mack
07-11-2008, 11:28 PM
Faustian bargains in football
By Jesse Fink (source: www.atimes.com)
Funny old world we live in. Who would have thought there would ever be a time when what started out as one of the world's premier mosque construction companies would want to buy an English football (soccer) club? Moreover, that the construction company in question had links to the world's premier terrorist?
Newcastle United, the object of the Saudi Binladin Group's (SBG's) affections, has gone into public relations overdrive, denying media reports the seriously loaded Bin Laden family of Jeddah have lined up a 300 million pound (US$592 million) takeover at Tyneside.
Which raises the question: what exactly is the problem?
Osama, the black sheep of the Bin Laden flock, was officially disowned by his family years ago. He is to all intents and purposes, in public at least, persona non grata with the people he used to count as kin.
SBG's chairman, Osama's half-brother, Bakr, is not a terrorist. By all accounts and reputation he's a legitimate businessman and ranked by ArabianBusiness.com as the 21st most influential Arab figure in the world. His background and name have not stopped his company from investing in all sorts of businesses beyond its bread and butter of construction, reputedly including Microsoft, Boeing, and even, as Michael Moore makes a case for in Fahrenheit 9/11, the oil concerns of the Bush family of Texas. He's dined with British royalty and American presidents - as whitebread and capital "E" establishment as you can get.
But Bin Laden or "Bin Ladin", as Bakr and his brothers and sisters now spell their name, are still dirty words in the West. They have as much chance of buying Newcastle as I do of dating US glamour star Carmen Electra.
Which, when all the facts of the story are considered, is somewhat hypocritical. Actually, staggeringly so.
To my mind, what is far worse than the Saudi Binladin Group taking over the Magpies, as Newcastle is known, is the ease by which shady gangsters and their hangers-on have infiltrated the highest echelons of the English game. The ease by which certain crooks have gained residency to escape being jailed at home. The lip service paid to the English Premier League's own "fit and proper person test", which stipulates a director of a football club will be disqualified from holding such an office if he or she gets involved in anything that could be construed as corruption, insolvency, conspiracy to defraud, insider trading, false accounting, perjury, theft, tax evasion.
Well, the plain truth is the premier league simply needs all the money it can get and clubs, saddled with unpayable debts from overstretched operating budgets, are forced to hock themselves to anyone with the means to get them out of trouble.
So, for me, the real villain in this whole cesspool of greed is the premier league itself, led by its avaricious chief executive, Richard Scudamore, which has allowed the English game and particularly the "Big Four" clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea - to foster a culture of spending that is out of kilter with reality.
As the Sunday Telegraph's cluey columnist Patrick Barclay writes in the June edition of World Soccer magazine, "That half the premier league is owned by foreigners in not necessarily a point worth pursuing - the truly perturbing change is that the leading clubs are being burdened by levels of debt that appear unsustainable."
Foreign owners involved with premier league clubs include Russians Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), Aleksandr Gaydamak (Portsmouth) and Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal) , Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City), American Malcolm Glazier at Manchester United, Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett at Liverpool, American Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, Eggert Magnusson from Iceland at West Ham United and Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al Fayed at Fulham.
When rich foreign businessmen come into the league, the league gets the money and the owners get the legitimacy. It's a cozy arrangement benefiting everybody except, arguably, the fans. While many think they're getting more bang for their buck with more games being played and bigger names being signed, ultimately they're the ones who pick up the tab in the form of increased ticket prices, membership fees, merchandise costs, TV subscriptions and so on.
It's a vicious cycle that has got out of control, that makes the game too expensive for the average fan, and something must be done about it to preserve soul of the game.
But now that it's started, how do we stop it? The evil genie's been let out of the bottle.
Jesse Fink is a leading football writer in Australia. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book 15 Days in June: How Australia Became a Football Nation and has won various awards in Australia for his sports writing.
By Jesse Fink (source: www.atimes.com)
Funny old world we live in. Who would have thought there would ever be a time when what started out as one of the world's premier mosque construction companies would want to buy an English football (soccer) club? Moreover, that the construction company in question had links to the world's premier terrorist?
Newcastle United, the object of the Saudi Binladin Group's (SBG's) affections, has gone into public relations overdrive, denying media reports the seriously loaded Bin Laden family of Jeddah have lined up a 300 million pound (US$592 million) takeover at Tyneside.
Which raises the question: what exactly is the problem?
Osama, the black sheep of the Bin Laden flock, was officially disowned by his family years ago. He is to all intents and purposes, in public at least, persona non grata with the people he used to count as kin.
SBG's chairman, Osama's half-brother, Bakr, is not a terrorist. By all accounts and reputation he's a legitimate businessman and ranked by ArabianBusiness.com as the 21st most influential Arab figure in the world. His background and name have not stopped his company from investing in all sorts of businesses beyond its bread and butter of construction, reputedly including Microsoft, Boeing, and even, as Michael Moore makes a case for in Fahrenheit 9/11, the oil concerns of the Bush family of Texas. He's dined with British royalty and American presidents - as whitebread and capital "E" establishment as you can get.
But Bin Laden or "Bin Ladin", as Bakr and his brothers and sisters now spell their name, are still dirty words in the West. They have as much chance of buying Newcastle as I do of dating US glamour star Carmen Electra.
Which, when all the facts of the story are considered, is somewhat hypocritical. Actually, staggeringly so.
To my mind, what is far worse than the Saudi Binladin Group taking over the Magpies, as Newcastle is known, is the ease by which shady gangsters and their hangers-on have infiltrated the highest echelons of the English game. The ease by which certain crooks have gained residency to escape being jailed at home. The lip service paid to the English Premier League's own "fit and proper person test", which stipulates a director of a football club will be disqualified from holding such an office if he or she gets involved in anything that could be construed as corruption, insolvency, conspiracy to defraud, insider trading, false accounting, perjury, theft, tax evasion.
Well, the plain truth is the premier league simply needs all the money it can get and clubs, saddled with unpayable debts from overstretched operating budgets, are forced to hock themselves to anyone with the means to get them out of trouble.
So, for me, the real villain in this whole cesspool of greed is the premier league itself, led by its avaricious chief executive, Richard Scudamore, which has allowed the English game and particularly the "Big Four" clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea - to foster a culture of spending that is out of kilter with reality.
As the Sunday Telegraph's cluey columnist Patrick Barclay writes in the June edition of World Soccer magazine, "That half the premier league is owned by foreigners in not necessarily a point worth pursuing - the truly perturbing change is that the leading clubs are being burdened by levels of debt that appear unsustainable."
Foreign owners involved with premier league clubs include Russians Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), Aleksandr Gaydamak (Portsmouth) and Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal) , Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City), American Malcolm Glazier at Manchester United, Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett at Liverpool, American Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, Eggert Magnusson from Iceland at West Ham United and Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al Fayed at Fulham.
When rich foreign businessmen come into the league, the league gets the money and the owners get the legitimacy. It's a cozy arrangement benefiting everybody except, arguably, the fans. While many think they're getting more bang for their buck with more games being played and bigger names being signed, ultimately they're the ones who pick up the tab in the form of increased ticket prices, membership fees, merchandise costs, TV subscriptions and so on.
It's a vicious cycle that has got out of control, that makes the game too expensive for the average fan, and something must be done about it to preserve soul of the game.
But now that it's started, how do we stop it? The evil genie's been let out of the bottle.
Jesse Fink is a leading football writer in Australia. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book 15 Days in June: How Australia Became a Football Nation and has won various awards in Australia for his sports writing.