COUNTRY CLUBS

ON 4 OCTOBER, AS CHAMPIONS LEAGUE football returned to St James’s Park, there was a strange subtext to the fixture. For the visitors were Paris St Germain. At a press conference preceding the game, journalists asked if the identity of Newcastle United’s opponents brought an extra edge to what was already a big occasion. This “edge” was not about Anglo-French rivalry, even though it was in the north-east of England during the Napoleonic Wars that, according to legend, residents hanged a shipwrecked monkey, believing him to be a spy. Nor was it about any history of bad blood between the two teams. No, it was about the identity of the clubs’ owners. Newcastle, owned by Saudi Arabia, were playing PSG, owned by Qatar. Some therefore asked whether the game might…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2023

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