The first Newcastle game I ever saw at St. James’ Park was a 4-0 victory over Olympiakos in the UEFA Cup. It was not a sign of things to come. While I was also there when we beat Sunderland 5-1, over the years I’ve seen Newcastle slip out of Europe, out of the Premier League even, and get turned over multiple times by multiple teams. Yesterday, Newcastle were bought out by Saudi Arabia’s PIF, and the only way I can even begin to think about that is in FIFA terms.
In FIFA Career Mode, th♛ere’s an option called ‘Financial Takeover’ where the club can be sold to some rich bloke who gives you enough money to go and buy Erling Haaland. That doesn’t quite put Newcastle in perspective, though. Newcastle UTD are ♓now richer than the rest of the Premier League combined. Richer than the ten richest clubs in the world combined. Times Manchester City’s wealth by ten and they would still be behind us. Newcastle aren’t just rich; Newcastle are Jeff Bezos and everyone else is your dad’s boss who drives a nice Lexus.
Of course, what FIFA does away with is the ethical concerns. The financial takeover in FIFA just adds a couple of zeroes to your bank account and usually gives you a higher target in Europe. The money is fake, and ♒therefore clean. Real money is soaked in the blood and the sweat of workers. Bezos is rich, sure, but his employees are peeing in water bottles and collapsing from exhaustion to make minimum wage.
Newcastle’s money isn’t just slightly damp with the sweat of the workers either - it’s dripping red, soddenꦜ and soaked through. While Newcastle are not officially owned by Mohammed bin Salman, we are unofficially owned by him. MBS was the alleged orches⛎trator of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, not to mention a key figure in the Saudi regime that is staunchly anti-LGBT and has come under fire for its stance on human rights. Though MBS has introduced some reforms, like allowing women to drive, host concerts, and attend sporting events, he still rules over a deeply authoritarian and worrying regime.
If you’ve read this far in the hope that this will event🌠ually circle back around to video games, a) it will, b) I appreciate your patience and support, and c) MBS has shares in SNK, EA, Take-Two, and Activision Blizzard as well. Everything you love i🌳s owned by horrible people.
As a Newcastle fan, trans woman, and outspoken critic of discrimination who has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:freq📖uently called for more intersectღionality in our social ju♍stice causes, I’m all over the place on the takeover. Had it been a nice, clean FIFA takeover, I would have been all for it. The money Mike Ashley, our departing owner, has is dodgy anyway - he made it all from zero hours contracts in sports tat warehouses while workers lose sleep shifting giant Sports Direct mugs. While Newcastle haven’t won a trophy in over 60 years, prior to Ashley we were challenging for the league, for various cups, and 🤪in Europe, but were just falling short. Newcastle and England were very similar in that sense. Lots of great players, but perennial dark horses who fell at the first hurdle.
Since Ashley arrived, our ambition, talent, and identity has been lost. We’ve been relegated twice. We haven’t won a game all season, and we’ve mostly played teams at the bottom. We play pedestrian football and prior to yesterday, no one would have given us a hope of even contesting a trophy for the next decade. Because of the various ethical issues with this takeover - which were more about television piracy than murder, because capitalism - this affair has dragged on for 18 months, with the club effectively on pause for all that time. But even before that, ever since Pardew left, Newcastle have been going nowhere slowly. When Alan Pardew represents your g🐈lory days, you know something has gone very wrong.
My favourite moment in Ashley’s era would be the day we survived relegation on the last day of the season, when Jonas Gutierrez, who had earlier that season recovered from cancer, “the man who knows the true🌊 meaning of the word ‘survival’” scored the goಞal that kept us up. He was sacked the next week over the phone. That’s the kind of club we’ve become.
I won’t criticise the fans themselves for celebrating the takeover. The first emotion I felt, after the shock that it had gone through at all, was relief. Ashley’s gone. Charnley’s gone. Bruce will be gone soon. I wrote recently, when I thought the takeover was dead and buried, about how FIFA 22 nerfing Newcastle’s best and most 💟ambitious flair player, Allan Sa🅰int-Maximin, was a sad indictment of where the club is. FIFA 22 is the first time in years I haven’t been Newcastle in Career Mode, partly 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:because of create-a-club, and partly because I just can’t. I feel so uninspired by t🅰he club right now, and the idea of pushing the financial takeover button, when we were so close 🍰to it in real life, just seemed sad. Now that it’s actually happened, I’m not sure what to think.
I wish football was as simple as FIFA sometimes. I wish Newcastle being taken over just meant Haaland in th🌌e famous number 9 shirt in a couple of years time, and not that my club, the club I’ve loved for over 20 years, was now in the hands of a very rich, but also very murderous regime. I stuck by Newcastle United when they won nothing - so why do I feel like it’ll be harder to stand by their side when they start winning?