Newcastle’s Carabao Cup trophy is dripping with blood
Football isn't worth this
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On March 16th 2025, in the 45th minute of the Carabao Cup Final, Newcastle United defender Dan Burn rose to head in a corner, giving his team a 1-0 lead at half-time against their opponents, Liverpool FC. The 6”7 Burn, later recipient of the Man of the Match award, is a home-town hero for Newcastle United, having grown up supporting the team and signing from Brighton in 2022 at the age of 29 for a fee of 12 million GBP. Newcastle went 2-0 up through Alexander Isak (himself signed for Newcastle in 2023 for circa 63 million GBP) in the 52nd minute, and, despite a late goal back from Liverpool’s Enrico Chiesa, closed the game out to win their first trophy since 1969.
On October 2 2018, the Saudi Arabian political dissident Jamal Khosheggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate of Istanbul, Turkey. Apparently, Saudi forensic specialist Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy cut up Khosheggi’s body with a bone-saw while he was still alive; colleagues allegedly listened to music as the murder continued. Audio recordings reveal the dissident’s last words as ‘I’m suffocating… take this bag off my head, I’m claustrophobic.’ The ‘Tiger Squad’ assassination unit, a source told Middle Eastern Eye, brought Khosheggi’s fingers back to Saudi Arabia as proof that the killing had been successful.
These events should have no connection and should belong to irreducibly different worlds, except for that they were paid for by the same people.
Newcastle United is currently owned by PIF, the investment wing of the Saudi government. Since purchasing the club in 2022, they’ve put 438 million GBP into player purchases and significant further investment is slated for this summer. They recruited their coach Eddie Howe, one of England’s best young coaches, on a salary of nine million pounds a year. When the £305 million takeover was approved in 2021, the club was 19th in the Premier league table and without a win; given this, it is entirely fair to say that the success Newcastle are currently having is directly enabled by Saudi state money.
This isn’t to say that the players and staff haven’t been good or haven’t needed to be good to win the matches they have. Well done them. It’s just that the conditions for those players to come together were entirely down to Saudi wealth.
A little more then about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a country whose executions rates doubled in 2024, with an crack down on political dissidents; 345 Saudi prisoners were executed last year, working out as one just under every 24 hours. Official figures are notoriously opaque and are likely to be higher in reality. They’re big fans of flogging there too, such as the sentence accorded Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 1000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam’ after he set up a forum for online political debate. Despite a few recent releases, arbitrary arrests of regime opponents remain a constant, with many dissidents then subject to travel bans and forced to wear ankle monitors even upon release.
There has been some welcoming partial softening on women’s rights, with the country now up to the heady heights of 126 out of 144 on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Rights Index; nonetheless, many activists and dissidents for women’s rights continue to be jailed, including those such as Nassima al-Sada who campaigned for rights which were subsequently granted. As for LGBTQ+ rights in Saudi, let me know if you find them.
On March 29 2025, around 300,000 Newcastle fans lined the streets to celebrate the club’s cup victory. It was a joyous occasion. Newcastle fans young and old joined in the celebration; many Newcastle fans said it was the best day of their life. Club legend Alan Shearer described the celebrations as the best two weeks of his life.
All fans want their team to be successful. Indeed all of us all want to be successful; I myself have, for example, always wanted to be a famous writer.
Imagine then if some friendly moneyed foreigner came along and said – Here you are, here’s all my contacts in publishing, I’m going to pay for you to be introduced to them and then also pay for a big print run of your book and promo of it. Now I’d still need to be a good writer to make anything of those circumstances, but it wouldn’t change the fact that the opportunity been bought for me. It’d make it all just a little more artificial, tho the offer would still be just about impossible to turn down.
Now add to this fantasy that that money was provided by a serial rapist and murderer. Who beats their spouse. By now, we’re past the point where my success could provide me with any satisfaction whatsoever; my dreams coming true are simply not in themselves valuable enough to overcome that level of immorality as to how they had come about.
I certainly wouldn’t be able to go out and celebrate it and certainly would not get angry with those raising the point that my success was somewhat artificial. Sometimes fans of the football clubs bought by oligarchs or authoritarians will counter with, ‘Well, what would you do if your club was bought by one?’ Remarkably easy – I’d stop supporting them the next day. It’s only a game.
I sometimes wonder why I hate Newcastle United more than I hate Manchester City, themselves now the sordid and successful little sporting plaything of the United Arab Emirates. I think it is because I never liked Manchester City in the first place. Also there's something inherently absurd for those of us who remember the days of Alan Ball and Lee Bradbury to witness Man City winning the European Cup; it's all so obviously fake.
Yet Newcastle I liked, and Newcastle fans in particular; passionate, knowledgeable, with a club rooted in their community to whom they were remarkably loyal despite decades of underachievement. They also took to Rafael Benítez, a legend of my own club Liverpool, and indeed the two clubs have had many great shared players such as. Peter Beardsley and Dietmar Hamman. The great Kenny Dalglish managed both teams. Magpies know their football and, like Liverpool, see their club as moored in working-class solidarity.
Of course, outing myself as a Liverpool fan brings about the traditional response of the sportswashing defender, ‘Your team is owned by Americans - why is that any better?’ Well, it’s better because it’s better. If I want to protest Liverpool's Boston-based owners, there are democratic and legal channels open to me to do it, including crucially in the owner’s country of origin itself.
Crucially, the objectives of Fenway Sports Group in owning Liverpool FC are to get richer, rather than providing public relations to an authoritarian regime. It shouldn’t be necessary to adopt the foreign policy positions of Jeremy Corbyn - by which I mean that traditional far-left refrain of ‘the West is just as bad’ - in order to defend my football team. Football shouldn’t be a breeding ground for further cynicism, indeed should be a counterweight to it. A place where we can all be idealistic and sentimental for a change.
To know football is to also know its place in the importance of things; to quote Carlo Ancelotti, the most important of the less important things in the world. I agree with that and I think the reason we all get so passionate about football is because at its core, it really isn’t life and death. Like a good holiday romance, footy is both passionate and trivial.
Nonetheless, that means that these kinds of heavy geopolitical issues need to be kept out of football; it is grotesque to turn the working person’s Saturday fun into the arena for debate about slicing up political dissidents or jailing campaigners for women’s rights.
To be clear, it is the purchase of football clubs by political entities which politicizes them, not those objecting to it. It puts fans who don't want geopolitics in football in football in an impossible position, as it also isn’t worth turning a blind eye to such things going just so as not to spoil enjoyment of the game.
Doing so lends the whole thing a sense of grotesque unreality, like that Ursula Le Guin story about the one suffering child on whom an entire town’s prosperity depends.
Rather than acknowledging these situations, there’s even a tone of outright celebration of the ownership from staff, players and some fans. ‘Full credit to everyone involved,’ says Eddie Howe. And I’m sure that Public Investment Fund governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan is indeed perfectly pleasant in person, but he’s still the figurehead for a repressive, autocratic regime, entrusted with the task of scrubbing its image. It reminds me of those fans who went to Qatar 2022 and had a perfectly nice time. ‘Well, we didn’t see any dead construction workers at all!’ Here the great character virtue of the football fan, loyalty, is exploited as a weakness.
I do not believe in a responsibility to be political. Most of us have very little impact on politics; even friends I know who have been in active politics had to fight very hard to effect the most minor of changes. But I do believe in a responsibility to be ethical within the choices we are in charge of, and this means doing our best to make ethical consumer choices. And I do not believe there is any ethical way to support a football club being used as the sportswashing arm of an authoritarian regime.
Each fan still wearing their replica shirts, hailing their blood-soaked triumph, is making a tiny contribution to the public rehabilitation of the public image of that regime; across millions of fans worldwide, this adds up.
There would only ever be in my view one ethical way to respond to the purchasing of a football club by a dictatorship – an empty stadium, bereft of the presence traditional fans. It is not too much to expect of football fans, however important loyalty is in the game itself, to take that level of stand. It’s not as difficult as say, risking jail for your right to drive, is it now?
Complicity is a heavy word. Yet it is indisputable that the Newcastle United fans, those welcoming, amusing Geordies, are the extras, the local colour, the cuddly face of the PR department of evil regimes. The useful idiots for people who cut up their enemies in embassies. Imagine if one single one of those NUFC fans was in the room with Khashhoggi as they sliced him apart. Would they ever be able to delight in Champions League qualification again? Of course not. They’d never get the images out of their head. This state of affairs only survives thru some very studied ignorance on behalf of supporters.
Sportwashing depends on the fanbase not thinking about these things through for an instant, and not being brave enough to acknowledge they are owned by people who oppose every value the fans claim to profess. There are indeed Newcastle fans who see this and oppose this, such as NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, people who speak up and do good work.
No doubt many of their fellow fans are angry at them for raising the issue. Just as many fans of sportswashed clubs will be angrier with me for writing this piece than at the owners who bought them this success. It is always revolting to see someone take a moral stand you have convinced yourself is an optional one.
Indeed, I am astonished at the lack of political consciousness of younger football fans in particular, who have I suppose simply grown up used to the idea of this being the way football is and even has to be. Yet older fans can remember that, tho money has always counted in football, it wasn't always quite as sordid as this.
The silver pot Newcastle United has lifted is running over with blood. No sporting trophy could ever be worth the price of a single life, and the Saudi government has a great many lives on its slate. A local community and its generosity is being used to serve the PR ambitions of a feudalist regime, dictators of the desert who build great glass cathedrals on the blood of the poor; truly this is the world JG Ballard warned us about.
What I can never understand is how anyone could still enjoy it. After all, if it’s supporting a team you want so much above all else, it’s only 255 quid for an adult season ticket at South Shields.