It was kind of hard to see Manchester City a decade ago becoming a peer to the best clubs in Europe. I'm having an even harder time seeing it with Newcastle. What is to stop the Saudis from pulling an MK Dons and building a multi-billion pound stadium in London and rebranding? I assume they bought Newcastle because they are for sale and have PL level revenues that help them manage the low bar of FFP, rather than buy a club in a preferable location. Are they really committed to Tyneside?
Location is not really that important. St James Par holds 52K and they fill it. Rev will all be about commercial and TV. Like City, my guess is the club is basically just a media platform for vertical integration of other brands.
I just assume they want the "glamor" of ownership, fly in on private jets, eat at fancy restaurants, stay at 5 star hotels, and watch from their luxury suite on match day. Maybe they just build all that in Newcastle. Player recruitment is also an issue, I guess, but they will probably just pay insane wages to convince anyone reluctant to live there. Like I'm not sure I can picture Neymar playing for Newcastle, but I could see him at London FC.
They aren't opening a McDonald's, the plan isn't to make money via football operations. They are buying the club as a reputation management/media vehicle. Even if St.James' Park was half full it would meet the criteria for such an investment. The non-saudis are there to make on connect. Club sports has been dead for awhile so this kinda just gets a shoulder shrug from me. I mostly interested in watching young players get on with their careers. I was going to follow NUFC to see how Willock got on for example. Personally I've been focused on playing football while I still can, doing some adhoc coaching here and there, and making money. Also don't sleep on Newcastle, it's surrounded by unis so the night life is decent and it's not far (by NA standards) from Manchester or London.
Could very well be. But just don't you forget how much catching up that faces them in that regard. * Top Flight Titles: Arsenal 13-4 Newcastle (last time 94 years ago) * EPL Titles: Arsenal 3-0 Newcastle That said, your average Geordie fan is drunk right now, either literally (from what vids I've seen) or figuratively, with letting their imaginations go wild as to what Saudi ownership could do for them. I say good for them. It's the league authorities who sanctioned this deal... it's them whose ethics and integrity were checked at the door to the conference room.
Newcastle is a port city. Most of the oil oligarchs who have bought into these clubs have done so in similar locals.
Good thinking! Sadly there would be plenty of other non-petro bad guys out there to fill their shoes in FC takeovers.
I mean Newcastle is not that much of a backwater. But also you can do all that in London, then go up for the game
I'm probably selling Newcastle short, but their are 1/10 the size of London and are smaller than my hometown of KC, which is considered a small-market for pro sports in America. I just think the sportswashing/soft power explanation for this is BS. The effect is the opposite of what they supposedly want - every non-Newcastle fan in England - which is the vast majority of football fans - is now suddenly experts on Saudi human rights abuses where before most didn't give a sh*t. This is about status and ego. Qatar and Abu Dhabi have football clubs, the Saudis want one too. Buying a football club is like building skyscrapers or a 100 km linear city, or buying yachts and sports cars and art. We can only hope their running of Newcastle goes as smoothly as Jeddah Tower.
Regardless of the size of the town, Newcastle was one of the traditionally bigger clubs in the top flight/Prem. In the late 90s early aughts, they had several top 4 finishes. Their stadium is decent sized, holding over 50k, and their fanbase is significant in the northeast. As for sports-washing versus ego-trip --- two things can be true.
The appearance of en EPL super league is interesting, but also a problem for Europe. In the Bundesliga, due to the high level of competitiveness (outside of Bayern), you don't see a big 4 who constantly qualify for the Champions League revenue. This risk has a knock on effect in terms of investment, and also impacts on the experience and institutional knowledge of the teams. They qualify, then next season don't qualify, The EPL is heading this way - recently clubs like Spurs, Arsenal and Utd can't rely on top 4, despite big wage bills, and challenging clubs like Leicester and West Ham also can't bank on it.
I'd offer a couple of counter points to this First 'sportswashing" is kind of a simplistic take that you see in the Guardian, but applied to actual strategic acquisitions - e.g. Abu Dhabi - comes up a bit short compared to what they are really doing. I did a bunch of work in the hospo/tourism sector, and Abu Dhabi is known as an extremely savvy and long term investor in trophy assets. So their investment in City for example, gives them a global media brand, which they can integrate with another brand like Etihad which competes with Emirates to be a global hub airline. So they don't really care if you think Abu Dhabi is great - though maybe they have designs to build it as a rival to dubai I don't know. Truth is, most media consumers don't operate on this level. They become fans of City because they play good football and win games. Do many even know anything about Abu Dhabi? i doubt it. So its more like a vertical opportunity. KSA can use this space to build out brands where they could not do so before. Chelsea was probably closer to the idea of an Oligarch buying a club at a time when Russian influence was building in London - though again, I am not sure that was really part of any Kremlin strategy.
I don't buy in to the sports washing idea I see it more as the acquisition of a strategic brand asset which gives them a gateway into western media that they didn't have before.
Two things indeed. Maybe three or four. Saudis want an expensive (soon to be) high-profile sports toy like their gulf rivals have. They want to co-brand it with another pet of theirs, i.e. airline. They want to be at least as successful on the pitch as their rivals have been, even if Tyneside is more of a backwater. And they hope to get some positive sportswash PR out of it. As for NUFC, even though I somewhat childishly put down their record compared to Arsenal's, I think we all might be selling NUFC slightly short. They were inches away from winning the EPL in '96 until Keegan lost his head. And as a club, including it's supporter base, I've always thought of them as a "latent big club". Ready to step up at any moment, if the right owner/invstmt/mgmt came their way. That may have just happened. It's a one team town where everyone worships the same god. St. James Park is as close to being a city-centre cathedral as any I can think of in England. And it's a great vertical cauldron, which I always thought is just begging to be "completed" by building up the other 2 smaller sides to match... could be a sick home venue. Obviously no English city can even come anywhere close to London in size (9M) or cachet. But can we really say that Newcastle @270K can't ever be just about as attractive as Manchester @550K? Those Geordies certainly must be dreaming big right about now. p.s. All that said I do wonder if the Saudis tried hard to buy another club instead, like Spurs or Everton or dare I say Arsenal. Or maybe it's just that none of those clubs have Amanda Stavely, who seems to be the "charmer" in the whole thing.
Chances the vast majority don't give a shit about KSA's ethical record. Or, if they do, they're willing to let long-awaited football glory outweigh any ethical concerns they might have. And that's what's so sad about this. And it's the way of the world. Money talks. Power talks. Tribalism talks.
I'm worried of a mass exodus of our team. Remember Toure, Ade, Clichy, Sagna and Nasri joining the Citizens. Now Newcastle United will secure the signatures of Saka and ESR, aka the new Zidane.