Front lines

On the evening of October 7, 2021, thousands of Newcastle United supporters gathered outside St James’ Park, the club’s stadium in northeast England. The Premier League had just ratified the sale of the club to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Some supporters wore fake thobes—the long, ankle-length robe traditionally worn by men across the Arabian Peninsula. Others had wrapped tea towels around their heads with ribbon. A chant went up, aimed at Manchester City: We’re richer than you. Parents held their children up to witness what the local papers called a new dawn.

A van drove past the stadium, meanwhile, carrying a poster that read Justice for Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist and dissident murdered and dismembered inside his country’s Istanbul consulate three years earlier—on the orders, a U.S. intelligence report later concluded, of PIF’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The supporters saw the van. They kept singing.

Why?

David Goldblatt is a British sports journalist and sociologist, and the author of The Ball Is Round, on football’s global history, and The Age of Football, on its entanglement with money and power over two decades. Goldblatt says scenes like this have been a long time in the making. A foreign government had just bought itself one of the oldest clubs in English football—130 years of history, rituals, songs, grievances, loyalties, the whole of it. No regulator had blocked the sale. No court had intervened. No ministers had so much as asked any particularly difficult questions. No one had, it seems—apart from the small minority of supporters pointing out that the chairman of their club's new ownership had apparently seen to a critic’s brutal assassination just three years earlier ...

Elisha Maldonado: All these supporters showing up in thobes and the like—what were they celebrating with this?

David Goldblatt: A new life.

When the United Arab Emirates bought Manchester City in 2008—the first Gulf-state takeover—the reaction among supporters was overwhelmingly positive. You have to understand, this was a club who’d had their great days in the late 1960s and early ’70s—not just winning things but winning things in style, as one of the most glamorous clubs in England—with the charismatic manager Malcolm Allison strutting the touchline in a fedora and so on. And then it was decades of underperformance.