EPL TALK: Oil-rich clubs are taking control, it's silly to pretend otherwise

SO APART from Manchester City positioning themselves for a fifth English Premier League title in six years, Newcastle United reaching the top four and Qatar preparing for a World Cup that nobody wants, what have the oligarchs ever done for us?

No, don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. The PR troops are prepared, armed with buckets of whitewash and ready to shame all dissenters into silence with one word, deployed deliberately, to enrage the tofu-eating "wokerati".

Xenophobia.

Is the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund fuelling the Magpies’ revival?

Xenophobia!

Isn’t the Abu Dhabi ownership of Manchester City worthy of discussion?

Xenophobia!

Who thinks the World Cup should not be played inside stadiums built by exploited – and occasionally dead – foreign workers?

Xenophobia!

It’s enough to make the average, bleeding-heart liberal choke on one’s kale and hold back. Say nothing. Allow the new status quo to replace the old one of Putin-supporting billionaires, American hedge funds and a couple of Cockney porn barons. Previous club owners were hardly patrons of Amnesty International, so why the lazy, prejudiced accusations of repugnant inequality now?

Foreign ownership is nothing new. Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and even Leicester City all flourished with overseas cash injections.

But they were never state-owned clubs with bottomless pits of petrodollars. They were not instruments in a complicated, regional geopolitical battle being staged a continent away.

Eddie Howe may not be a tool for Saudi Arabia’s latest soft power experiment, but he certainly sounds like one when he points out that Newcastle’s goalscorers in their outstanding 2-1 win at Tottenham – Callum Wilson and Miguel Almiron – were already at the club before the cash flowed from the Middle East.

Nice try, Eddie, but the goals – and the subsequent victory – were created and protected by a line-up refreshed for around £200 million, so cheekily suggesting that the Magpies owe it all to Wilson and Almiron is like a property agent claiming that a sale of a Sentosa Cove penthouse was down to a pair of old curtains.

Of course, the money must still be spent wisely. Manchester City, to use the most obvious example, achieved a negligible net spend in the summer, despite buying Erling Haaland, thanks to the sales of Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko, which might be generously described as a novel attempt to preserve the myth of economic equality.

But it’s a facile argument. Look at those transfers again. Has any other club ever been in the privileged position of writing off the combined talents of Sterling, Jesus and Zinchenko? At Arsenal, Jesus is making the Gunners look like title contenders. At City, he was making up the numbers. The trio could be moved on because City’s supply line is inexhaustible.

Indeed the recent Manchester derby was a timely example of City’s dominance. The 6-3 scoreline was routine. It was neither a freakish result nor an off day for Manchester United, just a fair representation of the gulf between clubs owned by Gulf States and the rest, where individual strikers outscore entire teams. This is the real closed shop now.

And we are expected to keep up the pretence, whooping and applauding in all the right places, like watching a painfully obvious magic show for kids. We must continue to believe in the illusion that Pep Guardiola and Eddie Howe really are pulling a rabbit out of the hat every week, rather than acknowledge the unpalatable reality. They play with the biggest box of tricks.

Taboo to even talk about financial divide?

Just look at the divide between the top two sides. Arsenal recently struggled to put together a squad of 16 for their Europa League tie against PSV Eindhoven. City often leave a £100 million signing on the bench.

To even hint at such financial inequity, however, is to run the risk of being branded a xenophobe, or of being called a Big Six loyalist, or of having a disturbing obsession with Jack Grealish.

Jurgen Klopp tried it. And before you could say, “let’s have a balanced discussion about the foreign policy objectives of EPL club ownership", the PR apologists for the state-owned clubs appeared on the horizon, buckets of whitewash at the ready, howling in protest.

Apparently, Klopp didn’t think of the children. Rather than read Amnesty International reports on oppression, persecution and execution, Klopp should’ve focused on Whitney Houston lyrics, like the virtuous Howe, who believes that children are our future. Klopp should teach them well and let them lead the way, according to Howe, which the younglings cannot do if they witness the terror of Klopp shouting at a linesman.

Never mind the executions of 81 people in a single day, touchline banter is the real horror.

And still, Howe is being wheeled out, the acceptable, cherubic face of a brutal regime, to justify the questionable decisions of his employers, who promised no state intervention from Saudi Arabia, as Newcastle prepare for a winter training trip … to Saudi Arabia.

According to Howe, the trip is purely for “football reasons”, as the players will benefit from warm weather training and, presumably, no one on his staff has ever heard of Portugal.

Of course, the Magpies are off to Riyadh because the World Cup circus is off to Qatar, a tiny country with little interest in sportswashing, or football for that matter, just an incentive to acquire as much military hardware and goodwill as possible from the international community. Qatar 2022 is not really about football and never was, but we must pretend otherwise.

It’s a familiar theme.

Manchester City and Newcastle United are the first English clubs to be funded by foreign states and have entrenched financial advantages, but we must pretend otherwise. We must uphold the charade, that it’s really down to Guardiola’s scouts unearthing a gem called Haaland and Howe’s uncanny ability to blend £200m-worth of talent.

Foreign states are not just determining the major players of the EPL season, but the very shape of the competition itself, bending its fixture list to their World Cup will. Their omnipotence feels almost complete.

And it’s getting increasingly silly to pretend otherwise.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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