Newcastle takeover: Why BeIN digital piracy battle was always the key
Newcastle United fans celebrate at St James' Park following the announcement that The Saudi-led takeover of Newcastle has been approved. Picture date: Thursday October 7, 2021. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)
By Matt Slater 5h ago 59
Snow is falling and children are running under an archway into a wintry town square, where there is a giant polar bear, a snowman, fairground rides and wooden huts selling gingerbread men.
One of the children, a lad in jeans and a winter coat, starts a snowball fight and his parents join in but, hold on, who is that guy throwing snowballs? He looks familiar… oh, he’s gone.
Now we move to a high-end jewellery store and someone is admiring a watch. Yes, it is him… nope, he’s vanished. We go outside and the boy and his parents are looking at expensive cars now. And there he is again… no, disappeared.
The same thing happens in the next scene, which is set in a futuristic playground called Combat Field, and then again in a fancy restaurant. No matter, there are rollercoasters to ride and safaris to enjoy. The story returns to another public space but the snow has gone and Lionel Messi — it was him — is standing in front of the family and this time they can all see him.
As fairy tales go, it is a cracker but here is the kicker: this is Riyadh, not Budapest, Cologne or Salzburg, and this promotional video, which has been viewed 22.5 million times since Monday, is selling something called Riyadh Season, a two-month festival of events expected to attract 20 million visitors to the Saudi Arabian capital.
Until this week, it was the flashiest entertainment investment the kingdom has made since the pandemic put the brakes on attempts to rebrand Saudi as a family-friendly fun factory — a tough sell for a country that has attracted headlines for getting involved in a civil war, its human rights record, murdering a journalist and falling out with its neighbour Qatar.
But where there is a will — and the world’s second-largest oil reserves — there is a way and events have galloped ahead somewhat. You could even say they have snowballed.
The first hint of the coming avalanche came last month from Paris Saint-Germain, another flashy entertainment investment, this time made by Qatar, and Messi’s new employers.
After skipping a year because of COVID-19, the French club will be resuming a new tradition in January — a trip to Qatar’s capital Doha, where they will spend a few days training in the sunshine and starring in their owner’s promotional videos. So far, so new-normal.
But before they return to France, Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and company will be stopping in Riyadh for a friendly against a side made up of players from the two best Saudi clubs, Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr.
This is the final chapter of the Riyadh Season fairy tale. After Messi steps out of the giant LED billboard, he leads the boy to PSG’s dressing room where Mbappe asks the youngster if he is “Ready?” Now wearing PSG kit, the boy joins Mbappe, Messi, Neymar, Angel Di Maria, Marquinhos and Sergio Ramos as they walk out for their meeting with the Saudi all-stars. The match will take place almost a year after the kingdom called off its three-and-a-half-year blockade of Qatar, its small but noisy neighbour.
The full implications of this bout of ping-pong diplomacy became apparent on Wednesday, when another fairy tale began.
It started at lunchtime in the UK when journalists heard that Saudi Arabia was lifting its ban on Qatari broadcaster beIN Sports, settling its legal disputes with Qatar and agreeing to cooperate in the battle against digital piracy.
This was all of beIN’s Christmases at once, as they have spent more than four years on the front line of the Qatari-Saudi squabble.
That row started in June 2017 when Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut ties with their Gulf neighbour. Borders were closed, air space denied, trade shut down and the world’s most sophisticated digital piracy operation sprung up in Riyadh and started to steal beIN’s signal.
Repackaged as beoutQ — clever, innit? — this operation stole the premium sports rights that beIN had bought for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from the likes of FIFA, Formula One and the Premier League. To make matters worse, the Saudi authorities banned beIN on trumped-up charges, impounded the company’s equipment and then ignored all attempts by the holders of these rights to stop the piracy-fest.
Deprived of its largest market, beIN shed half its workforce and began ripping up contracts. It did not ditch the Premier League, though, partly because English football is very popular across the MENA territory and partly because the league always goes to bat, legally-speaking, for its broadcast partners.
Some will say this is because the Premier League believes in the rule of law; others will say it is because it knows what side its bread is buttered.
Anyway, the Premier League spent most of 2018 and 2019 unsuccessfully trying to get Saudi Arabia to shut down beoutQ, while the Qatari government complained to the World Trade Organisation and started an investment arbitration case against Saudi Arabia for $1 billion in lost earnings.
The rest of us? Meh. We ignored it. It was between these Arab brothers and it would sort itself out eventually. Until April last year, that is.
If you are wondering why I have written 900 words here before a first mention of Newcastle United, it is because Saudi Arabia’s desire to buy Newcastle United must be seen in context.
This takeover is just a chapter in a much bigger story…
https://theathletic.com/2874292/2021/10 ... urce=ukdfbSaudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) wants a European football club because he is trying to diversify the Saudi economy away from fossil fuels. Sport, entertainment, tourism and overseas investments will play a big part in this effort and he also wants to encourage his people to be more physically active.
But there is another reason for his interest in Newcastle United, the best available option for a state-sponsored assault on European football’s established elite: FOMO. He has watched the good vibes flow towards Abu Dhabi and Doha, thanks to their sporting endeavours with Manchester City and PSG and, quite frankly, he wants one, too.
Some academics describe this as sportswashing, a not particularly subtle way of misdirecting critical eyes by showing people something positive — buying a sports project and fixing it up also guarantees a lot of devotion.
That takes us back 18 months to the revelation that Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the sovereign wealth fund MBS is using as the clearing account for his Vision 2030 investments, was behind a bid for Newcastle.
To avoid raking over too many coals here, this was going to be a tricky deal to close, as the same Saudi state that had been stealing Premier League intellectual property (IP) for nearly three years was now trying to buy a Premier League shareholder. And so it proved.
Forget the fairy tales you have heard about corrupt Premier League bosses or lobbying from “Big Six” clubs — you have been misled by supporters of the Saudi-led consortium, as they wanted to close this deal last year, without acknowledging the issue of PIF = Saudi state = clear fail of the league’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test (ODT).
That test specifically asks if any prospective owner or director has provided “false, misleading or inaccurate information” in their dealings with the league, and involvement in digital piracy is spelt out as a no-no in the league handbook’s appendices.
The only surprise here is that some people are still surprised this was the reason why no representative of the Saudi state wanted to subject themselves to the ODT.
Months were wasted, while cans worldwide cooled, trying to pressure the league into ignoring its own rules and economic interests. A cynic might say it might have ignored the former but there was no way it was giving up the latter.
That summer, a damning report by World Trade Organisation confirmed what beIN and the Premier League already knew: the Saudi state had breached global rules on intellectual property by facilitating, promoting and failing to prosecute beoutQ. Two years before, the International Court of Justice had ruled in favour of Qatari citizens who were trapped abroad when the borders closed in 2017. And a month after the WTO ruling, Qatar Airways won another victory against the blockading countries in its quest for damages.
So, with the Premier League adamant that somebody from the Saudi government was going to have to take its test — and fail it, unless beIN’s grievances were resolved — PIF walked away. The league offered to test its belief that PIF = KSA at an independent arbitration panel but PIF said “no thanks”. After all, it did not amass assets worth more than £350 billion by making bad bets.
And that appeared to be that. Other interested parties kicked the tyres at St James’ Park but were rebuffed by club owner Mike Ashley, while Saudi was rumoured to be looking elsewhere: Marseille, Miami, Manchester United, Maidstone…OK, not them. But there was movement.
Donald Trump, who had egged on Saudi in 2017 by supporting its claims that Qatar sponsors terrorism, lost power in the United States. With a new, more traditional US president coming in, MBS read the room and decided it was time to end the feud. Saudi’s various defeats at international institutions had also finally persuaded him that sometimes you cannot just buy your way out of trouble.
On January 4, Kuwait and the US brokered a peace deal and Saudi re-opened its border. The following day, Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani arrived in Saudi for a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting and the deal was signed.
There were flickers of life in Newcastle, too. The club’s fanbase, desperate for something to get excited about after 14 years of loveless union with Ashley, never stopped believing and maintained pressure on the Premier League, the UK government, the media and anyone else they thought could unblock the takeover.
Ashley, eager to sell to the first bidders who had met his asking price and very clearly had the readies, was another who kept the faith. He belatedly took up the Premier League’s offer of arbitration on the matter of separation between PIF and Saudi state, and then upped the ante by taking the league to a Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT).
Did they do the trick? No, not really. Unhappy about the prospect of having to explain its rulebook in public, the Premier League fought the CAT case every step of the way, arguing it was unnecessary if it had already agreed to an arbitration hearing in January 2022. The tribunal’s decision on that question is just another of the many issues that until recently seemed important but is now academic.
Because the real issues were being resolved elsewhere: beIN was back in business in Saudi Arabia and that means the Premier League is back in business in Saudi Arabia.
As Wednesday became Thursday and media started getting ETAs for confirmation that the takeover has finally, remarkably, gone through, a narrative emerged that the real breakthrough is the Premier League’s lawyers have obtained legally-binding commitments from Saudi Arabia that the state will not meddle in Newcastle United’s affairs.
PIF, the wealth fund that is 1) chaired by MBS, 2) run by a board packed with government ministers and 3) is the main source of funds for this absolute monarchy’s plan for the future, is just any other investment fund, apparently.
It’s another fairy tale. One the league must tell itself to avoid awkward questions about the fact digital piracy is an ODT fail but a patchy human-rights record is not, and neither is the growing pile of evidence that links MBS to the plot to kill and butcher dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The facts are clear: The Saudi state was involved in the stealing of Premier League IP — and the league knew this because it had helped Qatar prove its WTO case against the Saudi state — and its sovereign wealth fund was unable to take the ODT because it knew it would fail. But then it stopped stealing Premier League IP and the ODT issue disappeared.
There is a scene in the second part of The Godfather trilogy where court proceedings that were going very badly against Michael Corleone take a shocking turn for the better.
A witness who had been testifying against mafia boss Corleone suddenly changes his tune, leaving the case in tatters. The witness does so because he sees his brother, newly-arrived in the US from Italy, enter the court and he is instantly reminded of the old country’s code of honour. This brother says nothing. His presence in the room is enough.
With the witness now singing a different tune, the courtroom erupts and Corleone is triumphant. His wife Kay, however, is suspicious about what she had just witnessed and asks Michael what just happened.
“It was between the brothers,” he says.
Saudi Arabia wanted Newcastle United because Abu Dhabi and Qatar already have football clubs in City and PSG.
And then it was stopped from buying Newcastle United because it fell out with Qatar and used football as a weapon in that fight.
It is now being allowed to buy Newcastle as it has called off that fight.
It really is that simple.
