JJ ponders the current state of this sporting life
OK, so this is about soccer / football.
But bear with me. It’s about more than that.
It’s about identity. And about what happens when something you’ve invested in emotionally through a lifetime changes in ways outside of your control.
How do you reconcile being a fan when the object of your affections proves to be problematic, or is associated with problematic characters?
It’s an issue in entertainment, as musicians, actors and comedians have been revealed to be at best, lacking in morals.
Do you consign them to history and never again listen to Michael Jackson?
Or watch anything with Louis C.K. in it?
Is there a personal sliding scale of what is an acceptable misdemeanor / crime before you cancel your favourite act?
Then there’s sport.
My team is Newcastle United:
Serial underachievers during my lifetime. But who are now on an upturn.
An upturn that stems from a takeover by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia in 2021.
The takeover was controversial due to questions over Saudi state influence and the role of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Despite Bin Salman being chairman of the PIF, legally binding assurances were given that the PIF was separate from the state.
This issue is problematic due to Saudi human rights violations, women’s rights abuses, the criminalisation of homosexuality, the restriction of free speech, environmental record and the war in Yemen.
Then there is the 2018 death of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi:
Khashoggi was murdered while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Who had written a monthly column in the Washington Post criticising the Crown Prince and Saudi policy.
Definitively unravelling the events has proved difficult but a number of sources and agencies have implicated Bin Salman as being behind it. The CIA are reported to have rated this happening with a medium to high confidence.
While campaigning for the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden said that the US would make Saudi Arabia a pariah in response to this and ongoing human rights abuses.
A position that was rolled back when in power.
Into this background: Newcastle United fans have been unwittingly drawn into geopolitics.
A report by The Guardian newspaper in July 2021 found that Saudi Arabia had spent $6.3bn on sportswashing since 2021. Football, golf, boxing and Formula One have been the most high profile sports to be targeted. The 2034 World Cup has been awarded to Saudi Arabia.
Fans of other clubs have taken the moral high ground.
Safe in the knowledge they can snipe from the sidelines at Newcastle fans acceptance of the new regime. Conveniently ignoring that were the situation reversed their own fanbase would likely act in exactly the same way.
Its an impossible position.
How can fans be expected to be the arbiters of moral opinion when governments and other authorities are happy to do business with them?
Any prospective club owner is subject to the Premier League Owners’ and Directors’ Test to determine whether they are a fit and proper owner.
It does often seem that there are no limits on what someone would need to do to fail this.
The Premier League declared themselves satisfied.
The government were also said to have been keen for it to go through, strengthening ties and bringing investment.
And yet, what about personal accountability? There are some that have met the new regime with commendable resilience.
A group was formed to counter the new owners: NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing.
Lifelong fans have given up season tickets.
They have resolved not to attend matches while highlighting the issues associated with the owners.
On the other side are a seeming majority who are willing to ignore any problematic aspects. They happen thousands of miles away, out of sight and out of mind. The main concern is how good they are at running a football club.
The inconvenient reality is that they do seem pretty good at that. Fortunes are on the up. There has been engagement with fans, with the community, with local government. It’s been painted as a long term sustainable project not some quick fix.
In Eddie Howe, they appointed a coach for solid footballing reasons rather than a big name of little experience to wow fans.
They’ve shown faith in him during sticky periods and been rewarded by a trajectory towards the upper end of the league.
They’ve also won a trophy. The first in 56 years. The last one was seven years before I was born.
There’s been a lifetime of mediocrity and disappointment, interspersed with moments of joy and periods of hope that ultimately ended in more disappointment.
Imagine this was your favourite musician.
How many albums would you give them before you concluded they’d lost it and stopped emotionally investing?
It’s unlikely you’d still be listening if it was 56 albums since they last dropped a classic.
Doesn’t matter how bad it gets. In fact, for some it’s a badge of honour that the worse it gets the more it means to stick with them.
The situation is exacerbated by the two previous sets of owners. They didn’t have the human rights absuing backstory but turned out to be problematic when it comes to running a successful football club.
Freddy Shepherd, local businessman and Chairman from 1998 to 2007:
Caught in a tabloid exposé insulting fans and record goalscorer Alan Shearer.
He was followed by Mike Ashley from 2007 to 2021. A case of being careful what you wish for. In a period when clubs were increasingly falling into foreign ownership and the likes of billionaire Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought success at Chelsea, having a homegrown billionaire promised much.
It went to the new owner’s head.
The previously publicity shy businessman went all in:
Joining fans in the stand at games, being caught on camera downing pints of beer and ingratiating himself further at bars afterwards buying rounds of drinks for supporters.
That didn’t last long. Finding that success in sport was harder to find than in business he settled for a style of ownership that priotised doing just enough to remain in the promised land of the Premier League with all the riches that brought.
Mid table obscurity was the aim. Not that that worked out either. There was an increasingly antagonistic relationship between owner and fans as disillusionment set in.
Exacerbated further by his rebranding of the stadium to reflect his sports retail chain as the not so catchy…
There are a small number of stadiums here where the club have sold off naming rights as a revenue stream but they’re mostly new stadia. Renaming and wiping out the history of a 100+ year old stadium is a big no for the fans.
When weighed against their predecessors who had mismanaged the club into a gradual decline? It’s hard to stand against the newfound hope and optimism of a club on the up.
We’re football fans after all, here for the love of the game.
Whatever your sport, it’s what happens in the stadium / arena that matters and first draws you in, not what goes on in the boardroom.
That is the counter-argument.
Football is branded as ‘the people’s game’ and the people will still be there after the current owners move on.
Is it unfair to expect them to give up on a lifetime of investment and protest against a chance of success because of what happens behind the scenes?
It’s a dilemma I can’t resolve. The rational part of me agrees that sport shouldn’t be used to legitimise the distasteful aspects of a political regime. Life is complicated though.
The emotional side couldn’t help watching that trophy win in March, caught up in the maelstrom of emotion.
Tortured throughout, even when 2 – 0 ahead, that it could all go wrong. It was bound to go wrong. We don’t win things. Until now.
So that’s where I am. Trapped in a quandary of contradictions not of my making. Enjoying the good times but with an asterisk against that -reminding me of the dubious mechanism behind it.
The good times are here. Along with the bad taste they leave behind
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Thanks for this piece, JJ. Although I’m not much of a sports fan (Chicago Cubs excepted), I definitely see where you’re coming from. I agree that the moral wrestling is at least as difficult when it comes to other forms of entertainment. For me, I didn’t delete Chris Brown or R. Kelly from my iPod but didn’t buy further work from them and didn’t seek them out. (Of course, we’re past the iPod days now and I don’t listen to them on Spotify.) The really difficult cases for me are Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby. In both cases, I will listen to MJ’s work and watch a “Cosby Show” episode but, like you said, there’s always a mental asterisk. (I would suppose the same would be true of O.J. Simpson but I never found the “Naked Gun” movies worth rewatching.) And then there are the Eric Claptons and Van Morrisons and Roseanne Barrs of the world whose politics rather than criminal actions register disgust. The same mental asterisk holds true. I never watched “The Apprentice” or I suspect the presence of 45/47 would raise the same issues.
MJ is an interesting case. It felt 5+ years ago that his influence was much diminished. I went to a wedding in 2018 and during the reception the DJ went with an MJ track. What would have once been a floorfiller on this occasion emptied the dance floor. Feels like the further we get from his death the problems surrounding him are fading. Whether its because there was never a criminal trial to put a definitive conclusion to his character I don’t know.
My son’s favorite band is/was 311. He would drive cross-country to attend 311 day (which is held on March 11th, or 3/11).
Then their drummer, Chad Sexton, came out in favor of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying they were just removing the Nazis there. That ended it for my son. He hasn’t seen them or bought their new music. I admire that.
It’s a complicated world with unseemly characters behind every scene, but taking the moral high road is difficult. The old saying, attributed to Mark Twain but who knows, is “A man who never lies has few friends.” We all want friends, so what’s a little white lie? Some lies turn off-white, then gray, then black. We have to ask ourselves where on that spectrum is too dark to continue that friendship? Same goes for sports teams or actors or musicians or politicians or the company you work for.
I hadn’t heard of 311. The drummer is free to hold those views – just as anyone hearing them has the right to be appalled. It is admirable that your son hasn’t compromised on his views. Similar to the football scenario, I imagine there are plenty who will say they can separate the person’s views from the music and that one doesn’t feed into the other. Everyone has their own decision to make on where the line is.
When the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 2010, it was the first time they did so in my lifetime and I had waited decades for it as a long suffering fan of the team. Then in 2021 it came out that a young player came forward during that playoff run that he and another player had been sexually assaulted by one of the coaches. Instead of doing something about it, they swept it under the rug so as not to take away from the good vibes of their Stanley Cup run. Once it came out a decade later what they had done, a number of people lost their jobs and were disgraced, including the president of the team and the head coach. After that, I never felt the same about the 3 championships they won, and I barely follow them. Not sure what will happen if they start winning again and the urge to jump back on the band wagon returns, but I honestly think I may never completely enjoy being a fan as I once did.
Totally understand how that situation compromises the feelings and enjoyment you had watching them win. The hope is that any new administration can learn from past mistakes and make sure they don’t happen again. Unfortunately, past experience in all walks of life suggests that may not happen and they may just continue to bargain on taking fans for granted and success will douse any discontent.