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I stated my feelings on this last time round in January and they haven't changed. I don't want NUFC to be owned by the Saudis. I despise them and would hate for our club to be involved in their plans to legitimize their medieval regime in a post-oil world. All of that said, if this is happening, it's out of my hands. Just like it was when Ashley bought us. We're as powerless against this as we were any of the myriad times we protested Ashley's decisions. And so if I've got no say, and I don't, then I'm going to fucking enjoy being a real club again, no matter who's signing the cheques. Having a real manager again instead of a succession of bargain-basement bozos. Investing significant funds into the first-team squad. Having a serious tilt at Europe again. Getting some relief after thirteen (fuck me) pretty fucking barren years. Scrubbing every trace of Ashley's low-rent sportswear empire from SJP. So aye, bring on the Saudis. Even if they only spend enough to make us a going concern again, that'd be enough.

Give over man. The Saudis chopped up and dissolved a well known journalist, do you really think a few bleeding heart twatterers will stop them investing?

Oh man, I’ve had a fucking shit week and I needed that thread. What a fucking treat that was. That fucking huckle doesn’t grasp why a family worth trillions wouldn’t take the cheaper and immensely more risky option of buying a League One side over buying a Premier League side and being able to immediately start investing? It’s not even worth noting that for all their twisting and deluded Geordie jibes we are the more recognizable club from the two by a large margin, especially internationally. As many know I live in the states, when I mention I’m from Newcastle people immediately reference either the beer, Newcastle United, or both even when they know basically nothing about footy. I’m sure the Netflix comedy series will help their exposure but it’s not exactly in a good light is it? This quote btw: ”I hope that their buy out will encourage people to buy us though, for one of they put a team together someone could see us as an attractive club to reignite the rivalry, I would say man city got bought out because they are next door to man United and already had a brand name” This is the sort of fucking gold I was expecting from them, they honestly call us deluded and then come out with utter dross like this. Every bit of it is magic, even down to bitterly trying to say Man City was a bigger brand than NUFC pre-Abu Dhabi group, we were a CL side just 4-5 season prior to that you numpty. It’s also worth noting the Abu Dhabi group went to buy NUFC first, there’s a reason this isn’t the first gulf state to try and buy NUFC while the only takeover attempts for our malformed “rivals” have been a clueless American hedge fund owner, then two wide boy chancers. Michael Dell has no knowledge of Sunderland, nor the imaginary takeover, firstly he invests in a passive fund that was rumored to be interested, he doesn’t engage in it, and secondly they gave a loan to SAFC, that’s what it was ffs they gave them a loan and the connection got the mackems frothing. It’s going to get a whole hell of a lot worse you little tramps, and you best believe I’m going to enjoy every second of it. Call me obsessed all you want, it’s going to be fucking hilarious to potentially watch world class players while those bong eyed cucks watch Will Grigg.

Surely if there is anyone to be criticised here it is Ashley for choosing to hand the reins to the Saudis? Has there been any such article?

Wonder if we should listen to glendenning (mackem) Delaney (hypocrite) Samuel (patsy) and the like. Or this When it comes down to it, there's fuck all moral high ground in football, but fucking hell we might actually have something to fall in love with on the pitch again.

Aye, I’ve come to expect no less from most journalists tbh. Most tend to be nothing more than WUMs with a greater vocabulary: This tweet was linked by prominent German Journalist Rafael Honigstein, in reference to Delanys piece as well as a few other little jabs he aimed at the fanbase. Again that’s the fan base this is all aimed at. Now I know this new bunch are pretty abhorrent, but where we’re all these journalists when we were railing against Ashley for 13 years? Where were they as Ashley took a club that had recently played regular European football and cheapened them out and drove them into the dirt to the tune of 2 relegations, basically never getting past the 3rd round of any cups, let the stadium and facilities rot to shit, tried to embarrass any club legend we had while essentially mocking and laughing at the fans. Did they stand up and say that football has gone to shit and he should never be an owner? No, they generally ignored him, or wrote a little piece about it when the fan pressure ramped up at a point or he done something particularly bad so they could cash in on some clicks, before going back to ignoring it. Little to no doubt many will be wanking off about NUFC years down the line if this lot do pile money in and have us in a position like Man City are now, which is what many currently do over Manchester City games.

Didn’t smell that bad, actually.

Food £200 Car £240 Mortgage £500 Cans £1865 Utility £150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

The Raygime has spoken.

I'm sorry like but that's utter fucking tripe from Glendenning. Working for a business owned by Saudis and therefore being paid by them is entirely comparable to supporting a club owned by them. No one who gets paid by the Saudis is in any "moral" position to say shit to us. Fucking losers man. No one who votes for any government that sells weapons to the Saudis is in any moral position to say shit to us either, so there goes half the country. I vaguely suspect new Labour might have done it too in which case that's the other half of the country also.

I guess almost everyone is selectively moral. I suppose the difference is some people accept it’s virtually impossible to live in western society and not be. You can still have misgivings about things and realise there’s fuck all you can do about it. Then on the flip side there’s a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites who are essentially just using this as a front for their displeasure at us having an owner with money to burn. They’re bankrolling the House of Saud and others of equally dubious morals every time they go to the petrol pump

Mind, there's going to be a real dearth of journalism and punditry on the 2022 World Cup when they all boycott it on the same moral grounds. (They will be doing that, right?)

He’s literally the embodiment of everything that is wrong with way Ashley has run the club. An over the hill perma-crock signed because he was free and to try and appease the halfwits who would view him as some sort of returning hero. Beyond being a promising (and clearly talented) youngster who we somehow got an absolute fortune for, he really never achieved much here in the grand scheme of things. However, even that dwarfs what he’s gone on to do since leaving. Factor in that he’s an absolute knacker who’d cause trouble in an empty house and I think it’s safe to say you and I differ somewhat on this matter

Aye, a lot of short memories. It's almost like, to be the best team in the league, you need to have the best players who tend to cost the most money.

I think we have to realise that this is coming from a place of pure jealousy tbh. Most human emotions boil down to something simple in the end and this lot are absolutely fucking gutted that it's us and now whoever it is they support.

That Glendenning really nails his point in the responses: So, essentially he’s perfectly fine with Delaney saying he’s uneasy/having a go at the Saudi Royal family, while he also takes their money since they pay a portion of his salary through part ownership of where he works, but it’s totally impossible for a fan of Newcastle to be uneasy with the new owners but still support the club. Bizarre and completely ridiculous take and logic. Apparently he’s a mackem that works for talkSPORT? Makes sense he’s an utter fucking knacker. He’s getting beyond wound up in the responses as well .

In the old days Liverpool and MUFC used to buy the league as nobody could compete against them financially. They just dont like it now cos the game’s been changed through foreign money

Pretty hilarious reading that with them talking about not being able to compete financially and not wanting to buy victory anyway - given they currently have the largest wage bill in the entire league by quite a distance!

I get that he doesn’t like us but if he genuinely thinks that if the owners spent £600m on the team we’d not have a chance of breaking in the top four he’s off his map. While it’s not worth mentioning how wrong he is I also find it funny that he’s essentially saying we can’t buy our way in but then references Man City as being in that elite, a team who.... well... bought their way in. To be honest if he’s that biased against a side he shouldn’t really be paid to give his opinion on football. I immensely dislike Sunderland but if they were in the PL and suddenly had owners who would spend £600m on their team they’d be a very good football side, to say otherwise is foolish. We aren’t going to go out and buy Mbappe but there’s no reason we can’t go and buy someone like, say, Grealish from a tin pot side headed for relegation. It would be an immediate step up for him, players of that bracket would definitely come. Sure you’d miss out on some that might get an offer from a current CL side and they opt for that but it’s utter drivel for him to act like we are going to sit not being able to buy decent players, we are in the PL after all which according to him in that set of quotes we should be immensely thankful to Ashley for.

Potentially, within 4 weeks, we can sit back and watch wall to wall football as 90 PL games are broadcast live on telly, along with the Champions League and Europa League latter stages, safe in the knowledge that we are no longer owned by Ashley and that Bruce will be on his way out in the Summer.

I do like wrapping my mouth around a juicy bit of loin, now that you mention it...

Not in a Yorkshire fucking accent it’s not.

Imagine missing the boat so much you became a plastic mackem Couldn’t they just invent a “grandad” from Manchester like half of the rest of the country in the 90s?

Norman Hunter 76

Notice how it's the top 6 now? Used to be the top 4 when the PL started then they were forced to include Man City and maybe us when we were good and Liverpool were shit then Tottenham. They're now in denial about Leicester. Also it gets extended whenever Man Utd finish lower. Doesn't enter their tiny brains that having 8 or 10 genuinely good teams would make it a lot more interesting.

I'll be honest I've not clapped fucking once. It's an empty gesture. A total fucking charade. Done so the Tory cunts can feel better about themselves. I did my clapping at the voting booth (Well my postal vote)

It'll be even better when they cancel this season and don't award the title to Liverpool. Then we win in next year

They can play a mash-up of Local Hero and Rule Britannia as he takes to the field for his biannual cameos.

Media told us to be happy with Ashley, insinuation was he was little more than we deserved... Now they’re telling us to be furious with the Saudis....am guessing they’re a lot more than we deserve? 🤔

It’s funny how they’re all suddenly desperately concerned about how our club is run. Cunts, the whole lot of ‘em.

Merson never has a good word to say for us. He’s thick as pig’s shit as well

I thought the general consensus was that Fop was Raoul Moat? Pretty sure he disappeared around the same time Gazza was delivering his bucket of chicken and fishing tackle.

Howay's rants on the mackems are great yet the words 'May' 'Fulwell' and the numbers '19' and '70' rarely, if ever, get mentioned?

His rants are good anyway but he’s taken it up a notch.

That was for the cup game v Bournemouth which we lost. Home game before that was 17k which was a little over the season average of 16k. Typical mackem, cherry picking attendances to suit you 😏

I bet you banged Terry Yorath's tho

Usually by cherry picking some solitary league cup replay attendance that was held on a midweek November night in the pissing rain.

Quite a popular one for showing how ‘fickle’ we are is comparing 80s crowds to later ones without the context of the division or the crowds of other clubs in the 80s

And they’ve got a fairly recent ground (certainly compared to how long we’ve been at SJP) and they were so lacking in identity that they needed a fan poll to agree on a nickname. Not to mention the tens of thousands of fans that came out of the woodwork when Peter Reid was manager. But aye, we’re the ones who didn’t know football existed before the advent of the PL. I’m minded of me cousin who dated a mackem in the late 90s who was a ST holder at the then brand new SoL. I was having a bit crack on with him and I mentioned knowing / being distantly related to Ron Guthrie. He was a young lad so I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t heard of him. However this lad didn’t know they won the cup in ‘73. I shit thee not

fuck them all Fuck them all The long and the short and the tall Fuck all the journos and pundits on Sky Give them the finger and wave them goodbye Repeat to fade.

CANS

They should keep on Brucie as well. Just think of the ensuing odd couple hilarity.

The bitterness is palpable on the SMB at the minute! The hypocritical bastards

Speaking of self righteous this is a conversation I had with someone on football365 if anyone is interested, you probably aren't to be fair Edit. I'm Kevin in the small chance there is any confusion. Sam Graham Although I have no connection with them, I have always had a soft spot for Newcastle United (a romantic love in the 90’s, perhaps more just pity recently). If they become Saudi owned, all of that good will will evaporate. Kevin McLaughlin And which institutions and governments do you think aren't swimming with money from Middle Eastern, Russian, Chinese etc sources. I'm afraid there's no way of getting away from it. The reality is that moral hand wringing in the face of that is sanctimonious. edited Chris Gill No. There is nothing sanctimonious about it. Using a faux intellectual macroeconomic argument as dispensation for immorality is to simply condone it. It is not clever, nor is it right. Kevin McLaughlin "It's not clever, nor is it right." Did you have a wistful glance into a mirror when you were writing that? This conversation reminds me of moral busybodies and supposed activists who get up on their soap box for anything, and when you point out they have an iPhone they're like, we still have to, like, live in the world man. And it is sanctimonious to be so personally moralistic and black and white about it, because you and everyone else is connected to and enjoying some aspect of society that is funded by such monies. Chris Gill Things become less black and white by degrees of separation. The money spent by perpetrators of evil permeates society at all levels, well done captain obvious. So we are all indirectly compliant and therefore morality and bare minimums cease to exist? Nice try. Still not clever. Still not right. Kevin McLaughlin Morality still exists and so does reality. And please tell me exactly how morally culpable Newcastle fans should be for Saudi human rights abuses should they complete the deal to buy the club. I assume you're English, so by virtue of living under that government and taking advantage of the NHS, national parks, roads etc, how culpable are you for British arms sales to the Saudis among other highly morally dubious decisions? The 5G deal with Chinese for another example. Chris Gill Not English. Newcastle supporters who are in favour of their club being owned by Saudi abusers of human rights are indeed culpable. Those who are opposed are not at all sanctimonious. And the British people do, in theory at least, have the democratic opportunity to object to dubious decisions (or endorse them as is their want). Do they have an alternative to national healthcare? Are those who disagree with government decisions morally bound to withdraw from society as protest? The crimes of yesterday do not justify those of tomorrow. And portraying the "taking advantage" of national services and infrastructure as culpability is simply laughable. It is so indirect as to be virtually non-existent. Your arguments are simplistic absurdities. Kevin McLaughlin It's not a case of being in favour of the Saudi's taking over, it's what appears to be happening whether we like it or not. I'm sure if you were to ask the vast majority of Newcastle fans they'd much rather much more altruistic and moral financial backers, but what is it that you think Newcastle fans are morally duty bound to do? Are we supposed to stop supporting the club? Should we be out protesting the Saudi's every day and night? And once again I'll ask you, exactly how morally culpable are Newcastle fans for Saudi human rights abuses, if they continue to support the one club in their city that they've grown up supporting? As for my arguments they are only marginally more absurd than making Newcastle fans morally culpable for the crimes the Saudi's commit, by continuing to support a team that they had no part in selling to them in the first place. And the point I was making with my examples was that there are things that happen which you have no control over but which make you party to immorality. To restate it one more time, by your logic above as long as you don't actively endorse the immoral overlords, and aren't directly taking advantage of their blood money, it's unreasonable to place too much blame on yourself. Chris Gill No. Your point was that having a moral objection to human rights abusing owners was sanctimonious. It isn't. Tw t. Kevin McLaughlin Lol, the name calling has come out. You know what they say about the people who are first to hurl insults in a discussion. And no I did not say or imply that objecting to human rights abuses was sanctimonious. Although it definitely can be dependant on the tone, content and obvious aim of the person who's voicing concerns, i.e sanctimonious moral grandstanding to make themselves feel superior while achieving nothing else. What I said was that it's sanctimonious to be so black and white when stating what you think Newcastle fans should be feeling about it because it's hypocritical, given all our hands are dirty to some extent in a world where morally questionable money is invested in every part of our lives, and most things we buy are made by virtual or actual slave labour. I've repeatedly said it's perfectly reasonable to bring it up, but you at least have to concede that it's not an easy situation for Newcastle fans, nor are we in anyway complicit in Saudi human rights abuses regardless of what happens. And once again you've failed to answer any of my questions.

Here's an article from the Guardian back in 2013 when a Saudi prince bought half of Sheffield United. Not even one mention of human rights. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/sep/03/sheffield-united-saudi-arabia-co-owner