“NOTHING succeeds like success,” the old proverb goes, and that is certainly the case on Tyneside, where the fans of Newcastle United were only too glad to welcome the Saudi Arabian conglomerate who took over “their” club in October 2021.

Backed by a public investment fund worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the new owner’s immense wealth enabled Newcastle supporters to dream of a bright new future for their team, based on the acquisition of expensive, top-quality players who would have previously been out of their price range.

On August 21 of this year, Newcastle participated in the first “Gulf Derby” against Manchester City who are owned by the United Arab Emirates Deputy Prime Minister Sheik Mansour, whose net worth has been estimated at $21 billion (£18.2bn).

City are the current Premier League champions, with the financial clout to buy whoever they want, whenever they want, and pay them exorbitant wages that few clubs around the world can compete with.

What City and Newcastle’s owners have in common, apart from geographical proximity, is their appalling human rights record both at home and abroad.

Since 2015, they have been the leading protagonists in a war against Houthi rebels in Yemen that has left millions of people on the point of starvation.

What the vast majority of City and Newcastle supporters have in common is that they don’t care as long as their Arabian sugar daddies front up the money to keep them at the top, in City’s case, or make them part of the football elite, in Newcastle’s case.

To be fair to both of them, most other clubs’ supporters would probably also welcome an input of money from Arab dictatorships, if it made their teams more competitive, regardless of their misdemeanours.

As football columnist Jonathan Wilson recently pointed out in the Guardian newspaper, “Everything is about money, greed and growth. The game itself, or the club’s place in its community, an afterthought.”

With over three-quarters of Premier League clubs owned by overseas interests, money is a key determinant of which of them can be successful.

Professional football displays all the characteristics of the capitalist system, of which it is an integral part — most notably with the increasing monopolisation of a handful of European superclubs whose collective financial muscle enables them to dominate the continent’s football association (Uefa) in order to virtually guarantee their continued participation in lucrative tournaments.

In England, the Football Association (FA) meekly allowed the nascent Premier League clubs to break away from the rest of the Football League in 1992 and benefit from the boom in television revenue.

Although a small percentage of the TV money is shared among lower-league clubs, the net effect of the breakaway has been a bonanza for Premier League members at the expense of grassroots football, where conditions for those playing in amateur leagues on park pitches and recreation grounds are generally awful.

It has become increasingly apparent that the domination of the professional game by a few clubs that are the property of Arab dictators or US carpetbaggers is not only detrimental to any concept of fair competition but, more importantly, has alienated working-class supporters and loosened the ties with local communities where their grounds are situated.

Protests by football supporters have hitherto largely been confined to complaints about lack of success on the pitch, accompanied by demands for boards to be sacked and replaced by new owners, as was the case with Newcastle.

But instead of ridiculing fans who celebrated the conversion of the “Geordie nation” to the “Saudi nation” by waving the regime’s flags outside the stadium, more thought needs to be given as to how the collective passion of the football public can be channelled in a more positive direction, and it is clear that the question of ownership is of paramount importance.

There are examples of supporter-owned clubs further down the leagues, and in other countries some form of community ownership is the norm.

Germany is often cited as an example to be followed, where it is a requirement for clubs to be 51 per cent owned by their supporters.

There are exceptions to the rule, but where it exists, fans pay a fraction of what it costs to get a ticket for a Premier League game and the clubs are very much part of the community.

Because of the huge amounts of money involved in running professional football clubs at the elite level, some critics have said that it would be impossible to implement a German-style arrangement here.

In fact, it would be perfectly feasible for football clubs to be licensed as community assets. As in the German example, 51 per cent of the share capital could be in the shape of non-transferable shares owned by supporters and 49 per cent available for commercial partners that sought to invest in the club.

Crucially, there would also need to be a representative of the local FA on the board who could ensure that, for example, any league-wide-agreed spending limits as a percentage of turnover were adhered to.

As part of their licence provisions, football clubs would be obliged to play a full part in local community initiatives to promote and finance sport for all.

Clearly for all this to function, effective, local supporter ownership of the clubs would be a vital prerequisite.

From a working-class, supporter perspective, this scenario would undoubtedly be a more attractive proposition than the current status quo and as such, it should be relatively straightforward to convince fans of its merits.

Mobilising them to do something about it will be more difficult and would involve a concerted campaign of information, education and action before there was any prospect of central government and the football authorities being persuaded that community and supporter-owned clubs were the way forward.

However, the independent Football Supporters Association are advocates of such schemes and for those of us on the political left, a campaign would provide a valuable space for the promotion of democratic, collective ideals that run contrary to the corporate takeover of football clubs that could and should really belong to us.