Newcastle United, Sunderland and Saudi Arabia – The truth | OneFootball

If you’re the sort of person that’s ever inclined to get into a football themed argument online, you might find the same, pretty tiresome insults get thrown at you as an advocate of the Newcastle United fanbase.

One of these that is less common nowadays, but still there waiting to burst forward, is that Newcastle had weak attendances before the relative success of the Keegan era. The bores raising this will even quote attendances from that time, with some dipping to 15-16k prior to the arrival of the messiah.

This argument overlooks some key factors, obvious ones being the fact that anyone under 40 had nowt to do with this and that varying states of protest had been carrying on for a couple of years. Also, despite the worst season in their history, Newcastle United still finished with the highest average attendance in the second division and the 13th overall in the country in that 91-92 season.

The main oversight in the argument though, is that football back then was a different animal. Two major changes came in around that time that transformed the game forever.

The first, a major stride forward, was the introduction of the backpass rule. Prior to this point the dominant Liverpool sides and, notoriously, George Graham’s Arsenal had based their success on taking a lead and consistently playing the ball back to the goalie, who could pick it up before repeating this exercise, running the clock down. Great for them, an utter turn off for anyone watching on TV in the hope of being entertained. Games immediately became more open after this, providing a better spectacle. The second big change was the production of this spectacle, as Sky Sports took over the televising of the new Premier League, showing more games with far better presentation and analysis than the shoddy, barely-there programming that terrestrial TV had served up in the preceding years.

Suddenly, football was trendy, a big part of 90s pop culture with shows like Fantasy Football League and Soccer AM emerging, while every celebrity worth their salt had an allegiance to a team to promote. This saw attendances rocket across the board, with all-seater stadia welcoming women and families, as opposed to the largely male crowds that had been painted as social pariahs by recent governments.

So, with football becoming big news, Newcastle United timed their rise to the top perfectly. Joining the Premier League in its second season, Keegan’s cavalier side became a media darling, swashbuckling their way to third place playing brilliant football with an attitude of “well score more than you” that Sky couldn’t get enough of. We were dubbed the Entertainers and this went on for four years of title challenges, top six finishes and exciting signings from around the world as Newcastle’s star rose considerably.

If you weren’t around at that time, I’m sure you can imagine this did not go down well on Wearside. Sunderland has always had a chip on the shoulder about being Newcastle’s poor relation. Their city is less accessible (no airport you know), has fewer facilities and gets less attention in general from country outside of the area. It’s probably best summed up by the chagrin mackems must feel when they tell foreigners or Southerners where they’re from and, when met with a blank look, are forced to say “it’s near Newcastle” which tends to prompt recognition.

Anyway, as United established themselves as everyone’s favourite second team, the mackems continued to rot in what we’d now call the Championship. Even when Peter Reid galvanised them into promotion, it was for a one season visit that saw Newcastle win the last ever derby at Roker Park. When Sunderland finally arrived with any staying power in 1999, Newcastle were thoroughly established in the national consciousness and the bitterness had well and truly set in.

There has been a bit of to and fro since then, as a brief surge into the top half of the table saw Sunderland’s two seventh placed finishes put them above Newcastle. However, Bobby Robson’s arrival saw the natural order restored and we were back into the top six as they headed for yet another relegation, going winless for eight years in derbies with United posting five straight victories at one point. Of course they bucked this trend as Ashley ownership saw us decay from within and that six in a row gave them something to crow about. But then what do you know, they got back on the relegation bandwagon and we returned to that top six, with a dazzlingly bright future promised post-takeover.

Which brings us to the present and the current myth doing the rounds on Wearside. I’m sure most will have become aware of the general mackem patter about the current state of NUFC. Or rather the current state owning NUFC. The party line seems to be that Sunderland is a fine, upstanding area of solid moral fibre whereas Newcastle is a wretched hive of scum and villainy and their fanbase would have stood as one and resisted any attempt at involvement in their admirable local institution from a regime such as Saudi Arabia. This is not only bo..ocks, it’s self-delusional, obsessive bo..ocks.

I’ve written articles in the past about the nuances of Saudi ownership so won’t go on too much but fundamentally, we are talking about a regime that is an ally of the British government and has a presence in many, many aspects of western life. The fact that this uber capitalism exists, does not sit well with me and many others, as it has allowed Saudi a seat at many a top table despite the questionable human rights record.

However, I draw the line at being held responsible for the morals of the matter when they invest a small slice of their grotesque wealth in our club, our area and potentially the longer term prospects of our kids. The critics of this acceptance vary in intent. Amnesty International and Hatice Cengiz are raising the same concerns they have consistently voiced as opponents of the regime. Certain journalists repeatedly making the same point whenever our fanbase dares to raise a collective smile are doing so via a mask of hypocrisy, with some organisations paying these very same hacks with Saudi money and none of the gentlemen of the press declining expenses paid trips to the burgeoning collection of major sporting events in Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Opposition football fans however, take this to a whole new level.

Manchester United fans claiming they are holistically too decent or pure to countenance investment from Qatar are both overstating their influence and rewriting their club’s history and Middlesbrough fans holding up banners after our takeover, just a few miles from the Aramco funded SABIC chemical plant, is a slightly tragic ploy for attention, but the mackems have taken this to the next level entirely.

A narrative of how honest decent “lads fans” would never be accepting of such an owner in the way that the corrupt, unscrupulous Mags are belongs in a fairy tale where Sunderland and Newcastle fans are different breeds from different planets. The uncomfortable truth is that Tyne and Wear is a fairly small, compact part of the world and the people are broadly cut from the same cloth. Yes there is historic rivalry between the cities (football and otherwise) but there is no dividing line where people stop acting like mags and start behaving like mackems.

I bought a ticket today for the derby and when I go into that away end I will be with some close friends, likely bump into the odd person I’ve grown to know and like through following United over the years. At the same time, I’ll inevitably encounter some repulsive scumbags who I wouldn’t ever associate with if I wasn’t locked in the same bit of the same football ground. If I was then put in a room with a section of the home crowd, you would get similar demographics without doubt. Anyone reading this who has never had a friend, or at least met someone they liked who supported Sunderland, has either led a very sheltered life or is taking this rivalry too far.

Taking it too far is exactly what the mackems seem to have done again, prompting me to set off on this rambling diatribe.

For anyone who may have missed it, the prospect of entertaining the mighty mags in the FA Cup has caused their fanbase to leap into action, asking for an eye-watering £17k to fund a flag display for the full stadium. However, when they submitted a design that had the entire main stand aiming a jibe at our ownership, this was shot down by their owner, who was quite within his rights to do so having contributed ten of the seventeen grand. He suggested they might want to go with something more pro-Sunderland and therein lies a massive inconvenient truth.

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Sunderland’s fan base would not have moved to object to Saudi ownership had the PIF looked to buy them, this is a fact. We know it, the media knows it and the element of their fan base smart enough to see the situation as it is, knows it too. The people who make up the two supporter bases are too similar to have different reactions and if anything, recent voting suggests Sunderland is slightly more right-wing, so would take less issue on the whole. The disdain for the practices in the country of our majority owners is simply a tool to legitimise an existing hatred of Newcastle United.

It would be interesting if, at half time in the cup tie, there was a giant vote among the home fans – an offer to entirely switch ownership, with Staveley, the Reubens and PIF all taking over them and us getting Dreyfus. I think we all know that vote would pass with upwards of 95%. There would be some Sunderland fans stuck to their principles throughout, as we’ve seen at Newcastle with the United against Sportswashing group. They would be a tiny minority. The majority would be in the middle, where they may feel conflicted and slightly uncomfortable but they understand that modern football and the modern world is run by the disgustingly rich, and can grudgingly make peace with a set up that sees a small portion of the obscene wealth filter into their own locale. Then of course, you’d have the dafties at the other end of the scale who would shamelessly fail to own their previous comments and be straight over to the tea towel drawer.

IMAGO/NurPhoto

The majority in the middle know fine well that this is a facade, that they are developing morals of convenience that may be called into question at some point soon. KLD does not look like he has the clout to fund a Premier League club, so any future sale might see them fall into the hands of a person or, heaven forbid, a regime that doesn’t have the most pleasant of histories. This would likely lead to a sort of comparison table, where Saudi Arabia is too evil, whereas the Chinese / Israeli / Afghan regime running them may be unsavoury, but it’s not quite terrible enough that good decent lads fans should feel morally compromised.

There is the odd voice of reason on their various media, agreeing with the owner’s assertion that the FA Cup display should be one that advertises them as fans of Sunderland as opposed to anti-Newcastle commentators. Most of their fans know this is a poor look, as they have nurtured the bitterness of the Keegan era, when everyone paid attention to us that they wanted for themselves, and allowed it to ferment into the obsession that has led to this flag display row. I feel like the run of previous defeats was a result of their own desperate desire to beat us at all costs transferring through to their team, whereas ours was so disconnected from the fans that they couldn’t get themselves up for it. With the likes of Dan Burn and Sean Longstaff in the side there won’t be any such issue and I believe the full division’s difference will tell on the day. This might create an implosion with the locals there that makes the bus journey home interesting.

What they need to do, is develop their own identity and focus on being the best version of Sunderland they can.

We could have done without this cup tie if I’m honest, as we are concentrating on trying to be the best version of our club we can be. We are Newcastle United and they are Newcastle United’s rivals, until they change that mindset they will continue to suffer from being in our shadow, no matter what they pretend to believe.