the innovation of Apple, Google and Microsoft. He liked to
play computer games and had a taste for the finer things in life. He purchased what is
believed to the most expensive house in the world, the Chateau Louis XIV in France, for
$300million. In 2017 he spent more on a single painting - £335million on Leonardo daVinci's
“Jesus Christ” - than he is now set to on acquiring Newcastle United. He also wanted
to change Saudi Arabia's image. There has long been criticism of Saudi Arabia's human
rights record. It follows an ultra-conservative form of Islam called Wahhabism. There are
heavy restrictions on women and a guardianship system that has created a form of gender apartheid.
There is precious little democracy and virtually no freedom of speech. Reporters Without Borders'
2020 World Press Freedom Index places Saudi Arabia 170th, out of 180 countries. It also
routinely executes more people than almost any other country.
In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed a record 184 people, some of them children at the time
of their convictions, including 37 people executed on a single day. However, the Saudi
authorities have just announced a ban on the executions of those convicted as children,
as well as a ban on public floggings.Yet any reforms have been tempered by crackdowns and
accusations of abuses in other areas. . MBS has also been accused of a litany of human
rights atrocities, from pursuing an air war in Yemen that has killed tens of thousands
of civilians, to jailing Saudi activists, including women who had protested the kingdom's
ban on women driving, to ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – a prominent Saudi critic
and journalist for the Washington Post – at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MBS was never
meant to be a king. The House of Saud is a sprawling family of princes and princesses,
all paid a stipend depending on their proximity to King Abdulaziz, known more widely as Ibn
[IB-NUH] Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. He had 36 sons and 27 daughters. It
is estimated that the family could number 15,000 members. But the throne only passes
through the sons and it took a series of deaths, from sons and crown princes who passed away
from poor health, before the 25th son, Salman bin Abdulaziz, the governor of Riyadh, became
king in 2015. MBS was King Salman's sixth, but favourite, son. Rather than travel abroad
to study in Paris or London or New York, MBS stayed in Saudi Arabia, studied law in Riyadh
and became his father's advisor, staying by his side. When Salman bin Abdulaziz became
king in 2015, MBS was rewarded.At the age of just 30 he was deputy crown prince and
given the plumb state portfolio of defence.What followed was a disastrous military campaign
in Yemen after rebel Houthi forces (who the Saudis accuse of being proxies for their great
regional rival, Iran) took the capital of Sana'a, forcing the government into exile.
Alongside his mentor Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of the UAE
and brother to Sheikh Mansour, and with support and weapons from the US and UK, MBS oversaw
a ruinous air campaign and naval blockade that killed thousands of civilians and starved
much of the country. The Houthis still remain a powerful force five years later. In 2017
he outmanoeuvred his rivals to be named crown prince. Soon enough, the purges began, the
most famous of which took place at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh. Overnight hundreds of prominent
Saudi businessmen and royal family members were seized and taken to the hotel which had
been transformed into a gilded prison. They were held for weeks until many signed over
large parts of their fortunes. It was portrayed by MBS and his allies in the West as an “anti-corruption”
crackdown designed to repatriate hundreds of billions of dollars back to state coffers.
Saudi Arabia's vast oil wealth meant that graft was a significant problem but one which
had largely been accepted, especially in the West, as a cost of doing business. It just
so happened that the people arrested were MBS’ rivals during his rise to power. After
the Ritz Carlton incident, MBS' power was almost unimpeachable. In a dewy-eyed profile
of MBS by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he denied that the move was a power
grab. , “So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is, ‘You will
not escape',” said MBS.The crackdown on the super-rich was welcomed in the Kingdom
and encapsulated two strands of MBS's approach. As the New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard
wrote in his new book MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman: “His rise has been
dominated by two simultaneous drives... He has championed a vast social and economic
overhaul in tandem with an extreme concentration of authoritarian power.”Meanwhile, the rest
of the world was being charmed by MBS. He became a key ally of US president Donald Trump
and enjoyed a bromance with Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner. He was the face of Vision
2030, a vast plan to revolutionise the Saudi economy and diversify it away from oil. It
was announced cinemas would re-open, after being closed at the behest of religious conservatives
in the 1970s, who believed they were un-Islamic. Concerts and WWE contests were hosted, as
were boxing matches and high-profile sports events like the Italian and Spanish Super
Cups. It is also thought that Saudi money is the driving force behind FIFA's new global
Club World Cup. FIFA president Gianni Infantino welcomed MBS to the opening game of the 2018
World Cup, sitting between him and Vladimir Putin. Women were allowed into Saudi football
matches for the first time. The ban on women driving was lifted. Yet at the same time Saudi
Arabia was jailing and allegedly torturing activists that spoke out against the regime,
even on issues that MBS had taken credit for. Loujain al Hathloul, a feminist activist who
had campaigned for the lifting of the ban on women driving, was arrested whilst in the
UAE and flown to Saudi Arabia. According to her family, she was tortured and threatened
with rape.Her brother, now in exile in Canada, gave an interview with The Guardian. He claimed
that her torture was overseen by Saud al Qahtani, one of MBS' key allies and advisers at the
time. She remains behind bars.The worst example, however, was the murder and dismemberment
of Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist had once been a trusted palace insider but fled
the country fearing for his life. He had written critical articles about MBS and Saudi reform,
which he continued to do for the Washington Post. When he visited the Saudi consulate
in Istanbul on October 2018, to arrange the paperwork so
he could marry his Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz, he was seized, tortured and then dismembered
with a bone saw. Despite Donald Trump running interference for MBS, and the Saudi vehemently
denying they had anything to do with Khassogi's murder, the Saudis eventually admitted he
had been killed by rogue agents, many of whom were from MBS' inner circle. “I get all
the responsibility, because it happened under my watch, ” MBS later said in an interview
with PBS Frontline. Saud al Qathani was again implicated. The US placed sanctions on him
too. But a Saudi court cleared al Qathani of wrongdoing. “That is the antithesis of
justice and an unacceptable lack of respect to the victims,” said Agnes Callamard, the
UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings.The CIA later concluded
that MBS likely did order the killing. As the Washington Post wrote, quoting a US official:
'“The CIA sees [MBS] as a “good technocrat,” but also as volatile and arrogant, someone
who “goes from zero to 60, doesn’t seem to understand that there are some things you
can’t do.” MBS is of course not the first Gulf monarch to buy a football club. Both
Qatar, with the 2022 WorldCup and PSG, and the UAE, with their purchase of Manchester
City, have invested heavily in the game. They weren't interested in profit. They were after
something else. Reputation laundering. Sportswashing and the chance to offer an alternative story
about the country to the rest of the world. There is no greater billboard than televised
European football, especially in the Premier League and Champions League. And the Saudi
state now appears to want a part of that. There has already been a heated online debate
about the sale invoking Saudi Arabia's appalling human rights record. Although there is no
ethical dimension to the Premier League ‘Owners and Directors Test’, they still have the
power to stop the deal. The test was beefed up during the wave of Chinese investment over
the past few years. Southampton's prospective owner Gao Jishenghad admitted to bribing officials
in China ten years earlier but rather than do time he turned state’s witness. It was
enough for the purchase to be held up and a new clause was added to the test covering
the failure of a prospective owner to hand over all relevant financial information. And,
most importantly to Newcastle United and PIF, a clause that states that a crime committed
in another state, even if not prosecuted there, could be a disqualifying matter.But that would
cause a diplomatic earthquake. Saudi Arabia is a staunch ally of the United Kingdom. MBS
has shaken hands with the Queen and her government. Until September last year, when a British
court halted the practise, the country had been sold billions of pounds in arms, which
were then used against the civilian population in Yemen. Billions of pounds are also invested
in London real estate and here is a fund, and a man, willing to invest money during
the greatest economic contraction in the country's history. Newcastle fans have a point when
they question the moral outrage over the purchase of their club. Particularly given the comparative
reaction to BAE systems selling £15 billion worth of arms and military equipment to Saudi
Arabia over the past five years. The priority for many was simply to get Ashley out, replaced
by someone, anyone, with the resources to rebuild and burnish that which had been sullied.But
the Saudi takeover could just us much sully as burnish the club's reputation. If football
was to have a line in the stand over the moral probity of its owners, you'd be hard pressed
to find a clearer one than the Saudi state being allowed to buy a Premier League football
club. As Amnesty International wrote in an April 21st letter to the Premier League's
chief executive, Richard Masters, shortly before the deal was confirmed: “Unless the
Premier League pauses and looks seriously at the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia
it risks becoming a patsy - a willing dupe of those trying to sportswash their abysmal
human rights records.”
And no one alleges the intention behind such a purchase with more clarity than Jamal Khassogi's
fiancée Hatice Cengiz: “I can say that the one incident that has hurt the reputation
of Saudi Arabia the most was Jamal’s murder. It continues to. It has destroyed his [MBS’]
reputation, he’s desperately trying to use these types of deals to repair his image ... if
the UK and the Premier League accept him, it shows other countries he is now accepted.”
Today’s video is paired with a written piece by the same author. To take the story further,
read more from James Montague’s interview with Hatice Cengez, and to answer the question:
why does the PIF fund want to buy Newcastle United? You can get a free trial to The Athletic.
Your support enables us to make more videos like today’s. Thank you for watching.