Hello and welcome to the TIFO football podcast. I'm Joe Devine and I'm now joined by Alex Stewart.

Hi Alex. Hello Joe. How are you? I'm grand. Fantastic. Well today we're going to be talking all about the football. Of course, it was in an international break this weekend. We might touch on England a little bit later. But to begin

with, of course, the huge news of last week, and I'm sure still the top story of this week, is the

Newcastle takeover by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the Ruben Brothers, and Amanda

Stavely. There we go, who is the face of the project. So we'll be talking about that. We'll be

talking about Steve Bruce's legacy. Also, the players, and I suppose they've seemed to have rather a lot of money now, so what they might be doing in January and the future, you know? And if you're interested in those things, then you really should check out the Athletic. Because Alex, do you know that it was

lovely for me to be able to read The Athletic last week when the news broke? Because not only did I have

the explainer as to why the deal was suddenly allowed to happen, but also I had a lot of behind-the-scenes

stuff. I read George's interview with Amanda Stavely, and I read some lovely pieces from Chris Woff about what the future might hold for Newcastle. Did you enjoy any of those pieces yourself there? I did, yes. Well, there you go. From the horses mouth. Visit theathletic.com forward slash Tifo for all of the updates about your team, whether or not you're a Newcastle fan. It really is worth it. And actually, you can get a 30-day free trial by checking out that link. That's theathletic.com forward slash Tifo. So you can try before you buy and have a scout round for 29 days. If you don't like it, then just leave. And it's all fine. But you won't want to leave because it's very, very good. Beyond that, we'll be talking about Manchester United, because it's all fine but you won't want to leave because it's very very good beyond that we'll

be talking about Manchester United because it strikes us that they're not having a very good season so

we'll talk a little bit about that later on and if we get around to it if we have time and I tell

you we're recording this intro before we've actually done the podcast that we might not

Loftus Cheek we want to talk a little bit about Ruben Loftus Cheek and also Tammy Abraham

because he played for England over the weekend and he's having a good season thus far under

Marino at Roma. So there we go. It's a stacked show today. Thank you for joining us and now

I will leave you on the warm hands and the cool embrace of the public investment fund. Such a warm embrace.

Now, let's begin with Newcastle, of course, Alex.

And as I said in the introduction, the takeover is complete.

We know that the other Premier League clubs, some of them are unhappy about it.

But I imagine it's going to be very difficult for it to be reversed at this point.

You were talking beforehand, weren't we, about now, about the sort of wealth of the owners

overall within the Premier League and how much of a proportion that the Saudi Arabia's

...