On October 2, 2018, Hatice Cengiz stood outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and waited for her fiancé to return with the documents that would allow the pair to be wed. She had been due to marry Jamal Khashoggi, a veteran Saudi Arabian journalist who once had the ear of the country’s all-powerful Al-Saud royal family but had, in recent years, fallen out of favour.
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Khashoggi’s journalism had been critical of Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s young crown prince. MBS, as he is widely known, embarked on a charm offensive with presidents, prime ministers and international captains of industry promising social and economic reform in the kingdom. One day he was to become Saudi king and was, ultimately, to become the prospective new owner of Newcastle United.
Khashoggi’s writing countered the reformist narrative, highlighting MBS’s growing authoritarianism and the jailing of those that spoke out against his agenda, be they journalists, academics or feminist activists. Fearing for his life, Khashoggi fled to the United States where he wrote for the Washington Post. He later flew to Turkey to attend a conference where he was interviewed by Cengiz, a Turkish graduate student. The two fell in love and quickly decided to get married.
Cengiz waited until nightfall for Khashoggi to return. But he never did. In fact, he was already dead.
Inside the consulate, a 15-man assassination team was waiting. Khashoggi was beaten, strangled, drugged and then dismembered with a bone saw. The Saudi authorities furiously denied they were responsible but the sheer weight of evidence made that position untenable. They would eventually blame the killing on “rogue” Saudi agents, who were closely linked to MBS’s inner circle (five low-ranked members of the hit squad were sentenced to death in a Saudi court, but those closest to MBS were cleared). MBS himself would later take responsibility for Khashoggi’s death, but denied he ordered it, saying it was a “mistake” that should never have happened. The CIA later concluded he most likely did order the killing. MBS has rejected that finding as “flawed”.
Saudi Arabia’s allies, including the US and the UK, sought to quickly put the incident behind them, but struggled to reassert MBS’s credentials as a young reformer focused on weening his country’s economy off its tremendous — but rapidly diminishing — oil wealth.
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Meanwhile, in the three years since her fiancé was brutally murdered by Saudi operatives, Cengiz had grown used to the online abuse as she waited in vain for justice to be fully served. Ever since, she has been hounded by trolls, who she believes are “flies” — state-sanctioned Saudi social media trolls who swarm around any remarks critical of Saudi Arabia.
US intelligence claimed they had uncovered a plot by the Saudi secret service to spy on her while she was in hiding in London, though Saudi Arabia has previously denied using surveillance tools against human rights activists and critics of the kingdom. Cengiz feared for her safety but continued to campaign to bring Khashoggi’s killers, and those who directed them, to book.
The speed at which the West sought to normalise relations with MBS and Saudi Arabia was deeply distasteful to her. But then it was announced that Newcastle United were to be bought by a consortium bankrolled by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). MBS is the chairman of the PIF and sits on the board.
It was a deal too far.
“It has been three years since the murder and nothing has been done. There is no accountability and there is no responsibility,” Cengiz says in an interview with The Athletic, switching between English and Arabic, her voice cracking with emotion. “The world powers, especially in the West, remained silent about the crime and they didn’t hold him (MBS) accountable. And we see the result of the silence. To buy this football club and no one can stop him. He sends a message that he can buy whatever he wants. That is why I felt I had to speak out.”
So Cengiz released a statement on Twitter urging the Premier League to block Newcastle United’s sale. A tirade of abuse followed, a mixture of the “flies” and frustrated Newcastle fans desperate to see an end to the disastrous Mike Ashley era. Other Newcastle fans decried the abuse of a bereaved woman.
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A few days later, her barrister sent a letter to the English Premier League, who were vetting the deal under their owners’ and directors’ test, urging them to reject the takeover. “There should be no place in the Premier League, and English football, for anyone involved in such abhorrent acts,” wrote Rodney Dixon QC. The same pattern of abuse followed.
“I can say that the one incident that has hurt the reputation of Saudi Arabia the most was Jamal’s murder. It has destroyed his (MBS’s) reputation, he’s desperately trying to use these type of deals to repair his image,” she says, explaining as to why she felt she had to speak out about the Newcastle takeover deal.
“Since the murder, many companies and countries don’t want to partner or do business because of the backlash. He wants legitimacy and credibility. Buying a team like Newcastle in the Premier League, in one of the most powerful countries in Europe and the world? You buy legitimacy in the international community. He’s accepted and celebrated for rescuing a struggling team. Everyone then sees everything in a different light.”
Ever since the proposed Newcastle takeover materialised, fronted by the British-born, Dubai-based dealmaker Amanda Staveley and backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, there have been many questions over the proposed £300 million deal. Chief among them was why would the Saudi state want to buy a Premier League football club?
For Cengiz, the reason was clear: to help rebrand Saudi Arabia, especially its crown prince. It wouldn’t be the first country to attempt that.
Since the turn of the 21st century, Gulf monarchies have poured tens of billions of dollars into sport to project a more positive vision of themselves. Dubai, one of the UAE’s seven emirates and its second biggest after the capital Abu Dhabi, and Qatar pioneered sports investments in football, tennis, golf and others, as a way to present a fresh image of themselves.
In 2005, Qatar opened its Aspire Academy — launched with a rare appearance of Pele and Diego Maradona on the same stage — which would become a lynchpin for the next ten years of investments, whether that was winning the bid for the 2022 World Cup or purchasing smaller, feeder clubs across Europe.
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A Qatari sovereign investment vehicle bought French giants PSG and set up a new broadcaster, beIN Sports, that would come to be one of the industry’s biggest players. Its state-owned companies, like Qatar Airways, enjoy plumb advertising space on shirts and pitch-side electronic hoardings. The 2008 global financial crisis saw Abu Dhabi step up its investments in sport, purchasing Manchester City and setting a blueprint of how to invest successfully in an undervalued asset while presenting a carefully curated image of itself that was often at odds with the political realities on the ground.
Staveley, famously, played a role in bringing Sheikh Mansour Al-Nahyan, one of the most powerful figures in the UAE and a brother of the crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed, to Manchester in the first place. And it was a meeting, first reported by the Financial Times, between Staveley and MBS on his super yacht “Serene”, worth almost half a billion dollars, that secured the PIF’s involvement in the Newcastle deal and brought it back on track. But there is little doubt who the true beneficial owner of Newcastle would be.
“Saudi Arabia is a family business and it runs a very tight ship,” said Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World. “Whoever has got their hand on the tiller will be in charge of all of this.”
Others have been more sceptical of the deal, which appears to contradict Saudi Arabia’s event-driven strategy focused on investing in Saudi Arabia. According to Professor Simon Chadwick, from the Emlyon Business School, the Newcastle deal doesn’t fit in with many of the country’s other investments.
“If you’re doing a quick count on the back of a cigarette packet: the F1 Grand Prix in Qiddiya in 2023 and the new high-tech city, Neom, plus other Red Sea projects… I estimate that Saudi Arabia is spending over a trillion dollars on those three initiatives,” he said. “So why would you buy Newcastle?”
The answer to that may lie in something much harder to define. “The Saudi involvement in the Newcastle takeover is about buying a prestige asset for state-branding purposes because the investment does not contribute to the PIF’s mission to assist in economic diversification or job creation in Saudi Arabia,” said Dr Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, as well as the author of Qatar and the Gulf Crisis.
“There is an intangible factor which the Saudis will be looking for in such an investment which is more about soft power projection, changing the image of Saudi Arabia abroad and utilising the mass appeal of football as a way to reach new constituencies.”
Changing the image of a country abroad is difficult at the best of times, but Saudi Arabia’s international reputation, especially when it comes to human rights, is perhaps the hardest to burnish. Ever since the country was founded by Ibn Saud in 1932, Saudi Arabia has followed an ultra-conservative form of Islam called Wahhabism. There have been heavy restrictions on women and a guardianship system that has created a form of gender apartheid.
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There is little democracy or freedom of speech. Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 World Press Freedom Index places Saudi Arabia 170th out of 180 countries. It also routinely executes more people than almost any other country. In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed a record 184 people, some of them children at the time of their convictions, including 37 people executed on a single day. In April 2020, it was announced that Saudi Arabia would stop executing people who had been convicted when they were minors for some crimes. Public flogging was also to end.
Enter Mohammed bin Salman, a prince who was never meant to be king. Ibn Saud had 36 sons and 27 daughters. It is estimated that the family could number 15,000. But the throne only passes through the sons and it took a series of deaths, from sons and crown princes who passed away from poor health, before Ibn Saud’s 25th son, Salman bin Abdulaziz, the former governor of Riyadh, became king in 2015. MBS was King Salman’s sixth, but favourite, son. When Salman bin Abdulaziz became king in 2015, MBS was made deputy crown prince and handed the defence portfolio. In 2017 he was elevated to crown prince, and King Salman’s anointed successor.
MBS embarked on an impressive social reform programme which charmed world leaders, especially Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
He took away powers from the hated Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a religious body whose officers would often harass women for not covering properly or mixing with unmarried men, and other perceived religious infractions.
Cinemas, which had been closed since 1979, were opened up. Concerts were hosted for the first time, featuring Arabic and Western artists. WWE events and heavyweight boxing championship fights were hosted. The Spanish and Italian Super Cups were both held in Saudi Arabia.
The guardianship system was partially dismantled. Women could apply for passports and travel without the permission of male relatives. Women would also be allowed to work in more industries and, finally, be allowed to drive.
One of the biggest barriers to fall was the ban on women attending Saudi football matches.
Unlike the UAE and Qatar, where league crowds can be counted in their dozens, the Saudi Pro League has the highest attendances in the region. The Al-Hilal versus Al-Ittihad derby, the biggest teams from Riyadh and Jeddah, usually attracts more than 50,000 fans. Tifos of MBS and King Salman were displayed before the derby last year.
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It was Jeddah’s other team, Al-Ahli, that hosted women for the first time, against Al-Batin in January 2018. Ahli won 5-0.
In 2019 Al-Hilal won the Asian Champions League and led Brazil’s Flamengo in the semi-final of the Club World Cup before succumbing to two late goals.
“Saudi Arabia wants its top clubs to be in the Deloitte Football Money League top 30,” says Professor Chadwick. Part of that plan has involved privatising the clubs, which at times had appeared to be little more than royal fiefdoms. “The privatisation program was all about improving commercial performance by making them more efficient, about making them more businesslike,” he added.
There would be big economic changes, too. The multi-billion-dollar Vision 2030 project, the cornerstone of MBS’s reform agenda, envisioned a new tech-led Saudi Arabia no longer dependent on oil revenues. Brand new tourism, entertainment, sport and technology industries were built almost from scratch. A futuristic city, Neom, was to be built by the Red Sea. The PIF, as outlined in a 2018 prospectus, would be one of the most important actors in bringing MBS’s vision to life by being “the engine behind economic diversity in the Kingdom”.
“He’s very, very, very popular,” says Ahmad, one longtime Newcastle supporter from Saudi Arabia, when asked by The Athletic this week how Saudis feel about MBS. “Saudi Arabia had a lot of money, but they were not investing this money properly.
“Now he (MBS) has a vision and plan and he is going straight with the plan. And nothing is stopping him. What he did in the last few years has changed a lot for the better. He is viewed very highly by the young generation. For me personally, I respect him a lot.”
That reformist zeal hasn’t stretched to political rights or foreign policy. When MBS was handed the defence ministry in 2015 he embarked on a disastrous military campaign in Yemen after rebel Houthi forces (whom the Saudis accuse of being proxies for their great regional rival, Iran) took the capital of Sanaa, forcing the government into exile.
Alongside his mentor Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of the UAE, and with support and weapons from the US and UK, MBS oversaw a ruinous air campaign and naval blockade that killed thousands of civilians and starved much of the country. The Houthis still remain a powerful force.
In 2017, after MBS was named crown prince, hundreds of prominent Saudis were invited to the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, including possibly Saudi Arabia’s best-known billionaire investor, Prince al-Waleed bin Talal. The hotel had been transformed into a gilded prison. They were held for weeks until many signed over large parts of their fortunes. Seventeen people later claimed they had been tortured, with one person dying in captivity. Saudi Arabia dismissed the allegations of abuse as “absolutely untrue”.
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It was portrayed by MBS and his allies in the West as an “anti-corruption” crackdown designed to repatriate hundreds of billions of dollars back to state coffers. It was a coincidence that many of the people arrested were MBS’s rivals during his rise to power. In the same year, MBS led a coalition including the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt that cut diplomatic and economic ties with neighbours Qatar, which they accused of supporting Iran and Islamist forces in the region. That has also backfired — Qatar has not been isolated economically or politically.
At the same time as loosening social restrictions, Saudi Arabia was jailing and allegedly torturing people who spoke out against the regime, even on issues for which MBS had taken credit. Loujain al-Hathloul, a female activist who had campaigned for the lifting of the ban on women driving, was arrested and, according to her family, tortured and threatened with rape. She was released on probation in February 2021 after almost three years in prison, but she is subject to a five-year travel ban and other restrictions.
But it is the fallout from the killing of Khashoggi that has most threatened MBS’s plans. “Jamal told me that, when he (MBS) first came to power as the deputy crown prince, he thought that reform would come. He was optimistic about the future in some ways,” recalls Cengiz. “He preferred to stay in his country and not to leave. He was proud to be Saudi. He wanted to help his country. He was optimistic.”
But over the months and years, under sustained online attack, it was clear he had to leave the country. “He often told me he always wished he was wrong. He hoped this would all change and the analysis would not be true,” Cengiz says. “He paid the ultimate price for it. He never thought they could go this far.”
Cengiz will likely spend the foreseeable future looking over her shoulder. In June 2019, a report by Agnes Callamard, a human rights specialist who serves as an independent expert on extrajudicial killings for the UN, released a report that stated “there is credible evidence warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials’ individual liability, including the crown prince’s”. The government rejects the report and denies the crown prince was involved in the killing.
As the New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard wrote in his new book MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman: “Regardless of MBS’s role in the murder, he fostered an environment in which 15 government agents and a number of Saudi diplomats believed that butchering a non-violent writer inside a consulate was the appropriate response to some newspaper columns. It’s hard to believe he had no idea what they were planning.”
Yet the allegations of MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s killing is not the only thing that has been brought to the attention of the Premier League. PIF’s proposed takeover of Newcastle received particular scrutiny over the Saudi state’s alleged involvement — which it denied — in the pirating of football content from Qatari broadcaster beIN, one of the sub-plots from the ongoing Gulf blockade. Frustrated with the process, the consortium pulled out of the deal in July 2020.
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However the Saudi Arabia-financed consortium’s bid for Newcastle is now back on following the reversal today of a ban on beIN Sport in the Gulf nation.
Issues were also flagged surrounding perceived conflicts of interest. Sheffield United are owned by Prince Abdullah bin Musaad. Like MBS, Prince Abdullah is also a grandson of Ibn Saud, albeit with less political power. “The Ritz Carlton affair doesn’t just demonstrate his (MBS’s) absolute control over the Al-Saud family and other members of the elite,” said Nicholas McGeehan, director of Fair/Square, a human rights NGO. “It also shows his willingness and capacity to exercise that power.”
For Cengiz, the sale wouldn’t just allow MBS to present a different face to the world. It would fly in the face of the values that the West claims to hold dear.
“People will not listen to places like UK and US because they are willing to look the other way when people have a lot of power, a lot of wealth and a lot of oil,” she says. “They look the other way when you want to sell them weapons.”
She doesn’t blame Newcastle fans for questioning her intervention. She believes them to be victims, pawns in a wider political battle. “We have to stop it,” says Cengiz, whose fiancé’s remains have never been found. “It’s not about me, but about us. It is about all the people under these repressed regimes.”
(Top photo: Mohammed bin Salman. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AFP via Getty Images)