Would you swap Bloom for sportswashing if it meant titles for Brighton?

The rich keep getting richer. Newcastle United are the latest Premier League outfit to be turned from football club to giant sportswashing brand via the arrival of billions upon billions of money from Saudi Arabia.

Money talks in football. It always has. With the honourable exception of Leicester City, every English champion going back to probably The Leeds United in 1992 won the title because they were rich. Even Blackburn Rovers.

Because Blackburn are an unfashionable club, people romanticise about Kenny Dalglish leading Alan Shearer, Chris Sutton and co to the title in 1995 as being some sort of underdog story.

In reality, it was because Jack Walker had lots of money and decided he wanted to spend his vast fortune on his hometown football club.

The days of a Walker and a Blackburn happening again are further away now than they have ever been. Only six of the current 20 Premier League clubs remain in the hands of English owners.

And how can any of those English owners compete with crown princes and sheikhs from oil rich countries or Russian oligarchs? The answer is they cannot.

Once every 20 years, you might get a freak title winner like Leicester in 2016. An unlikely side will win the FA Cup from time to time, such as Portsmouth and Wigan Athletic.

It is noteworthy though that both were in the third tier of English football within three years of their victory at Wembley and suffering financial ruin inside a decade.

There is no escaping the fact that those clubs whose foreign wealth far outstrips the rest of the top flight are the ones competing for silverware every year.

Newcastle’s new owners are rich. Very rich in fact. They have 10 times the wealth of Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi backers.

We have all seen how many trophies and titles those petrodollars have piled up in the corridors of the Etihad Stadium since Sheikh Mansour arrived. What the Toon Army could do with even larger backing is frightening.

Nobody knows how rich Tony Bloom is, but it is a pretty fair assumption to suggest that his bank account does not possess as many zeros as Mohamed bin Salman, Sheikh Mansour or Roman Abrahmovic.

The only way then that Brighton or another unfashionable club of the Albion’s ilk can come to challenge consistently in the 21st century is if they are taken over by owners who possess a fortune comparable to the GDP of an actual country. For Manchester City and now Newcastle, that is literally the case.

And in almost every example, the only way such wealth will arrive is by said unfashionable club becoming a sportswashing empire. Is that a price worth paying?

The takeover of Newcastle has been so controversial not because people do not want to see the Toon succeed, but because of what the real purpose of it.

A new club challenging the status quo and upsetting the apple cart breathes new life into English football. Newcastle have always been a sleeping giant, a City where everyone lives and breathes the Toon.

Over 50,000 people would still turn out at St James’ Park every week, even in the Championship and even when Mike Ashley was using the club as a vehicle for his Sports Direct brand and nothing else.

No club deserves success, but you would not begrudge seeing Newcastle win something for the first time since rationing just to see how much it meant on Tyneside.

That is not though why Saudi Arabia have bought the club. They have invested because they see football as it means for portraying a more positive image of Saudi Arabia, compared to its current reputation of a lack of rights for women, homosexuality being illegal and the murder and dismemberment of journalist critical of the ruling regime.

As the unelected deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a member of the Royal Family of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mansour bought City in 2008 for exactly the same reason.

Now when you hear the words Abu Dhabi, what is your first thought? Manchester City probably, the beautiful football of Pep Guardiola, back-to-back Premier League titles, the magic of Kevin De Bruyne.

City desperately want that Champions League win because being European Champions adds more gravitas to Abu Dhabi by association.

You are meant to think of football so that you do not think of slavery, forced disappearances, no freedom of press or the lack of human rights in the UAE, a country which Amnesty International described as “committing crimes against its own people”.

One example of the ultimate hypocrisy is City supporting Manchester Pride and the rainbow laces campaign. At the same time, Sheikh Mansour is part of a government who criminalises homosexuality.

Punishments for being LGBTQ+ include jail time, flogging, fines, deportation, chemical castration, forced psychological treatments, beatings, forced hormone injections, torture and ultimately, death.

Saudi Arabia have invested in Newcastle United because they believe that if they turn the Toon into the best football team in Europe playing the best football, then it will wash over some of their most questionable actions and policies.

It has worked to a degree for City, but as the outcry over the Newcastle takeover has shown, Saudi Arabia will need to do something seriously impressive to make people forget the luring of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggito the Turkish embassy and his subsequent killing for being critical of the regime.

The takeover has also shown where the Premier League’s priorities lie. They refused to rubber stamp Saudi investment in Newcastle for over a year because of Saudi Arabia banning beIn from broadcasting in the county, the Qatari television company with the rights to show English top flight football in the region.

That mean that piracy of Premier League games was ripe in the kingdom. As soon as Saudi Arabia and beIn came to an arrangement, the Premier League welcomed Saudi investment with open arms.

The message from English football could not be clearer – not showing matches through an approved broadcaster is a crime serious enough to preclude you from owning a club. Murdering critics and trampling over human rights however is fine.

Of course, the Premier League and Newcastle are not the only vehicle for Saudi sportswashing. They now have their own Formula One Grand Prix.

Anthony Joshua fought Andy Ruiz Jr there in 2019. There had even been talk of hosting Joshua v Tyson Fury in the kingdom, one of the biggest bouts in British boxing history packed off to Saudi Arabia because money talks.

And sport is not the only way that Saudi Arabia try and spread their influence. Their investment fund have shares in Disney, Facebook, Uber and Boeing among others. Sports is only a small piece of the propaganda pie.

None of what goes on in Saudi Arabia is the fault of Newcastle fans, either. English football supporters have little say in who runs their club.

Owners cannot be cherry picked based on the opinions of fans and those who follow the Toon Army should not be criticised because Saudi Arabia have decided that Newcastle represents the perfect mechanism for their sportswashing.

You would hope though that they feel a little uncomfortable about whose money is now backing them and the purpose of it, rather than just burying their heads in the sands and awaiting that first Premier League trophy. Mike Ashley was not a great owner, but at least he never ordered the assassination of his critics.

Which brings us nicely onto the purpose of all this. Whilst Bloom’s ambitions to establish the Albion as a top 10 Premier League club are admirable, there seems little chance of a Team Like Brighton ever competing regularly to become Premier League champions without Bloom selling to a multi-billionaire.

Said billionaire would have their own motives for buying the Albion and they sure as hell would not revolve solely around watching Haydon Roberts lift the Champions League trophy as Seagulls skipper in seven or eight years time.

It poses an interesting dilemma. Would you be happy with Brighton becoming a sportswashing empire for a nation trying to make people forget about their questionable human rights record if it meant seeing the Albion win trophies at the pinnacle of the English game?

For me, it’s a no brainer. Bloom might not be the richest owner in the league by any stretch of the imagination, but he is the best – and not just because he has pumped in over £300 million of his own money to turn the Albion from League One strugglers to Premier League club playing at a beautiful stadium.

There is no ulterior motive. Bloom invests in Brighton & Hove Albion because he wants to see the club succeed. That is what sports ownership should be about.

94.5 percent of Brighton fans think he does an excellent job according to a recent survey by SkyBet. Only Leicester’s Aiyawatt ‘Top’ Srivaddhanaprabha had a higher approval rating. That 5.5 percent do not think Bloom is great proves that crack is one hell of a drug.

So what if Lewis Dunk, Roberts or whoever follows as Albion captain never lifts a piece of silverware in my lifetime?

Much rather that than see Brighton as a giant advertising billboard for a nation to divert attention from using slavery, locking up the LGBTQ+ community and committing human rights abuses against its own people.

Selling to foreign owners would be selling the soul of the Albion and everything that makes it the club it is. Newcastle fans might be singing about getting their club back, even though their club is now just a vehicle for hiding the horrors of Saudi Arabia.

City fans might love being a living, breathing advertisement for Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mansour smiling in the director’s box at the same time as the UAE commits crimes against its own people.

But not Brighton. Give me mid table mediocrity with the odd stab at Europe with Bloom at the helm over winning titles for autocrats any day of the week. The rich might keep getting richer, but that does not mean they are better off.