Newcastle Is a Long Way From the Top

Somewhere, if you look really hard, there is a struggling football team at the heart of the Newcastle United story. The Saudi government’s record on a whole range of human rights issues should never be forgotten or overlooked. Nor should the cravenness of the Premier League in pretending the Saudi Public Investment Fund and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are somehow discrete entities while, again, allowing a wholly inappropriate owner to take over a club. And neither should the wider lessons of what this says about a modern Britain in which everything is for sale and nobody seems much to care about ethics or consequences so long as they are benefitting.

But beyond all that there is the issue of…