How Saudi Bought English Football

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guest

Episode Summary

The Saudis have entered the English football chat. And it’s not a very pretty one, we’re afraid. Two kick-ass British sports journos sound off on what we know, what all we don’t, how the Newcastle deal went down-- and what ought to happen.

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Transcript

COLD OPEN

Waff: Next on One Decision. I think it's the lack of transparency. I mean, the hypocrisy, but it just felt like eighteen months had basically been a charade and that everything had been sort of backdoor dealing.

INTRODUCTION

Kosinski: Welcome back to One Decision. I'm Michelle Kosinski. Today's a bit unusual as we wade into the world of sports. English football, a subject I did not think we would tackle in foreign policy. But more and more, other worlds collide into this one, maybe never so much as with the sale of Newcastle United Premier League football club to Saudi Arabia. Yeah. Interesting bedfellows. And that's how a lot of people feel about this. Stunned, some disgusted, and many aren't quite sure how to feel. So to help us sort out this decision, let's first bring in Britain's former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, himself an English football follower, as well as somebody who's dealt with the Saudis more than I'm sure he's allowed to talk about. Hi, Richard.

Dearlove: Hi, Michelle. I quite often go to soccer matches, and I love taking my two little grandsons who are sports mad.

Kosinski: So what if Arsenal was owned by the Saudis? Would you still wanna take your grandkids to see them?

Dearlove: If I had the tickets, I probably would.

Kosinski: You would?

Dearlove: Yeah. I would. Well, come on, Richard. Well, I think you understand me well enough now. I'm a bit of a cynic. Look. The Saudis are massive investors in The UK. That's true. They're entwined in our commercial, economic, and political lives. The one thing it's made people do is discuss the Khashoggi issue, which wouldn't have been discussed if they hadn't bought the football club. So there are many, many more people in The UK now who are aware of the iniquities of the Saudi regime, and I just don't think it's practical to disentangle our disapproval. I mean, I've been to Saudi Arabia a lot. It's quite a hard place to go to and quite a hard place to relate to. Yeah. Try going there as a woman, Richard. Well, I know. I mean, I guarantee you won't like it. Well, I didn't like it as a man. The last time I went to Saudi Arabia, which was quite a long time ago, I was there for several days, and I realized that the end of my trip had been organized in such a way I hadn't actually seen a woman whilst I was there.

Kosinski: Exactly. You don't. So I guess that you could say if other football teams can be owned by Qatar, The UAE, and on and on, then it's not really that much different that Saudi owns Newcastle.

Dearlove: It's a further escalation up the scale of disapproval, if you see what I mean. I do. I definitely see what you mean. It's a global business. It's a religion. It gets inevitably, seriously entangled in geopolitics. I mean, look at the whole business of Qatar and the World Cup.

Kosinski: I know. So what bothers so many people about it, including these journalists that we interviewed, who by the way, were the only people who are willing to talk about this subject. No one surrounding the team. No one will speak of it. I wonder why. Like, the fact that nobody will talk about this decision bodes very, very poorly for the motivations behind it. Yeah. I think that's true. First, the reason it was delayed seemed to be 100% because Saudi Arabia was pirating all of these games. And then once Saudi Arabia stopped doing that, then magically, the sale could go through. So it wasn't human rights being the problem and the murder recently of an international journalist, it was the pirating issue. I mean, that's pretty pretty sad.

Dearlove: I think it's sad, but it's the realities of global business and franchises that are worth billions of pounds. It's very, very hard to make moral judgments about ownership when you're in a country which has a close political and even military involvement in Saudi Arabia. Okay, we disapprove massively of the way they behave on a number of occasions. Without going into detail, I've actually been one of the people sent to Saudi Arabia to see the very, very top people, to tick them off about their misbehavior and to challenge them over these issues. And it's a very painful and difficult experience. Oh my gosh. Richard, you have done everything. Well, I've done some pretty weird things, but I'm not prepared to get into detail as to what actually happened. I had one visit to Saudi Arabia. I mean, no political figure would have dared to go, so I got sent.

Kosinski: Oh, god. And how do they appreciate getting told off by you?

Dearlove: It was one of the chilliest and most difficult meetings I've had. This is when the three brothers, Sultan, Abdullah, and Nayef, were all still alive. If I could write a record of it, it would go down in history as an unpleasant meeting. Oh, no. And I mean, they're tough people to deal with.

Kosinski: Yeah. Just ask Jamal Khashoggi's family or people in the kingdom who are gay or ask half the population, women. Thanks, Richard. So this is where Newcastle found itself when a group of investors approached last year with a bid from the Saudis. Not just some businessmen. It was the royal family's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund or PIF, of which the notorious crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is the chairman. The US intelligence community believes he himself ordered the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the PIF helped transport the killers. Now the whole Newcastle saga has been a roller coaster, a dodgy one where you're not allowed to see what's behind the curtain or who's controlling it. And the only people who will talk about this in-depth publicly are reporters who've been covering this or trying to. We sat down with Rob Harris, global sports correspondent for the Associated Press. Great to join you. And Chris Waff, who covers Newcastle for The Athletic. Let's start there. All right, Chris, how has it been since the sale went through in October?

INTERVIEW

Waff: A very frantic few weeks from Newcastle suddenly being this worldwide sort of news story.

Kosinski: Right. So where did this $400,000,000 saga really begin?

Waff: October, November 2019. We knew that a deal was becoming close with the consortium. So really, this has been more than two years in the making, but possibly, you could argue, maybe almost five years in the making, given that Amanda Staveley had tried to buy the club previously. Right. The British financier who then teamed up with the Saudis and another investor. But the Saudis now own 80 percent.

Kosinski: When you first got wind of this, did you immediately feel like this could get weird?

Waff: Yes, I did. I mean, it was sort of something which sat a little bit uncomfortable with me. I sort of had suspected for quite a while that wherever the money was going to come from, there would likely be a controversial element to it. But when it was Saudi Arabia, that sort of struck a chord even higher. But as it's evolving, did fans care? Basically, previous owner, Mike Ashley, was loathed by the vast majority of the supporter base. He'd alienated club legends. And so I think there is an element of almost anyone but Mike Ashley. But then there were others, and I know of it, it's a very, I have to say it's a minority of supporters, but a minority of supporters who do not want anything to do with the club as long as Saudi Arabia's PIF own any stake in the club. And so for a lot of people, when I include myself in this, there is a conflicted nature to this and a lot of ethical and moral questions. But then there is also another element to this, which is a lot of supporters are excited about what this takeover could actually mean. The club that hasn't won a major trophy since 1969, hasn't won a domestic trophy since 1955.

Kosinski: It's a very, very complex issue. Do you think that these kinds of debates over who the owners are and what their records are has a place there?

Waff: I think it does have a place, but the vast majority of Newcastle's fans polled over the course of the last eighteen months have been in favor of this takeover happening.

Fans: For fourteen years, it's kind of been just a depressing skeleton of a club for it to finally be at the end of it now. It's just it genuinely hasn't actually sunk in yet. It's exciting. It's nervous. It's not so much about the Saudis coming in. It's more about actually leaving for me. It's the Premier League who ultimately could have stopped this from happening. They delayed it for the best part of eighteen months, but then they've eventually passed it.

Kosinski: Let's talk a little more about this with Rob.

Harris: Yeah. I mean, it's been really reflective, I'd say, of how concerns about human rights have grown within sport more generally. It's probably peaked in a way with this Newcastle takeover, which has brought the Premier League having to scrutinize matters far beyond its normal jurisdiction.

Kosinski: Exactly. Because, you know, when you're picturing people at any sporting event, you imagine the last thing on their minds is geopolitics.

Harris: Particularly in the case of Newcastle, desperately dreaming of success, desperately needing hope, desperately wanting any sorts of investment. The fact is even before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, we had the Premier League imploring in disputes with Saudi Arabia over the piracy of its television rights, and that was a commercial theft. The awarding of the World Cup to Qatar, I think, that immediately raised those concerns about human rights when that vote took place in 2010 by FIFA.

Dearlove: The winner to organize the 2022 FIFA World Cup is Qatar.

Harris: It was only sort of in the subsequent years that we started to get a growing awareness of how we get a collision of human rights and sports issues, probably around the time of the Arab Spring, in particular in 2011 when Formula One was due to go to Bahrain, and then indeed as the infrastructure started being built for the World Cup in Qatar, the human rights groups like Amnesty started to raise awareness about how sport can lead to abuses too.

Kosinski: Now a Saudi takeover of the team was by no means assured. In fact, at one point, the Saudis just pulled out, saying approval was taking too long and might not even be worth it. But behind the scenes, a lot more was happening, and it was not at all about Jamal Khashoggi or human rights. All indications point to that delay being in large part about the Premier League being furious that Saudi had been flagrantly pirating matches for broadcast, refusing to do business with the legit rights holder, Qatar, whom the Saudis were blockading. It was so audacious. Okay. The Qatari broadcaster is called beIN Sports. The Saudis then set up their own football broadcaster called beoutQ, a sort of f-u name, a play on shutting out Qatar. And they just illegally aired the matches. Crazy. Like, the league was supposed to be okay with this.

Waff: But the league did kind of just paper over that in the end so that it could ultimately approve the deal. The official reason the Premier League say it took so long was that they did not receive the assurances they wanted in the summer of 2020 that the Saudi Arabia's PIF and the Saudi state were actually autonomous from one another, and basically that they wanted to ensure that the Saudi state could not influence the running of Newcastle United Football Club, which is very difficult to show given that the crown prince is the chairman of PIF. Exactly. I mean, does anyone buy it that the government is not involved in this deal? It's very, very difficult to argue that they're not. They primarily claim that they have received legally binding assurances. I was told from people on the buying side that those assurances were also given during the summer of 2020. They were not deemed to be sufficient at that point. Interesting. Essentially, the issue would have been that if Saudi PIF was deemed to be the Saudi state, then the Saudi state would almost certainly have failed the owners and directors test for the various piracy issues that we mentioned. What eventually did happen was that the Premier League said that they received enough assurances and that the takeover was able to go through. It just so happened that the same week that the takeover went through, an agreement was reached between Saudi Arabia and beIN Sports that beIN Sports could be shown in Saudi Arabia again. And also that there was various other settlements to do with piracy. The Premier League claimed that that had nothing to do with the takeover of Newcastle being passed, but I think you could put two and two together and make four with that one. I don't think it's difficult to see where the issues are there. And it's interesting when we talk about all the moral issues to do with Saudi Arabia in terms of the war in Yemen, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, human rights abuses. Outrageous as all of those are, they were never actually an element in terms of whether this takeover is gonna happen or not.

Waff: The sad element really is that the Premier League's owners and directors test does not take any of those moral elements into account. It almost certainly should, but it doesn't. That wasn't actually the element that delayed this.

Kosinski: But wait. At the same time this piracy issue was being ironed out behind the scenes, you also had the Qataris as well as other teams lobbying against the sale in their own interests. And you had the Saudi crown prince text messaging the British prime minister. The UK press reported that Mohammed bin Salman warned Boris Johnson that things would sour between the two countries, and Saudi is a big arms client of The UK, if the football deal didn't go through. The UK government denied lobbying anyone for the Saudis, saying they were just looking for some clarity.

Waff: So the Premier League in that sense, I think, did not also want to pass the takeover until they felt that they could actually tackle the issue of piracy in Saudi Arabia. Because in that country, it was illegal for the Premier League to be shown. That's the situation they would have had if it had been passed last year. The Premier League, as I say, argue it was not to do with piracy, but the evidence certainly suggests that that was a strong element behind why this takeover was delayed for so long. Whereas if the Saudi state and PIF were the same thing, then they wouldn't have been able to put them through in that sense because the Premier League have argued in various national courts and various national cases that they believe that Saudi Arabia has pirated their material. This whole thing seems shady no matter how you look at it. Oh, yeah. Yes, there has been nothing satisfactory at all about the way that this saga has unfolded.

Harris: One of the things the Premier League has still never been clear on was they had to gain what they called legally binding guarantees that the Saudi state wouldn't be controlling Newcastle, and it's still very confusing what these guarantees are. The public investment fund is a Saudi government entity. It's on a Saudi government web domain. Six members of the board are Saudi government ministers. Another member is an adviser to the royal court, and another is someone who likes to be dressed as his excellency who is the non-executive chairman now of Newcastle United based on this. Only one member of that board would be allowed to actually be present to discuss it. That's why even other Premier League clubs are exactly not too clear on how the new ownership structure is or why indeed was approved.

Waff: It has all been going on behind closed doors. There's been very little transparency. Mike Ashley, the previous owner, even started two legal cases against the Premier League, both of which were then dropped once the takeover eventually happened, but we weren't really given adequate explanations about that either. And all the allegations which were involved in them included the supposed corruption that was alleged in terms of beIN Sports and other Premier League clubs. All of that suddenly was brushed under the carpet. Do you know of any evidence that the UK government got involved to push this deal through after the crown prince texted your prime minister? My understanding is that there was some pressure behind the scenes or conversations behind the scenes as to how can we reach a conclusion where this takeover can eventually happen. They opened doors and the local newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle, wrote to the foreign office and managed to get some information released that conversations had happened to do with the Premier League over the takeover. They wouldn't release exactly what they were, but it shows that the government were involved in some element throughout this process. We have no answer from government, from the Premier League, from anyone. Nobody knows how we got from a to b and the murky waters that seem to have been in between. Have you gotten any interesting tips or information surrounding that? I mean, I haven't got anything substantial enough to sort of stand up in a court and say this proves that, but I've spoken to a lot of people and seen information that sort of passed between certain elements to show that there was political involvement. How high, when, I can't say for certain. And I don't think we will ever know for certain unless the government release that, and they've redacted a lot of the information that was in the government papers, which were released. Wow. Some of the communications, some of the emails, a lot of it was redacted. The argument, I think this was either from the foreign office or the international trade office, was basically that it was sensitive information to do with trade with Saudi Arabia. So that in itself then brings another element beyond this where it's saying, right, well, this isn't just a takeover of a Premier League club. Why are the foreign office involved in this? Why does it go beyond football? What are the elements that are being considered here?

Kosinski: Around Newcastle, the controversy hangs in the air. At the first match after the deal, rival fans held up an enormous sign depicting Mohammed bin Salman wielding a bloody dagger and a mock owner's test ticking off boxes for murder, beheadings, terrorism, censorship. But in response, some diehard Newcastle followers have gone the other way, suddenly becoming huge fans of Saudi Arabia, wearing its traditional clothing, defending the kingdom. Yeah. There's a lot of discomfort all around now.

Harris: You get Saudi flags on their social media profiles and very much they become arch defenders of a state that they've never been to, so determined are they to protect the investment in recent weeks.

Waff: This is depressing on a couple of different levels. Oh, absolutely so. All those sorts of things do make me feel uncomfortable. And I do think for a long while, a lot of Newcastle fans will be having this internal debate about how they can support their club, even if they have significant reservations about the ownership of it. Unfortunately, now that is part of Newcastle United. For someone who has grown up in the region and sees it as an institution of the area, that makes me feel grossly uncomfortable. And it's like Manchester City are seen as being run by Abu Dhabi. PSG are seen as being run by Qatar. Those links, you can't remove them. I think that we're gonna see more and more of the likes of those banners and the likes of those chants going forward, unfortunately.

Kosinski: When you already see Russians, Chinese, Emiratis, Qataris owning these teams, what would you say to the people who say, well, what does it matter? Every one of these countries has some sort of stain on it. This is what the activists do call sports washing, that Saudi Arabia is trying to present its new face to the world. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Harris: And through sport, they can gain this great brand association too. Gaining a foothold in the world's biggest soccer league is a means of exerting soft power as well. But with it, they get this immense backlash which perhaps can stymie these objectives too. Absolutely. I would look perhaps to Qatar when they won the World Cup bid in 2010. This scrutiny from the human rights groups started to grow on the labor conditions, the restrictive laws, and you could say that Qatar actually had more damage than good from actually having the World Cup. They've had to also liberalize their employment laws, things like minimum wage, particularly when you've got players in the sense of soccer protesting against human rights abuses. That's something now that Saudi Arabia has to deal with.

Waff: It is a real shame because historically, these were cultural institutions important to the city. But really, what they've become are huge businesses. It really has gone too far. Does sports washing work, do you think? To an extent it does. What's been interesting is that actually all the issues in Saudi Arabia have probably been highlighted in The UK and possibly internationally, you could argue, more than they ever have been before. Maybe that will only be a short term thing and once the initial controversy wanes, perhaps the sports washing element will work. I suppose you could argue with Manchester City, what's happened there in terms of the regeneration of parts of Manchester, the positive image of winning so many trophies. But you'd say it probably has worked. Some may argue that you could almost have sort of a reverse cultural influence and that maybe therefore that will force the likes of Saudi Arabia to take on more quote unquote Western values for want of a better term, whether that happens or not, I'm not entirely sure.

Kosinski: Yeah.

Waff: It became inevitable at some stage that more and more autocratic regimes were gonna want to buy a club. It's just such murky waters now, there needs to, in my opinion, be greater regulation of it. Why should it matter? Well, I suppose that's almost a question that goes to the very essence of why sport matters or why football matters. When Newcastle fans or Newcastle as an institution, as a club, then becomes seen as being linked to Saudi Arabia, that's where the issues come in.

Kosinski: It's intriguing that both of these longtime sports journalists feel the league needs a human rights policy. Even months after the takeover, the league is still having to make public assurances that the Saudi state won't control the team, that the owners can be removed if necessary, and on and on. At the same time, though, that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is now running ads on the BBC.

Harris: There is not a clear statement of human rights policy that even an organization like FIFA actually now has in place in the wake of the controversy over the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia, the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. And that's why when it came to awarding the 2026 World Cup to The United States, Canada, and Mexico, they had to declare to FIFA their human rights risks, all of those countries, even The US telling FIFA what the risks were, like discrimination towards minorities and towards women, and what they would do to mitigate that during the tournament. But we don't see anything like that from the Premier League. You get this paradoxical situation now where a club like Newcastle might be promoting anti-discrimination measures, things like rainbow campaigns in football, while actually at the same time such things would be illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Kosinski: I think it's safe to say that probably most people that want to go and watch a sport or turn on the TV, they don't wanna be thinking about these kinds of geopolitical issues. It's like when you're eating your cake, you don't really want a big piece of broccoli on top of it. You know, you just want to enjoy it. But do you think that enough fans care about these kinds of human rights issues when it comes to their sport? Sport is the one thing that gets so much attention, you know, way more than the news. And I feel like that's why it's also become fertile ground to make political statements. So maybe it's becoming a place where those debates happen most effectively, which is weird.

Harris: Actually, a sporting event going to a country helps to sort of raise awareness to perhaps bring about change.

Kosinski: And you know what? I don't really blame people for not wanting to wade into geopolitics. It's really about the league itself. And the fact that now as a journalist, no one will talk about this. Nobody associated with the team or the league.

Waff: No one. The whole way through this process, it's made me angry.

Kosinski: Newcastle will now have piles of money. The team might improve. But does anyone really wanna be part of sports washing Saudi Arabia, however subtly that happens?

Waff: I have so many sort of contrasting feelings internally about it. Do I separate the footballing element from the political element? Are there parts which can be separated and parts that can't? I can't even answer those questions yet. It's such a complex, complex issue.

Harris: And I know that a lot of people will go, well, it's only football, but it's so important to this area. It's so important to so many people's lives here that it's not just football. They're trying to attract more sporting events to the country. Formula One is heading to Saudi Arabia for the first time. Sport is being used as a key part of what they would perceive as a new look Saudi Arabia. There are geopolitical motivations behind owning a soccer team. And you get legions of adoring fans when you can deliver that success.

Kosinski: Isn't it a shame though that these leagues don't say, okay, sure, you can be a host once you clean up these major human rights issues, but no one ever does that.

Harris: The Premier League wants to distance itself, I'd assume as much from Mohammed bin Salman as possible. It'd be interesting to see if he ever does go to a game. The new manager of Newcastle was unveiled, Eddie Howe, and immediately he had to face questions about how comfortable he was working for Newcastle and its new ownership.

Waff: Basically, each occasion he replied with, I don't wanna talk about politics. Now for a lot of people that was unsatisfactory, and I think in many ways it wasn't satisfactory.

Kosinski: Isn't it interesting how geopolitics gets now wrapped up in this? But it is important. I mean, why should it matter who owns the team?

Waff: In a sense, it doesn't matter who owns the club because it's still representing the city of the region. But then it goes beyond that. They had coal and shipbuilding industries historically, and then they were decimated and there wasn't enough investment to really diversify the economy after that. And so it's been one of the forgotten areas. And then suddenly the Saudi Arabian owners may bring their wealth. Again, there are so many different elements to this that it's so difficult to try and compute all of those at once.

Kosinski: What in your view is the worst thing about the way this went down? Was it the lack of transparency? Was it the obvious hypocrisy in how they do the owners and directors test? Or what do you think?

Waff: I think it's the lack of transparency. I mean, the hypocrisy, but it just felt like eighteen months had basically been a charade and that everything had been sort of backdoor dealing, and with so many more questions remaining than answers, it's just entirely unacceptable. If Newcastle starts winning, are people gonna say, oh, it's just because of that sweet, sweet Saudi oil money? Yeah. Any success in the future is going to be tainted to an extent. There will be an element of truth in that. Newcastle United haven't won a Premier League match this season. They're second bottom in the Premier League. They're winless. They can't even win a football match. They're the richest club in the world. The one everyone fears in terms of becoming this dominant force, and they can't actually win a football match. I would ask the question, you know, does all of this risk tainting the sport? But the reality is not enough people care for it to taint the sport. No, absolutely not. And the show does go on. Indeed.

Kosinski: It's been great talking to both of these gentlemen. Thank you very much for having me on. Great to speak anytime. Let's bring our spymaster back in. What do you think, Richard?

ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE

Dearlove: Yeah. It's a method to legitimize a distasteful financial and business arrangement. And, you know, let's not beat about the bush. I don't approve of it. It's not something that's really going to be stopped.

Kosinski: When the Saudi government gives them assurances that, oh, well, legally, they won't be involved. Is that in any way feasible?

Dearlove: To an extent, the more of these links that exist, the more likely you are to have some say or influence with the Saudis. I mean, in a way, if you go to Saudi Arabia, any sports activity, even amongst men, is almost sort of anathema. This is a society without public entertainment, for goodness sake. But over time, Saudi Arabia will shift very slowly towards something which will be more acceptable to us. And it does give us more opportunity to say things to them which are tough to say, and it's more likely that they'll listen because they're entangled in something in which, you know, they have an interest.

Kosinski: Like, is it a bad decision because it allows these governments to be in the conversation when maybe they should be shunned? Or is it better because now every time there's a game, somebody is gonna bring up their failings and oppression?

Dearlove: And I mean, it's exposing them to the sort of criticism they've never had. You can bet that the other team's fans will come up with all sorts of extraordinary insults and chants. I'm fundamentally a believer in trying to talk to the people you deeply disapprove of. You isolate them, they probably get more extreme and behave even worse over time. And it's a difficult judgment to make because you're saying, well, you're making moral compromises. Yes, you probably are making moral compromises. But I think, you know, look at that whole issue of the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia over time because of the pressure, you know, women now starting to drive.

Kosinski: What these journalists seem to be really for was that there be at the very least a human rights policy for the Premier League. What do you think about that?

Dearlove: I don't think you can be something as socially consequential as, you know, the major sport in a developed Western country without having a clear stand on, let's say, human rights issues. And I think to tie Saudi Arabia into the culture of British football may in the long term be quite beneficial.

Kosinski: Do you think that sports affects geopolitics?

Dearlove: Yes. Because it's so influential and so popular, it definitely has a role to play, and it's unavoidable.

Kosinski: Richard, great chatting, and thank you for joining us. Follow us wherever you find your podcasts and on social media. I'm Michelle Kosinski. Drop us a line. We love hearing from you too here at One Decision.