By Philip Thornton 31st July 2023
Like most things, we can lay the blame for the Saudi’s sports-washing agenda firmly at the door of British imperialists.
Back in the First World War, Britain fomented Arab nationalism in order to undermine the Turks who had sided with the Germans. The newly confederated Kingdom of Saudi Arabia quickly established itself as the dominant force on the Arabian peninsula and when oil was discovered in the 30s found itself in a position of economic and military importance that it was courted by the very nations that once despised their race and religion.
The double standards and hypocrisy of the west demonstrated in Israel and Yemen, Syria and Ukraine only exposes the nauseating lies of ‘war to protect democratic freedoms’.
Yeah! As long as there are billions in arms contracts and fossil fuels to export them the noble NATO freedom fighters are prepared to look the other way.
The Saudis can murder, torture, slaughter at will but those evil bag men in the Stick Exchanges of London and New York can wash that money clean and award themselves even bigger bonuses and share dividends.
Footballers are hardly the most intelligent or moral of people. Are the players signing for Saudi clubs now betraying say LGBT fans? They don’t really care if there’s £700k a week on offer and it’s still those at the end of their careers going there as they did in the US and China.
If Mbappe signed and gave up Champions League football then maybe there’d be more of an outcry but despite the creeping colonisation of international sport by oil rich sheikhs and assorted oligarchs and franchise fuckwits there’s still a slim sliver of hope that fan power can stave off total corruption.
FIFA, EUFA, tge FA/SFA are all tarnished. They exist only to maximise their own salaries/backhanders and exploit the game as a global entertainment brand.
Fan power can still make a difference. Celtic fans have taken up the Palestinian cause and rightly won lots of friends eager to dismantle the apartheid of Zionism. Liverpool fans let their republican sympathies show at Wembley and became once again the enemy within of our free speech loving media.
I don’t care if Man United are taken over by an oil- rich Arab or a strike busting Mancunian, both are as rotten as each other.
The game WILL implode at some point. The weight of obscene wages, corrupt administration and incompetent ownership will bring it down. The sooner, the better.
Holywell Street 
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