Newcastle United can never win while Mike Ashley’s reign of indifference continues. They might enjoy surprise progress up the league table, avoiding relegation and scraping home victories with backs placed deliberately against the wall, but you can’t move forward when the owner places his heavy boot so firmly in your path. For that distant dream, of a Newcastle team that supporters can be proud of, Thursday marks a sorrowful slump back towards the abyss.
This takeover approach was never simple. The consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PiF) blamed their withdrawal on the prolonged and protracted decision-making process by the Premier League, but they must always have known that they were a uniquely complicated party to work with. Too much noise, too much baggage, too many bumps in the road. It is possible too that they may have simply balked at the earning potential of a football club in the middle of a global pandemic, and used the delay as an excuse.
But the greatest damnation of Ashley’s legacy is that he made the Saudi bidders appear to many as the good guys. Newcastle United supporters will have grown sick of the phrase “sportswashing”, but it does bear repeating. Saudi Arabia stands accused of using widespread torture, punishing rape victims, limiting free speech, banning human rights organisations and continuing an illegal military intervention in Yemen. They saw Newcastle as an opportunity to offer an alternative angle, a distraction tactic to the human rights offences.
Plenty of supporters were prepared to accept that fate, even with their eyes open to the new owners’ methodology. You can see their point, even if you don’t agree with it: how could anything feel worse than the suffocation of their beloved club by someone they see as a Shakespearean villain who once drank with them in the stands? Only a small minority of fans actively celebrated the identity of their potential new owners; the majority merely wanted something, anything but Ashley.
Part of their indignation at criticism of the takeover lies in the merry two-step that the UK already dances with Saudi Arabia, and not just led by a government happy to sell them arms. There are Saudi Arabian fingerprints across UK sport. Why, when nobody seems to stop any of that happening are they suddenly intervening now? It’s a flawed argument, but one founded upon deep emotion and angst.
This takeover also meant more to Newcastle than its football club buying expensive players. The local economy has been dismantled piece by piece by underinvestment from a southern-focused government and the foundations may well be destroyed by a combination of Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. But then that is how investment funds like PiF operate: Build a club and you generate praise, change the city and you make friends.
Personally (and it may not be popular with dispirited supporters), I am glad that these buyers failed but incredibly sad that Ashley’s reign continues. I have a familial love for Newcastle United, but could not enjoy it in either its current or potential future state had the takeover succeeded. Thursday’s news does not bode well for the state of Newcastle’s starting XI in 2020-21, but I do believe it can be good news for the long-term future of the club as a social institution. Saudi ownership was a door locked behind them through which they could never return.
The problem comes in the illogicality of that stance. The two situations are intrinsically linked: You cannot have a failed takeover and Ashley’s last stand finally being ended. A vote against the PiF becomes transfigured into a vote for Ashley. How typically Newcastle United: Only they could make both options feel like bad news and so split a fanbase in the process. The only remedy is another interested party, but there are concerns about the viability of Henry Mauriss’s bid. Another storyline in this sorry saga begins to weave its chaotic web.
And so another season looms into view with belief lost and every supporter left cursing wasted time, wasted money and wasted opportunity. And so again supporters must await leaks intended to spur their excitement but far more likely to end in more futility and a sea of broken promises. And so still Newcastle, a city that paints itself in black and white, remains stuck fast in shades of grey. They do not deserve this; on that point I hope we can all agree.
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from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/39Iru6Y
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