LSecond: Nick Waltemaide, who was signed for £69m during the summer frenzy, stopped scoring. £55m winger Anthony Elanga has struggled for game time and goals. Centre-half Malik Thiaw, signed from Milan for £35m, continues to make basic mistakes. Last summer’s transfer window, conducted without a sporting director and an outgoing CEO, is looking increasingly like a disaster. Football has seemed a little slower and less urgent these days, while St James’s Park are a little quieter and more anxious. Eddie Howe basically sums it up with a hug and a smile.
Tier 3: It turns out that Alexander Isaac lit the exit for others to follow. Sandro Tonali’s agent decided to pull a little prank on transfer deadline day, putting Arsenal on alert. Tonali will likely be the next painful transfer story, perhaps Bruno Guimarães or Lewis Hall or Tino Livramento. Sporting director Ross Wilson still has his foot under the table. Chief executive David Hopkinson believes Newcastle can be the best team in the world by 2030. Newcastle sit 11th in the Premier League. No sign arrived in January.
Tier 4: A new training ground rumored to be near the airport has not yet materialized. There are no plows in the ground, no announcements, no architect’s drawings, no timelines. The new stadium at Rees Park remains a figment of the imagination. During the acquisition process, Amanda Staveley claimed that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had “big plans to invest in cities, housing, everything.” The regeneration of St James’s Park, its community and the wider city area was a key part of gaining public support for the bid. More than four years later, there is little evidence that these plans have been formally enacted.
Tier 5: Last week, the Saudi Public Investment Fund quietly but dramatically scaled back its massive £5.8tn Neom megacity project in the face of rising costs. The highlight of Neom in 2017 was The Line. 166 miles of mirrored skyscrapers 500 meters high and 200 meters wide, with hidden marinas, 30-story buildings suspended upside down from bridges, and topped by a World Cup football stadium. Mountains will be leveled, tunnels dug beneath them, and blasted to make way for them.
However, the project quickly descended into a kind of intentional farce, as the developers encountered massive logistical, physical and technical obstacles and still felt unable to convey it to the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. One senior executive told the Financial Times that staff “effectively had to lie about the timeline and cost of delivering the vision”. Aerial photos revealed much of the tunneling and excavation work being done for a high-speed rail connection to the new airport, which may never be built.
Tier 6: Investments are downsized, downgraded, and cut across the kingdom. The Muqab, a huge cubic skyscraper in Riyadh that would have been the world’s largest building by volume, has been demolished. For months, there has been speculation in the boxing world that Saudi Arabia was starting to cut back on its generous mega-fight budget. Cristiano Ronaldo is reportedly on strike at Al Nasr due to lack of investment in the team.
Tier 7: The crown prince was in a generous mood during a visit to the White House in November, pledging $1 trillion in investment in the United States, without providing details. But behind the scenes, PIF is said to be short on funds. The decline in oil revenues left a big hole in the company’s accounts. The company’s portfolio is littered with big-ticket investments that didn’t bear fruit, including a cruise line with one ship and an electric vehicle business that doesn’t yet sell cars. Foreign investors have been told there is no new capital available as a result of what is euphemistically referred to as a “restructuring”. Where does a lavish commitment to sport fit into this landscape of cuts, recalibrations and slow-burning chaos?No one seems to know.
Tier 1: The majority of Newcastle’s fans still do not recognize the club’s Saudi ownership in any meaningful way. Mike Ashley is still fresh in our minds and will continue to be a contender for Champions League qualification this season and next. Still, a kind of cold anxiety seems to be gripping one of England’s great clubs. A dark suspicion that the vivid dreamscape that was sold in 2021, the vision that caused many clubs to swallow or look away from the many human rights concerns surrounding the deal, will take years to materialize, if at all.
PIF’s recent history is a story of grand plans, tremendous ambitions, and unfulfilled promises. Promises deferred, broken, or never meant to be kept, essentially existed as spells, public displays of desire in a world that increasingly leans more toward spectacle than exercise of power.
Perhaps Waltemade found the shooting boots. Perhaps a final at Wembley or back-to-back wins will get the city excited again. Perhaps eventually a training range will be built. Perhaps at some point in the next decade, a new stadium will be built over the old stadium. But, of course, there are no guarantees, no recourse if nothing happens, no outlet for buyer’s remorse, and no meaningful way to hold those responsible accountable.
Decisions that affect their future well-being are made without their consent or veto power, in rooms they do not have access to. Layers of bureaucracy and management, economics and geopolitics, the fate of clubs and cities at the mercy of the whims of the global oil market, or what the man in the palace will build tomorrow. One of the eternal tragedies of English football is that those who have the biggest stakes are ultimately the ones with the smallest stakes.
