Last Friday’s soft deadline for bids for Manchester United has produced two immediate options: Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani.
Ratcliffe’s bid is not without complications, given his company Ineos owns other European football clubs. But it is the bid from Qatar that has raised the most questions and has garnered huge support amongst a section of Manchester United’s supporters who are desperate to see the club at the top of the world game again.
Those supporters have reacted angrily to the media scrutiny and criticism of the Qatari bid, and their arguments are a repeat of those we heard during the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United.
Here we try to answer each one in turn:
“This is a private investor, not state ownership”
Well, maybe a little bit of yes but also very much no. Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani is the son of former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who was also the deputy head of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and effectively the right-hand man of the previous Emir of Qatar.
Al Thani may not have immediate influence over law-making or national policy, but that misses the point. He is fronting this bid precisely because of the perceived distance between himself and, say, Qatar Sports Investments, who own Paris Saint-Germain. Whether that distance remains in practice is another question entirely.
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“Irrespective of who or what might present itself as the face of Qatar at Manchester United, nobody should be under any illusions about the omnipotent power of the Qatari government, or that family and country come first, not self-interest,” Professor Simon Chadwick, an expert on sport and geopolitical economy at the SKEMA Business School, told the Athletic this week.
That is also the opinion of human rights groups, who have written to Uefa and the Premier League to point out that Qatar’s political system does not allow for any private investor – however wealthy – to operate outside of the influence of the state.
This veil of separation might be enough to pass the technicalities of football’s lawmakers; we must wait to see (if the Qatari bid even gets to that stage). That is not the point we are making here. We are asking whether this should be welcomed. And the answer must be no.
“They invest in other British businesses, unless you missed that? So why is football different?”
They have indeed invested in other British businesses; this is not some clever gotcha that nobody has noticed. But there are two things to mention here. Firstly, the technical point: investment is not the same as ownership.
It is one thing to invite investment from a particular source, but another thing entirely to be owned outright. We had this with Newcastle’s takeover by Saudi Arabia: “Errr, they also have invested in Disney?”. Yes, and they have recently upped their stake in Nintendo. But to 8.26 per cent. They have a roughly four per cent stake in Twitter. These are minority stakes that do not allow any extraordinary power.
But also, so what if they did have greater influence in those companies? Why does it matter if Qatar already owns stakes in the Shard, Sainsbury’s. Heathrow and Barclays Bank? The point is that our football clubs are historic social institutions and therefore should be treated as such.
If all you want is for your club to be the richest in the world (and that does seem to be a priority for many), there’s no argument. If you want your club to be protected from the interests of a state, there is.
Manchester United should aspire to be more than Heathrow. People haven’t been spending their time, money and love following Heathrow from town to town, country to country for generations. Heathrow has no established community. If Heathrow changes hands or its name or its branding at the whims of the owner, nobody loses out.
“You’re only saying this because they are non-Westerners. This is orientalism”
This is an argument that came to the fore during the Qatar World Cup, the accusation of western imperialism against those who criticised the practices of the state and the treatment of minorities.
Firstly, every human rights organisation agrees that Qatar has in place an employment system which amounts to slave labour by migrant workers. Homosexuality remains illegal. These should be non-negotiables. If Manchester United purport to be an ally of those in every community who support the club, how can that sit with state ownership by Qatar?
Where state ownership walks, sportswashing follows. Sportswashing is the use of football clubs, leagues or tournaments as a tool of propaganda to deflect attention away from less favourable coverage, in this case on human rights issues. It is a means of improving a state’s (or company’s) global reputation and, in some cases, establish a reputation within sport that can spread to greater political and economic influence on the world stage.
To those who say that the United Kingdom is not squeaky clean on any matter you would care to name, I agree! And if the UK, France, Spain or any western or eastern state was funding a takeover of a football club, I would be against that too. The point is twofold: Qatar does have issues with human rights violations that have not been adequately addressed or improved; we don’t want any football club being controlled by state influence.
“They can’t be worse than the current owners”
And that’s the greatest crime of the Glazers and Mike Ashley at Newcastle. It’s not just that they strangled a club’s hope of being the best version of itself. It’s not that they trampled on the realistic dreams of supporters until their hopes were reduced to merely praying for competence. It’s that they made any alternative, even this alternative, seem worth celebrating. That is their legacy and it is shameful.
“Do you expect fans to campaign against this?”
Every supporter will make their choice and nobody can tell you how you must feel. They will fall into one of three camps. Some will be deeply worried about Qatari ownership and may well choose to campaign against it. Certainly, some of Manchester United’s supporters’ trusts have moved in that direction, seeing the evident downsides of state ownership.
In the middle, a majority will probably lie. They will rightly celebrate the end of the Glazer era, a club that sunk deeper into the ground through the implicit acceptance of comparative mediocrity that the family oversaw. They will have reservations about Qatari ownership, but they will also reason that it is not their place to protest against it.
If the Premier League is happy to wave through the takeover, they will say, it strikes as a little unrealistic to expect a group of downtrodden football supporters to go further than anyone else.
I totally understand that stance, even if I don’t agree with it. Life is grim enough for an awful lot of people right now, and football is an escape. You want to go and watch a match without having to take moral stances about state influence. I get it.
But then there are the cheerleaders, those who are already campaigning heavily on social media for this takeover to go through because they see the pound signs and the trophies and Kylian Mbappe in a Manchester United shirt and that is all they care about. Which is…well, it’s not for me. But at least have the good grace to admit that’s your motivation and save us all the mental gymnastics.
“Who cares who owns the club? It will still be Manchester United”
There is a reasonable point in this, and it will be used by the middle majority as labelled above. For them, a football club goes beyond its owners.
A football club is made up of memories. It’s the last-minute winners, the impossibly long coach journeys home after heavy away defeats. It’s the familiar faces you catch sight of in an away end four or five times a season, only to both slip off into the of your lives in between.
It’s the one-way bonds you make with players and managers who will never even hear your name. It’s the hope and the pride and the despair. It’s the glumness of one season ending and the joy at the next one appearing around the corner. None of that is dependent on the owner and, if you can honestly separate the two, good luck to you because I’m very jealous.
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The Busby Babes and the Class of ’92 were culturally significant not because they won trophies but because they were forged through something organic, not plastic. And all the billions in the world can’t recreate that perfectly.
“Where is this outrage around Manchester City and Newcastle United?”
The auto-response of the online football fan, almost always proffered without checking first. Here’s the thing: we’re not saying this is a bad idea because it is Manchester United. There is not some shady cabal of journalists and writers who are plotting to keep United under the control of the Glazers (whose own era in charge has been entirely lamentable).
The pieces were written about Newcastle and Manchester City, you just weren’t bothered then so you didn’t seek them out (and that’s fine – why would you care when it wasn’t your own club?). But don’t automatically assume that this is an attack on your club. This is an attempt to protect, not damage, them.
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