Premier League clubs get their collective radge on with Newcastle

Having spent the best part of 13 years complaining about their club being owned by a famously tyrannical despot who was quite clearly using it to further his own self-serving interests, Newcastle fans were understandably delighted when Mike Ashley finally decided to sell up to a famously tyrannical despot who is quite clearly using it to further his own self-serving interests. When it was quietly pointed out that, for all his many flaws, Ashley had not to the best of anyone’s knowledge ever ordered anyone’s murder and isn’t the leader of a state where mass beheadings, the flagrant abuse of human rights and the daily bombing of innocents abroad are de rigueur, many of those fans pointed out that their club hadn’t actually been bought by Saudi Arabia, but its Public Investment Fund. What’s more, the Premier League had received “legally binding assurances” that the Saudi state would not have control of the club.

And while Football Daily has a handful of magic beans it would like to sell anyone who genuinely believed these assurances to be true, they could at least steer the naysayers in the direction of an interview given by Richard Masters to the BBC around the time of the sale in November 2021, where he said with a commendably straight face that if his organisation found evidence there was Saudi state involvement in the running of the club “we can remove the consortium as owners of the club”. You can imagine Richard’s surprise when last week, in a legal dispute between golf’s PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed sportswashing counterpart the LIV Tour, PIF argued in a US court that it deserved sovereign immunity because – drum roll – it is indistinguishable from the Saudi state. As Groucho Marx once didn’t quite say: “These are