Southampton 1 - Newcastle 4, and the bloat of it all

There were ten televised Premier League matches this past weekend. One of them was played on Sunday afternoon, when Southampton hosted Newcastle at St. Mary's Stadium. It was not the marquee matchup of the weekend, nor the highest-scoring match or one featuring, really, anyone close to a global star. Instead, it was the chaff that waves alongside the wheat of the league, the kind of game that few people outside of the two fanbases involved care is being played. A not-insignificant percentage of those who watched probably caught one of Theo Walcott's stuttering runs out of the corner of their eye at an airport bar, say, or spread across a wall of twenty flatscreens at a Best Buy and stuck around to watch for a moment or two until their plane was called. There was no reason to expect that those ninety minutes of routine football would linger long in the memory. And yet they do.

First, the small matter of the football itself. Newcastle moved gracefully past Southampton, dispatching them with an ease and nonchalance casual enough to border on the languid. Miguel Almiron has transformed into a dazzling player, his feet invisible as they cruelly offer then retract the ball from onrushing defenders, and whenever he finds himself crammed in a corner, he can turn for support to players like Kieran Trippier and Bruno Guimarães, both of whom can make a straightfaced claim of world-class status. This is a squad in the midst of a slow but irrepressible upheaval, every three months its weakest points identified and diagnosed with thirty million pound cures. The result is fluidity and urgency; urgency in the speed with which Newcastle counterattacked and suppressed incipient Southampton ripostes, and more hauntingly, urgency in the eyes of Newcastle players who know that their Brazilian replacement is no more than a single call from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund away. These are good players playing for a very good manager, the cherubic, baby-blonde Eddie Howe, but they sit so high in the table in no small part because of the existential dread that hangs so low.

Southampton, on the other hand, are mediocrity in motion. There have been three Premier League matches decided by a 9-0 margin since October 2019; Southampton were humiliated in two of them. They possess both a place in the relegation zone and a thoroughly middling collection of players; a club not quite big enough to retain its best talents when the top clubs come knocking, but sufficiently well-run as to avoid the more seductive response to such steady, predatory erosion: an inwards collapse and a precipitous plummet down the leagues. If nothing else, their identity is one of persistence. Southampton are less a club evocative of a describable style of play than they are defined by their stubborn withstanding of the Premier League's relentless capitalistic pressures. It would be charming if the football weren't quite so beige.

For all their rounded corners, Southampton started the match well, pushing deep into the Newcastle half and forcing a few uncomfortable moments from goalkeeper Nick Pope. Ralph Hasenhüttl, Southampton's stocky Austrian manager, must have been relieved. After only one win in the previous eight, even the gregarious, widely-adored Hasenhüttl knew that the financial incentives undergirding every decision in this globally-consumed league were clanking with increased volume. He had to win this game against Newcastle to have any shot of keeping his job and increasingly, it seemed that even a win might not be enough to satisfy the wavering trust of his corporate overseers. I wonder if Hasenhüttl, the guillotine creaking not far overhead, found irony in his execution being decided by Newcastle United.

There is sportswashing, and then there is Newcastle. When the club was acquired last October by a consortium led by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF), the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne descended into delirium - black and white-striped grown men clambered atop police cars and slithered up telephone poles, jubilance flowing forth like sheening oil. Their club had just, in essence, become an arm of the Saudi state, and the Saudis are very, very rich. For Newcastle, who have twice been relegated to the second division of English football in the past thirteen years, the purchase, at a minimum, guaranteed stability. Even more likely than stability was glorious opulence - with a new regime capable of spending billions on improved facilities and higher caliber players, most Newcastle fans saw no reason why they wouldn't be competing with the likes of Bayern Munich and Real Madrid in a few years time. Perhaps the better question is whether Bayern and Madrid will soon be able to compete with Newcastle.

There exists ample precedent for state-owned football clubs - look no further than Qatar's Paris Saint-Germain or UAE-owned Manchester City - but the brazenness and extravagance of Newcastle's takeover was galling, even to the most profit-driven among us. The PIF are so wealthy that when their takeover finally received league approval, the other 19 Premier League teams (hardly lacking agendas and means of their own) effectively forced the league chairman to resign and after a meeting from which they excluded only Newcastle's representatives, redrew the league's financial regulations to constrain Newcastle's ability to generate revenue. The only club to abstain from that vote was Manchester City, who did not want to endorse a precedent that would surely constrain themselves as well. Such a hostile entry into the league for the new Newcastle regime was fitting, after all. The Saudis have never shied from hostility.

The PIF's purchase came with no apology for Jamal Khashoggi's hacksaw, nor any acknowledgment that the funds made available to buy majestic players like Sven Botman and Alexander Isak belonged to a regime guilty of a gluttonous myriad of human rights abuses and war crimes. The onus, instead, was placed on long-suffering Newcastle supporters - still freshly traumatized by the gloomy decrepitude of the Mike Ashley era - to decide how to feel about their club's sudden elevation. Questions were asked about the limits of fandom, the stringency of principles held, the hypocrisy Geordies were willing to stomach. With exceptions, most Newcastle fans did not seem to care. Faraway offenses can be tolerated if they facilitate swaggering four-goal displays. After the takeover was officially announced, throngs of Newcastle supporters partied outside the stadium wearing thawbs and keffiyehs.

A year on, those fractures have cooled and settled. Newcastle sit third in the league, snug in the Champions League positions. They are adulated for their progressive style of football, the plaudits heaped upon their defensive nous and Eddie Howe's remarkable player development, but the Saudi baggage is never far away. Commentators add qualifiers after praise, online discussions quickly grow hostile, Newcastle's accomplishments always echo with a bit of hollowness. The reservations are two-pronged; there are those upset by the club's active legitimizing of the Saudi regime and there are those indignant over the craven capitalism on display, the naked imbalances and inequities inherent to this new ownership (and, of course, those furious about both). Every intricately worked goal is a reminder of all that has been spent and all it has cost. And now, in the bright light of the looming World Cup, the complaints are harder to ignore.

In less than two weeks, the World Cup in Qatar is set to begin. It is a monstrosity of an event. With stadia built by abused foreign laborers (thousands of whom have died) and hosting privileges secured by open-air bribery, this tournament is not so much a smear on the face of global football as it is a shameless dropping of the veil, a month-long celebration of the perverse commercial interests that govern today's iteration of the sport. This is a capitalist orgy, yes, but it is also deeply adherent to football's new character, the grim zenith (and, more likely, just the beginning) of a game's long-accelerating addiction to money. Children wear jerseys with gambling sponsorships etched across the front, lower-league clubs are abandoned to bankruptcy as bloated Super Leagues are proposed, and hundred-million transfer fees are, depending on the player, sometimes described as bargains. The sport, quite simply, is ill.

On Sunday, Southampton succumbed 4-1 to a cleaving, merciless Newcastle. Newcastle's four goals were scored by a Paraguayan, a Kiwi, a Brazilian, and an Englishman - their international diversity a testament to football's global appeal, their combined transfer fees of €126m a testament to liquidity and sovereign funds. Afterward, Hasenhüttl was asked if he could see a way out for his club, who are straining mightily - and failing - to achieve parity, despite having spent hundreds of millions of euros on players themselves over the past several years. His answer - "Er, no." - was evidence of a man who knows what is already done, and evidence of a man who understands a broken system with too-intimate clarity. The ninth-longest-serving manager in English football was fired before the day was done.

Two Sundays after the whistle blew in Southampton, another whistle will blow in Al Khor. Ecuadorean players will chase Qatari players under a bristling sun and in the days that follow, players wearing English white and Brazilian yellow and Dutch orange will do the same. Some of them will be contracted to Newcastle and many others will not be, but a select few of those will perform so gloriously that Newcastle will spend €60m in January to correct the oversight. These elite players will be asked about niggling injuries, feared adversaries, missed chances, and perhaps, a (courageous) journalist will pose an awkward question familiar to the Newcastle, PSG, and Manchester City players, a question that grows plump under the drooping sun. Are you complicit? Any player who does not answer with a smiling 'yes' is either lying or did not hear the question. The same goes for us watching from home.