Saudi money, English Football
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A multi-million pound takeover of the English Premier League team Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund could be in the works.
BBC Sports reporter Alistair Magowan explains what we know so far about the deal. In the meantime Ellen R Wald, author of Saudi Inc, speculates on Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman's motivation for wanting to buy Newcastle. It’s not likely to be profit, explains football finance expert Kieran Maguire. Perhaps prestige?
But given that the Saudi state’s record on human rights is abysmal, as Felix Jakens from Amnesty UK explains, is it appropriate that they should be allowed to buy the team? We hear from Norman Riley, Newcastle United diehard and deputy editor of the True Faith fanzine.
Producers: Edwin Lane, Frey Lindsay.
(Picture: Newcastle supporters in the crowd. Picture credit, Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Coming up, my Middle Eastern billionaires love buying English football clubs. |
| 0:10.9 | Owning a Premier League football club puts you in a very elite group, |
| 0:15.2 | and the kudos that that brings for high net worth individuals and companies outweighs the financial benefits. |
| 0:23.2 | Yep, rumour has it, the Saudi royal family, with its dubious human rights record, |
| 0:27.7 | may now be buying Newcastle United football team. How do the fans feel about it? |
| 0:33.2 | Once players start coming in and once big shiny trophy start getting one, I'm only a human being, |
| 0:37.0 | you know, I've got me, I'm selfish as well like most of us are. |
| 0:39.2 | So let's see. |
| 0:39.9 | But as I feel right now, yes, I do have a moral dilemma at the prospect of this take of a going ahead. |
| 0:44.7 | The money behind football and who pulls the strings, business daily from the BBC. |
| 0:52.2 | So the rumours are out there, but what's really going on? |
| 0:55.8 | The UK press seems to be a wash nowadays with breathless stories about Mohammed bin Salman. |
| 1:00.7 | He's the Saudi Crown Prince, being behind a significant bid for the English Premier League team, Newcastle United. |
| 1:07.7 | The BBC sports reporter, Alastair McGowan, has been digging into them. |
| 1:11.6 | Well, this all came about on the 25th of January when the Wall Street Journal broke a story |
| 1:16.1 | about a potential takeover of Newcastle United worth £340 million. The interesting aspect, |
| 1:22.0 | obviously, was the fact that it was Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. A couple of days later, |
| 1:26.0 | I think on the Sunday, we found out |
| 1:27.9 | that the talks were advanced, but there was a lot of doubt about this going through. The deal was |
| 1:32.8 | said to be complicated. And from what we heard as well, Mike Ashley, who is the owner of Newcastle, |
| 1:38.3 | was called unpredictable, according to the source we had on the story. So there's a lot of |
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