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It’s testament to how bad Mike Ashley’s ownership is that a fair number of Newcastle fans seemed keen on a Saudi takeover. He’s the poster boy for Britain’s ‘greed is good’ culture and has zero understanding of football as a community undertaking. One of the worst owners going.
That said, we need to rethink how we see the people who own our football clubs. Trading an exploitative vulture capitalist for a despotic regime or a billionaire autocrat does not represent progress, just because the latter have more money to burn.
It says everything about the state of the game that fans feel these are their only options. Broadly, a lot of fans have come to accept the idea that football clubs should be dependent on rich benefactors, that the sport is so dirty that right and wrong don’t come into it anymore.
A Saudi takeover would have been disastrous for Newcastle’s reputation as a club and would only have seen another community institution reduced to a blunt instrument in an international PR war. Football clubs cannot be allowed to become geopolitical chess pieces.
Mike Ashley won’t be around forever, he’s already shown his willingness to call time on his sorry spell in charge. In the meantime, we need to find ways to empower fan ownership and representation at all levels of the game.
Football clubs should be owned by the people who care about them, people who have invested in them through the generations, not by those looking to cynically exploit them for their own gain. Mike Ashley, Mohammed bin Salman: it’s not a binary choice. We can do better, honestly.
