Rags to riches: The Saudi takeover of Newcastle United

When the Emperor Vespasian imposed a tax on the use of public urinals, his son Titus was disgusted. The association was unworthy and distasteful. Vespasian picked up a coin and sniffed it. “Non olet”, he said; this doesn’t stink. Long-suffering Newcastle United fans, whose club has been bought by a consortium in which Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund has an 80 per cent interest, are in Vespasian’s camp.

The Saudi regime may have a deplorable human rights record. The Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of the Kingdom, has been held responsible – by the CIA among others – for the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, chopped to bits in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But so what?

The fans have been longing to get rid of the club’s owner Mike Ashley for years now. Didn’t Churchill, justifying the wartime alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union, say that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make a pact with the Devil?

You can see the fans’ position and sympathise with their feelings of delight. Newcastle United should be one of the top clubs in England, even Europe. It is what is known as a sleeping giant.

It should be up there with the Manchester clubs, Liverpool and Chelsea. Instead, it’s been starved of investment and has more often been struggling to avoid relegation from the Premiership rather than challenging for the title.

Years ago, Ashley promised much but achieved nothing. Now, this promise of Saudi money will make Newcastle the richest club in England, indeed Europe.

Investment from Saudi’s Sovereign Wealth Fund will top even what Dubai has invested in Paris St Germain. What’s not, as they say, to like?

It’s not, after all, as if the big money invested in other football clubs is always clean as the driven snow. It’s not as if their owners are all respected, or respect-worthy, folk. In politics, the Conservative Party isn’t apparently greatly concerned about the source of some donations it receives either, and its leader Boris Johnson doesn’t much care whether the money “olet” or “non olet”.

If I was a Newcastle fan, I suppose that I might defend the deal by echoing the highwayman Captain Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera who asked, “are we more dishonest than the rest of mankind? Show me the gang of courtiers…” and so on.

Today, for “courtiers” read “bankers” or just the City of London where, I understand, much dirty money is washed clean. Moreover, the Geordie fans may triumphantly carol, whereas the Glazers takeover of Manchester United was so cunningly contrived that it loaded the club with debt; Newcastle will not only be debt-free but knee-deep in financial clover.

The future, as an American firm, who took over a business in my local town, once said, will be so bright that you’ll need to wear sunglasses to look at it. It’s true that, unfortunately, that business was soon asset-stripped and closed, but there can be no fear of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund running out of cash.

Meanwhile, the Premier League, on the ball as ever, declared that it has received legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control the football club. So that’s all right then.

The new and more attractive face of the club is the Yorkshire -born financier, Amanda Staveley. A keen show-jumper as a child, a Cambridge graduate and sometime girlfriend of Prince Andrew, she has a substantial stake in the new regime and assures everyone they are in it for the long run.

So that too is all right. She also says that, just as the Dubai owners of Manchester City have invested in the renovation of run-down areas of Manchester, in time, one assumes, the new regime at St James’s Park will do likewise in Newcastle. Let us hope that any such developments are happier than the transformation of the city effected in the 1960s by the councillor T Dan Smith and the architect James Poulsen, both of whom unfortunately subsequently served time in prison.

And what of the Crown Prince and the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi whose fiancée has been urging Newcastle fans not to welcome the Saudi takeover? Well, nothing really.

That’s a matter of politics, raison d’etat, and nowt to do with football. Think of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi scientist who devised the V1 and V2 rockets that hit London and was whisked to America immediately after the war to mastermind America’s Space programme.

As Tom Lehrer warbled in his song, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.” “Non olet” you see.