No to sportswashing! Football should belong to the people  

Elite sport is rapidly being captured by big money and re-purposed. Billionaires, oligarchs and corporations are now being pushed aside by oil-rich nation states who use football and other sports to disguise the repressive nature of their regimes.

Golf has already been sucked into the vortex by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, which now hopes to control all top-level competitions. There is talk of tennis going the same way, with the head of the Association of Tennis Professionals admitting he has had “positive talks” with the PIF.

Football and golf are being torn away from their origins, their history, from their natural development within their communities, and from the ideas of fairness and sporting ethos built up over a 100 years. Ownership of a football club provides profit and prestige and it is that which now drives the top levels of sport.

Not surprisingly perhaps, it is in Britain that much of this transformation in sport has been pioneered. In 1992, clubs in the first division of the Football League broke ranks to set up an alternative league, the Premier League, a limited company with commercial independence from the Football League and the FA.

From that point, the capitalist market-place took control. Fans were side-lined, big money moved in, at first through oligarchs and billionaires who became the new owners. Some clubs were listed on the stock exchange index, players became hugely-expensive commodities, and ticket prices shot up, excluding many from the game they loved. By transforming themselves into profit-making businesses, the clubs thus became the very opposite of what they were set up to be — community-based sporting clubs created by and for fans and players.  

Before long this headlong rush away from the spirit of the sport was raised up another notch when, in 2008, the first of several buy-outs of clubs by autocratic states was sealed. Abu Dhabi’s ruling family took control of Manchester City, seeking to present the purchase as a private business venture.

In 2021 the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia bought a majority share in Newcastle United, and Sheikh Jassim, of Qatar, is bidding to buy Manchester United for upwards of £5bn, having already bought Paris St Germain. Other Qatari conglomerates are moving in to buy more European clubs. Qatar, infamously, hosted last year’s World Cup and, with the backing of FIFA, banned any show of support for LGQBT+ rights.

Saudi clubs are now buying top European players to play in their league, a move that many think is a prelude to a Saudi bid to host the World Cup — which would count as the ultimate sportswashing enterprise.

A detailed report examining how these oil-rich autocratic states ever got into a position where they could buy outright some of the most famous clubs in England – also looking at who facilitated the deals and what this meant for the clubs and their cities – reveals the shady actions of central government in the UK for encouraging these totalitarian regimes.

Called Easy Cities to Buy—Counting the Cost of UAE and Saudi Arabian Soft Power in Manchester and Newcastleby FairSquare, it says: “The UK government has been a central figure in state takeovers of English football clubs in parts of the country where vast reductions in UK government spending have had the most damaging economic and social impact. The UK government went to remarkable lengths to support Saudi Arabia’s takeover of Newcastle United in 2021.”

The austerity policies of the Tory governments of 2010-2023, had, in effect, made the former industrial towns of Newcastle and Manchester vulnerable to accepting any kind of investment, in the absence of any from government or British industry.

The report also singles out local politicians and the local media for their neutrality and refusal, by and large, to investigate and condemn the human rights records of the Gulf states in question.

The United Arab Emirates, the report says, of which Abu Dhabi is the dominant part, “has forcibly disappeared, locked up, exiled, or bullied into silence any Emirati who has offered even mild criticism of its rulers. Its model of authoritarian stability has effectively turned it into a totalitarian surveillance state”.

The ruling Al Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi, is accused of bankrolling Donald Trump, Marine le Penn and the Russian Wagner group of mercenaries. It was the UAE that allegedly funded the ousting of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt in favour of the unelected dictator Abd el-Fattah el-Sisi in a military coup that resulted in the massacre of at least 900 people in 2014.

The abuses of the rulers of Saudi Arabia are even worse. In March 2022 – less than six months after the Newcastle United takeover – Saudi authorities executed 104 prisoners, including 81 on a single day, half of whom were from areas that had seen widespread demonstrations calling for reform during the previous decade.

The country’s dictator Mohamed bin Salman was, according to the United Nations, behind the brutal kidnap and murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. And it was he, when minister of Defence in 2015, who instigated a Saudi-led coalition including the UAE, to attack the forces of an uprising in South Yemen, causing unimaginable misery to 80% of the population.

Both states oppose the liberation of women as equal citizens, and repress the LGBTQ+ movement. They  terrorise their people into silence and they strike quickly at any sign of protest. And yet they now own, one each, two of the most heavily-supported English football clubs.  

And because of the money that has now been poured into these clubs, quite possibly in breach of UEFA Fair Play regulations, Manchester City have become the dominant club in Europe, while Newcastle United, in a single season after the takeover, have gone from floundering around at the bottom of the Premiership into fourth position where they secured a place in the Champions League.

The benefit to the two states is obvious. To the outside world they can cultivate an image of football-loving, philanthropic benevolence to disguise and soften the reality that they are despotic regimes. As for the cities of Manchester and Newcastle, the benefits are hard to find — except on the pitch. Most, but not all the fans are supportive, happy to see their teams winning again. Football is their joy, one of their few joys in these hard times. And with governments and local authorities supporting the takeovers, they see little wrong.

The government pushed hard for both takeovers, hoping for spin-off investments and an increase in trade. In Manchester, following the take-over, there was a controversial joint venture with Abu Dhabi to build 6,000 new homes in what was touted at the time as an “examplar of regeneration”.

But it turns out, as detailed in a report called “Manchester Offshored”, that Abu Dhabi “got the land on the cheap, it also received UK government support, circumvented affordable housing regulations and took all of its profits from the deal to entities registered in Jersey and therefore not subject to UK income tax”. The report concluded that Manchester City Council had “sold the family silver too cheaply”.

The pressure came from the top, and the local politicians fell into line. The government of David Cameron set up “Project Falcon” in 2013 to assist the UAE to get “privileged access to Britain’s political elite, prime land deals and world-famous institutions in academia and the NHS”, according to one newspaper report.

And it turns out that while Boris Johnson professed neutrality over the takeover of Newcastle United when the deal was faltering, he was lobbied directly by Mohamed Bin Salman, who reportedly wrote: “We expect the English Premier League to reconsider and correct its wrong conclusion.” He threatened consequences for relations between the two countries if it didn’t go through. It did of course.

“There can be few, if any, local institutions that provide more pride of place and community cohesion than football clubs,” the report says. “Football clubs should not become political tools for autocrats and authoritarians, and a failure to arrest the increasing involvement of states will likely have devastating impacts for the game, and potentially for the clubs themselves and the cities whose political classes generally appear blind to the threat that they pose.”

Easy Cities to Buy — Counting the Cost of UAE and Saudi Arabian Soft Power in Manchester and Newcastle by FairSquare. Written and researched by Alex King and Nick McGeehan. Available to download here.