Saudi Arabia Wins its First Major English Soccer Trophy

By Tiernan Cannon | March 21, 2025 | 10:25am

Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images

International Affairs Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia Wins its First Major English Soccer Trophy

We’ll begin, before getting into all the unpleasantness, with the football: Newcastle United, after 70 long, desperate years of major trophy-drought, have won something. The Carabao Cup is not the most prestigious cup competition in English soccer, but, for a club that doesn’t win much, it means an awful lot. Newcastle needed this, and, to be fair, the competition needed this. No other team besides Manchester City, Manchester United, or Newcastle’s defeated foes Liverpool had won it since 2013, when Swansea City were the unlikely winners, so it was about time another name was etched onto that trophy. Newcastle, as the footballing cliché goes, wanted it more.

Newcastle upon Tyne is a one-club city, in the sense that there is no other major club representing it at the highest levels of English soccer. It’s situated in the north of the country, and, at one time, was a major center of heavy industry, but deindustrialization came to hit it hard. Factories closed, jobs were lost, and a core part of the city’s identity was damaged, which, perhaps, goes some way to explaining the passion of Newcastle United’s fans. In an area perceived to be forgotten by Britain’s southern-dwelling elite, the club’s return to the top tier of football, after a long period of decline and mismanagement, is an assertion of the region’s might.

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The first of Newcastle’s two goals against Liverpool—an absolute thunderfuck of a header—was scored by Dan Burn, a six-foot, seven-inch giant of a man who’s missing a finger and otherwise looks like he’s time-warped into the contemporary Premier League from an era long passed, well before professional players generally transformed into the sleek, waxed little things we recognize running around the pitch today. Burn is an old-fashioned sort of player, and his story to get to this point is an inspiring one. He is a life-long Newcastle supporter, having been born locally, but his success with the club was never guaranteed. As a child he was rejected by them, on the basis that he wasn’t good enough, and for many years he toiled in the lower leagues of English soccer, only making it to the Premier League at a relatively old age. He joined Newcastle in 2022, and, three years later, at the age of 32, he’s now won his first major trophy, as well as being called up to play for his country for the first time. This is the stuff of English boyhood dreams.

But—and there’s always a “but” in soccer nowadays; no story can remain unambiguously lovely—Burn’s success with Newcastle didn’t materialize out of nowhere. Had he joined before 2021, Burn would have been part of a very different team, and major success would have seemed inconceivable. But 2021 was the year Newcastle was purchased by its present owners: the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which, itself, is controlled by the country’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Elite soccer is a grubby business, and Newcastle are far from the only team to have unsavory owners. Chelsea are owned by a consortium of venture capitalists who, in the course of three transfer windows, spent about $1.27 billion for the sake of, ultimately, ripping apart the old team, hoarding young talent, and creating a fresh squad which, at present, is quite boring and isn’t especially successful. Manchester United’s newish minority shareholder, the energy tycoon Jim Radcliffe, is overseeing a massive wave of redundancies and cuts at the moment, affecting the regular people who work at the club, while a group of boardroom managers he has assembled—described wonderfully by the soccer journalist Dion Fanning as “the politburo of bullshit”—stroke their chins in the stands, look somber, and earn massive salaries. They’re not even the worst owners of Man United, as the major shareholders, the Glazer family, continue to bleed the club dry, even as Radcliffe soaks up most of the attention. Even at the smaller end of the Premier League scale, teams like Brighton, though much-admired as clever, plucky underdogs, are nonetheless owned by Tony Bloom, a man who earned his fortune through the seedy gambling industry.

The spirit of English soccer has been twisted by amoral, exploitative capitalists, but, with the entry of nation states into the scene, things have gotten worse. The stage was set in 2003, when Russian oligarch and pal to Vladimir Putin, Roman Abramovich, purchased Chelsea and dragged the club into a period of unprecedented success, before being forced to sell following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The money he pumped into the club, and the way he used it to bolster his image, served as the blueprint for what was to come. By 2008, Manchester City had been bought by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the oil-rich Abu Dhabi royal family, and, before long, City had been transformed from a middling, but historic club into a global, shiny brand and one of the best—and richest—teams in the world. Newcastle’s Saudi takeover came 13 years later.

Buying Newcastle is just one part of a wider Saudi strategy. The Public Investment Fund has taken over four Saudi clubs, too, pumping them full of money which has been used to seduce aging legends like Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Karim Benzema into playing in the Saudi Pro League. Through an absurd and dubious selection process, Saudi Arabia secured the right to host the 2034 World Cup, while its state oil and gas company, Aramco, has become FIFA’s major sponsor. The country will also host the 2027 Asian Cup, and it’s already started hosting the finals of both Spanish and Italian domestic cups, because, in these days of bland corporate nonsense, community and place mean nothing.

It’s not just soccer. Saudi Arabia has also invested heavily in golf, tennis, mixed martial arts, WWE, boxing, sailing, Formula 1, horse racing and esports. But why? This seems like a lot of money and effort for something as seemingly frivolous as sports.

The Saudis try to frame their focus on sport as an effort to diversify their erstwhile oil-reliant economy. Cynics, on the other hand, imply it’s little more than a sportswashing exercise, whereby the Saudi regime exploits the world’s love of sport to soften its own image as a despotic, violent petrostate. The cynical reading is persuasive enough, given that the Saudi image is, indeed, in need of a good scrub. The horror stories are endless: the regime arrests, tortures and murders those who dare to speak out against it. It conducts mass executions for offenses including the holding of “deviant beliefs.” Homosexual people can be whipped and chemically castrated. People are disappeared for social media posts. Migrant workers live and toil in conditions amounting to torture. Women live under a system which has been characterized as “gender apartheid.”

On March 8, 2022, a law formally enshrining male guardianship over women was issued in Saudi Arabia. It included provisions that, according to Human Rights Watch, “facilitate domestic violence and sexual abuse in marriage.” Note the date that the law was issued. March 8 is International Women’s Day. Was that a wild coincidence, or was it specifically chosen to make a mockery out of the liberal values such a day represents? This is where the lens of sportswashing falls short, because, evidently, the Saudi regime doesn’t really care how its image is received. If anything, coverage of its human rights abuses has only grown since it so aggressively moved into the sporting game, so, clearly, there are other motivations in play.

Saudi Arabia holds a tremendous amount of power, not only regionally, but, increasingly, further afield, too. Consider its relationship to Britain, which, not too long ago, was a major imperial power in the Gulf. The U.K.’s ties to Saudi Arabia run deep, but gone are the days when it was unambiguously the senior partner. Saudi investments into the U.K. are increasingly important, as illustrated, for instance, by the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s stake in Heathrow, the U.K.’s busiest airport. Saudi investors, too, are players in London’s office real estate market, while, on the other side of the relationship, Britain is a major supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia—arms, incidentally, which have been used to induce a severe humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Both countries, then, hold leverage over the other.

The Saudis have used their leverage. According to reporting by The Guardian, Mohammed bin Salman last year personally lobbied David Cameron, who, at the time, was the foreign secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, in order to persuade him to intervene in the legal case of a London-based Saudi dissident, who was suing the Saudi government. Bin Salman generated the pressure by telling Cameron there could be “implications” for £100 billion worth of Saudi investments in the British economy.

The Saudi takeover of Newcastle may well serve a sportswashing effort, and, surely, moving into the sporting sector really does help the Saudi economy to diversify. But it goes deeper than that. It is about Saudi power ingratiating itself ever deeper into the British economy and political scene. It is about hard power, and the fans of Newcastle are just caught up in it. It’s not their fault that this has happened. It’s not their fault that soccer and the British government both are so thoroughly compromised by dirty money from abroad. They, like the rest of us, are just part of a grim moment in history, where everything beautiful or meaningful is something to be commodified or exploited by those more powerful than us. Even something as pure as a big, fuck-off power-header by a large Geordie named Dan.