Newcastle being owned by a nation state: how is this accepted and normalised?

“I t’s a fund.” There was something captivating about watching Tracey Crouch MP say these words in front of a parliamentary committee in December 2021; like the moment, six episodes in, when you realise – oh yes, of course – that your favourite character is actually a robot replicant too.

Crouch was responding to the suggestion during a discussion of the fan-led review of professional men’s football that Newcastle United’s ownership is in effect an arm of the Saudi Arabian government. And it was an impressive moment in other ways, evidence of the smartness, the excellent optics, of getting someone relatable and unaffected to front up this significant but still carefully circumscribed exercise in populism.

Crouch is not one of those corporate manager-style MPs who appear on your TV screen looking like a werewolf dressed up as an estate agent. She isn’t the type of Conservative party ideologue who seems to be genuinely angry about “distortions” to the market, as though the market is actually a coherent thing that has feelings and must never be disrespected, like the Force.

She certainly isn’t Boris Johnson, with his sniggering disdain for the people he must woo and befuddle, the sense the whole thing is a glorious swindle to be retold over someone else’s Coquilles Saint-Jacques, before whisking off, leaving the fridge door open, wiping your hands on the curtains and taking a piss in the sink.

Crouch has instead always seemed like a very reasonable person. Albeit one who, when it comes down to it, will still tell you that the moon really is made from boiled ham, that a fund is always a fund, and that everyone involved is just going to have to accept this.

With good reason too. As things stand there is a very powerful