Speaking recently on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, Jonathan Wilson claimed that Mohammad Bin Salman wouldn’t have been a good owner of Newcastle United, and also that the club wouldn’t have been able to spend a great deal in the transfer market due to Financial Fair Play (FFP).
It was announced last week that the mooted £300 million takeover of Newcastle United was dead in the water after the prospective new owners – a Saudi Arabian-backed consortium – pulled out of the deal due to the length of time it had taken for the Premier League to make a decision on the matter.
However, Jonathan Wilson stated on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast that he believes Newcastle have actually ‘dodged a bullet’ because Mohammad Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, seems to be ‘a pretty clumsy leader’ who wouldn’t have been ‘adept at running a football club’.
He said: “I actually also think they’ve dodged a bullet, in that I don’t think Mohammad Bin Salman would have been a particularly good owner. I don’t think anything he’s ever done on the world stage suggests that he or the people that he employs are particularly capable. He seems, to me, a pretty clumsy leader.
“Even if you could leave the moral stuff aside, I don’t think he would have been adept at running a football club. And actually, I think the talk about hundreds of millions of pounds being available for transfers wouldn’t have happened anyway, because FFP, although it is still pretty toothless, even those gums can bite slightly. You can’t just go out and spend a billion pounds – people would actually raise a stink about that.”
TIF Thoughts…
As such, it would certainly appear as if Wilson believes that Newcastle have indeed dodged a bullet with the takeover not going through, primarily because he believes Mohammad Bin Salman would not have been ‘adept’ at running the club if the takeover deal had been successful, as well as the fact that the club wouldn’t actually have had ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ to spend in the transfer market – as had been touted – because of Financial Fair Play regulations.
Do you believe that Mohammad Bin Salman would have been a good Newcastle owner?
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