Newcastle would be ultimate feel-good story – if not for Saudi Arabian ownership
The giant screens at Wembley captured the full gamut of human emotion: the relief of Ant and Dec, the euphoria of Alan “I’m just a sheet metal worker’s son from Newcastle” Shearer, the tears of fathers and sons who had wondered if this moment would ever come. One whose face they did not convey was Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the man who, as chair of Saudi Arabia’s £720 billion sovereign wealth fund, had made all this possible. But he was there on the pitch at the end, lifting the first English football trophy secured as a direct result of his kingdom’s relentlessly acquisitive vision.
Newcastle’s triumph is, at face value, the ultimate feel-good story. The defining goal of this final was scored by big Dan Burn from Blyth, whose father had written him an open letter ahead of the same fixture in 2023, describing him as an “inspiration to every young kid in the north-east”. And the abiding image was of friends and families swaying along to the melodic beauty of Mark Knopfler’s Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero. The joy was to see glory restored to passionate, patient, success-starved Tyneside. The less wholesome subtext was that this achievement had, inescapably, been engineered in Riyadh.
Few are prepared to mention this just yet. The overwhelming reaction is a sugar rush, a toast to a magnificent fanbase and to their decades of pent-up yearning. But Newcastle’s feat is hardly one of unadulterated purity. It also represents a less savoury side to the national game, where most appear desensitised to the sources of the money that enable these transformative moments.
First there was the indulgence of Roman Abramovich turning Chelsea from also-rans into serial winners, irrespective of the fact that the former owner had acquired Sibneft, the Russian oil giant that underpinned his fortune, in a post-Soviet environment characterised by his own lawyer as having “no rule of law”. Then there was the genuflecting to Sheikh Mansour, leader of an Abu Dhabi regime that had been branded a “black hole” for human rights, fuelling Manchester City’s rise from tragi-comic status to six Premier League titles in seven years. And now, finally, there is the pact with Saudi Arabia, a country that dismembered a dissenting journalist in one of its consulates just seven years ago but that now bankrolls Newcastle’s resurrection without anybody batting an eyelid.
One reason for the prevailing indifference is that Newcastle’s success has, by the standards of most Middle Eastern states’ annexation of sport, been a slow burn. Where City and Paris St-Germain were lifted by their benefactors in Abu Dhabi and Qatar to positions of utter domination, Newcastle have had to wait 3½ years for their Saudi windfall to translate to tangible reward. With the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules curbing their power in the transfer market, spending has been surprisingly modest for a club buttressed by bottomless wealth.
But the uplift has still proved dramatic, with Newcastle propelled out of regular flirtations with relegation to Champions League qualification, two Carabao Cup finals in three years and now, at last, the silverware they craved above all else. Now that the Saudi Public Investment Fund has the taste for it, there is no telling the heights to which they could soon aspire. The nagging question is whether this is a development worth celebrating. If state ownership can be such a toxic subject at City, an asterisk in the eyes of many on their accomplishments, why should Newcastle receive a free pass?
One mercy is that fans are no longer so overt about revelling in their rescue by the Saudis. At the first post-takeover match at St James’ Park in 2021, one gentleman posing in mock Arabian garb declared: “We’re Saudis, we can afford anything.” It was a day of jarring contrasts, with banners proclaiming the old Jimmy Nail wisdom about Newcastle being a mighty town built on solid ground interspersed with supporters imitating Middle Eastern costume in dishcloths and dressing gowns. And here at Wembley in 2025, there was that same uneasy juxtaposition. Either you lost yourself in the Tyneside takeover, or you suppressed a slight shudder at the glimpse of Al-Rumayyan as master of all he surveyed.
You can shrug that this is all just business, that if the Government is happy to bend the knee to the Saudis then there should be no problem in football following suit. The trouble is that the Premier League, desperate to defuse the initial controversy over Newcastle’s change in ownership, insisted it had received “legally binding assurances” that the club would not be controlled by the Saudi state. Then Newcastle unveiled a green-and-white third kit that made them look like the Saudi national team, and that particular line felt little more than a pretence.
The overwhelming urge today is to applaud Newcastle unconditionally, to hold on to the unforgettable sight of 40,000 of their ardent fans twirling their scarves in unison. But the reality is seldom so straightforward. We cannot on the one hand scorn Manchester City versus PSG as “El Cashico” and on the other herald Saudi-backed Newcastle as some tale of homegrown bliss. You wish it could be different: that the focus could be solely on Burn, a true local hero, or on Eddie Howe, the outstanding English manager of his generation. But that is what happens when the game prostrates itself to the highest bidder. Nothing is sacred any longer.
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