One afternoon last October, thousands of fans began gathering outside St. James’ Park, the 130-year-old home of the English soccer club Newcastle United, to celebrate a new beginning. Some sported the club’s traditional black-and-white striped jerseys. Others toted cases of booze. There was no match that day, but that only improved the mood. In seven games that season, the team had yet to record a win. Newcastle, once one of the best sides in England, had endured years of mediocrity under the ownership of a miserly local sporting-goods magnate. Magpies supporters resorted to stockpiling cans of beer for the day their fortunes changed. That day had come at last.
The key acquisition who would turn Newcastle around wasn’t a new midfielder or a manager; he was a murderer. The club had been sold for $409 million to an investment group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, an almost endless reserve of cash controlled by Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto head of state. In 2018, according to the US government, MBS had personally approved an operation to assassinate a Washington Post journalist. But as the news of the takeover sank in, the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw was the last thing on the minds of these supporters. To some, MBS seemed to be a point in favor of the deal. Outside the stadium and on social media, fans added a new flourish to the team’s uniform—they donned red and white head coverings, in imitation of the Saudi ruler. “We’re richer than you,” the crowd sang. One supporter wore an MBS mask.
The fans in Newcastle were unsubtle, but hardly unique. Soccer is undergoing a financial and geopolitical shake-up that has ushered in a gilded age of excess, dirty money, and inequality. Fueled by Wall Street and petrostates, the sport is more profitable than ever. But the consequences of consolidation and unchecked money have become clearer, too. The story of how teams like Newcastle win is also about what fans, institutions, and governments lose to get there. To watch the Premier League on Saturdays, or the World Cup this November, is to experience a crash course in capitalism and power today.
Just as the Moneyball era produced a generation of baseball fans who talked like Nate Silver, soccer’s age of decadence has turned fans into current-affairs obsessives. Sovereign wealth funds, sanctions, and debt seep into Saturday-morning chatter with the same frequency as counter-pressing or expected goals. The forces shaping modern soccer into something bigger, better, and more morally bankrupt than ever are the same ones that have blown up everything else. Following the sport is an education in oligarchs, oil, corruption, media, partisanship, politics, and the financialization of everything. You don’t even have to like soccer to learn from it—because in a lot of ways, the story of the sport’s last two decades hasn’t been about soccer at all.
Soccer has always been a mirror of the larger world, but the image it’s reflecting back is decidedly new. In 2004, Franklin Foer published . It was a canonical text for Americans who took an interest in European soccer in the early 2000s, coinciding with the US women’s World Cup victory and the men’s unlikely run to the quarterfinals; the movie ; the actual David Beckham; and the emergence of satellite
