The internet always knows what you want. This week a particular video clip has been popping up in those wormholes filled with adverts at the side of my screen, pressing its nose up against the glass for hours on end like an unhappy cat mewling at the window.
Alan Shearer slams Roman Abramovich over Ukraine statement. There it is again. And here is the text of Alan’s actual slamming: “There’s still no condemnation from Roman or the club about what’s happening in Ukraine.” It is a robust and sincere statement, deserving of serious treatment. So let’s break this down.
Alan Shearer has clearly looked at the facts. And he has decided that the invasion of a neighbouring state, the bombing of civilians, the use of advanced weaponry: all of this is unacceptable.
By extension, for an English football club to be owned by someone complicit in such crimes, well that is unacceptable too. This is non-negotiable. As Alan Shearer rightly states, we cannot have our football clubs tarnished, sullied, or linked with regimes that may be guilty of such crimes.
At which point three possibilities present themselves. Alan Shearer has never heard of the war in Yemen. Alan Shearer is unaware of who Mohammed bin Salman is, or what he does as his main day job. Or third, Alan Shearer is wiling to overlook both of these things because he really likes and cares about Newcastle United.
And sadly at this point the world does start to intrude. It isn’t hard to make the connection here. Newcastle United are owned by a fund that is governed by a state. And that state is also, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, involved in the bloodstained invasion of a neighbouring state.
For the last seven years Saudi Arabia has been waging a war that has led to the deaths of an estimated quarter of a million people, not to mention famine, chaos and societal collapse. The organisation Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the role of Mohammed bin Salman – who, to be clear, manages the fund that runs Newcastle United - for alleged war crimes.
And yet instead of calling out, say, Amanda Staveley for failing to condemn these issues Alan Shearer believes instead that the takeover of Newcastle by the Saudi fund is “a special day” filled not with pain, guilt and chicanery, but with hope. It might be funny. If only it wasn’t so depressing, and so difficult.
This is not an unprovoked, ad hominem attack on Alan Shearer. It is a considered, ad principium attack on the world view he is espousing. I like and admire Alan Shearer, both as a great ex-footballer – among the best in the world in his pomp – and as a pundit too, a role he has grown into from the early awkwardness as a rather taciturn ex-pro, to his current incarnation as an honest, forensic and informative dispenser of truths.
Except, not so much here. That state of cognitive dissonance is just too weird to gloss over. Shall we set it out here, just to be clear? Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the British government because he is “associated with a person who is or has been involved in destabilising Ukraine and undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”
What happens if we take these words and transpose them? Because Newcastle’s ownership is not just “associated with” or distantly tied to the destabilising, undermining and Biblical-scale destruction of it own neighbour Yemen. It is openly and personally engaged in it.
This not a link that needs to be proven or teased out. It is literally the same person overseeing both the football fund and the fighter jets. And given it is now OK, and indeed de rigueur to suggest Chelsea’s trophies are stained by the blood of the citizens of Kyiv and Mariupol, it has been an odd thing to scan the sports websites and slip between these two extremes.
Over here we have the guilt and the shame of Chelsea. And then just below the news from Newcastle about what an excellent job Eddie Howe is doing (which he really is) and what a smart, entirely commendable bit of spending that £80m winter window investment is turning out to be.
This is not whataboutery. It is literally the same thing. Football owner + bloody war = undesirable. This is genuine equivalence. An estimated 10,000 children have been killed or maimed in Yemen. Shouldn’t someone in football also care about it just a little? Alan? Are there, like, any more videos?
There are two things worth saying about this. First, it is just so hard, and so complex. It’s not the fault of the club’s supporters, who are being asked to process and take a view on something that has so many angles, and who only really come to this place for a little light and joy, to savour that connection. This thing has been foisted on all of us. How do we solve it?
Perhaps some basic clarity would help. This is the second thing here. The truth is quite simple. We don’t talk about sanctioning Saudi, or have images of the war in Yemen placed in front of us on a daily basis for one very obvious reason. Saudi is an ally. Whereas Russia is hostile.
Check back and Abramovich was also hit with sanctions because the government suspects he has been “supplying steel to the Russian military which may have been used in the production of tanks”. Let’s take that across too. Newcastle’s fund is owned by an entity that is literally, not potentially, sending tanks to kill civilians. But in this case those arms are supplied by Britain.
To date the UK has supplied the Saudi coalition with £10bn of Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Storm Shadow missiles. Zoom out and it isn’t hard to picture a world where Putin is calling for sanctions against Britain and ordering Abramovich to offload Chelsea to preserve the good name of the Kremlin.
This is the world in which sport finds itself embedded. What has changed is the hard edges of where this thing can lead are now very visible. If Shearer’s paradox teaches us anything it is that you either see it and reject it en bloc; or it is probably best to keep quiet.
