 Newcastle United have had a tough few years with the once great team relegated twice in a decade and had pointed blame squarely at the club's owner since 2007 that's Mike Ashley and there have been consistent calls from the stands for the sports direct boss to sell up. On Thursday, Newcastle supporters had their wish come true. Ashley is selling and he's selling to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund chaired by Mohammed bin Salman is worth 320 billion pounds, which means that overnight Newcastle has become one of the richest clubs in the world. This is how fans celebrated it. That was fans celebrating outside Newcastle's ground on Thursday. The BBC spoke to supporters in more detail about why they think the deal is a good thing. It's just sort of a bit of a relief. I'm like kid on Christmas morning, I don't want me birthdays and I'll come at the same time. I think it'll have a massive impact, like get the money put in the face hopefully and hopefully we'll win some trophies. Such a big day for both the club, the city and you know kind of everyone in the areas nearby. Newcastle fans are very happy, understandable for many reasons. This means that their club could become a contender for the Premier League if all this investment flows towards it. Of course, this deal is incredibly controversial because of the Saudis appalling human rights record that's both within the country and outside of the country. Aaron, what should we make of this deal, of this purchase? Well, I think it's important to say, Michael, that the Saudis are hugely ambitious and when you think what they pulled off with 9-11, I really wouldn't put a Premier League title past them in the next couple of years. They do think big. You've got to give them that. You've shocked me there. I didn't have... I mean, the Saudis, well, 15 of the 9-11 is like as well a Saudi. The relationship between the Saudi state and 9-11 is obviously controversial, but also hasn't been investigated to the degree one might hope it would have been. No, but also senior people close to the Saudi establishment like the Ben Laden family, for instance, the largest construction sort of family in the country. Of course, one famous Ben Laden was involved in that. However, joking aside, Michael, they are going to be far and away the most affluent club in world football, far and away. I've been selling, I think, as a personal fortune of something like 300 billion. You've got Aramco. It is the world's largest company. It's not a PLC. It's not publicly available to buy, but it's in the trillions in terms of its value. It's bigger than Amazon. It is a game changer. In terms of how this has happened, it is difficult to make the argument against Ben Salman, Michael, when you have gasoline and UAE money in European football. It is very, very hard when you see what's going on with the city and PSG. Where do you draw the line is the big question. So I can see why from a regulatory standpoint, this hasn't gone through and it hasn't been stopped. Because ultimately, you look at Bramovich with Chelsea. You can talk about other owners too. They're clearly involved in some quite shady things. But I think particularly with the Gatteries and the Emiratis, if you're looking at, for instance, the war in Yemen, the UAE has also been involved. The Gatterie government has also allegedly bankrolled quite problematic, shall we say, political causes abroad. Of course, Ben Salman is a bit more high profile with the Khashoggi murder. He was murdered in Istanbul by agents working for the Saudi secret services. The Saudis are a level above when it comes to their brutality. Of course, very regressive regime. You still have the death penalty. You might say, well, you have that in the United States and China too. That's fair enough. Until very recently, women couldn't drive in the country. They couldn't use 3G phones or 4G phones. They often couldn't go into malls where men went. That is slowly changing. But it's important to say when people try to build, for instance, an analogue between Iran and Saudi Arabia, when it comes to civil liberties for women in Saudi Arabia over the last 60, 70 years, it's been a whole distinct case by itself. Probably Afghanistan is obviously in a similar sort of category, but nobody else fundamentally. And these people are being allowed in at the very top of British industry. And that's what football is. Premier League is at the very top of the Premier League. So of course, we should have major misgivings about it. What's the political response? You know, I do feel like actually when it came to football ownership, fan ownership, supporters having a role and influence in their clubs, that felt like it was sort of coming up a bit when we had, of course, the Super League debacle just a few months ago. This is a world away from that. You have Newcastle United fans overjoyed and rightly so, Michael. They've had this guy, Mike Ashley, the Cockney mafia running their club for a long time, more than a decade, going nowhere fast. They came second in the mid-1990s, but they've not really enjoyed sustained success, winning trophies and so on for a very long time. So I understand why they're happy, but I think more broadly what this tells us about Premier League, football as an industry in Britain and fundamentally British public life and how our economy works and whose interests is quite sad and it's quite revealing because it's not just football. You know, people like Ben Salman are deeply implicated and invested in all manner, you know, all parts of the economy, all manner of industries, very little said, of course, because that money comes in handy. You mentioned other owners and how this compares. We can look at the top five richest clubs in the Premier League. So number one is now Newcastle, owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, who are worth $320 billion. Of course, they're not going to invest all of that in Newcastle, but that's how deep their pockets are. Man City is owned by Sheikh Mansour. He's worth £22.9 billion. Mansour is Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Chair of its sovereign wealth fund. Chelsea, you probably know, is owned by Roman Abramovich. He's worth almost $10 billion. He was the Premier League's first multi-billionaire owner buying Chelsea in 2003. He, again, as you probably know, is a Russian oligarch. He made his money through buying up Russian state assets after the Soviet Union collapsed. So basically, stealing from the Russian people. Arsenal is owned by Stan Cronkate, who is worth £6 billion, although he hasn't invested that much in the club, so their fans really don't like him. And Aston Villa, at number five, is owned by Nassif Sawiris, who is an Egyptian construction magnate. £200 million has been spent on players over the past two summers. So Villa fans probably more pleased with that guy. I want to look at one more perspective from a fan who actually talks about what this will mean more broadly than just in terms of football. Sam Fender is a singer-songwriter from Newcastle. He's a big deal. He's got a number one album, and he spoke to BBC Breakfast the morning after attending celebrations outside St James's Park. Well, we went up to, we did Jules Holland, and then went straight up to St James's in my saxophone player. Johnny got on the statue and started playing local hero and 5,000 Jordies just started singing along. Because of the club takeover? Because Ashley's out here, and everyone past this, everyone I've seen. I did about a thousand selfies, got mobbed and they gave us, but everyone was absolutely class, and they gave us a lot of cans, and I'm really hungover. I'm really, really hungover. Appreciate your honesty on that. But I mean, these things happen, don't they? Does it feel like a massive moment for the club? Yeah, well, I feel like I'm on talk sport. Yeah, it's obviously quite a contentious situation as well, you know what I mean? But I'm just really happy for the fans, and I'm happy for the city, and I'm happy for what might come of it, probably economically, for our place, for our town. That was a very charming interview. Aaron, what I wanted to talk to you about there though is not going on BBC Breakfast and saying you're hungover, and it kind of went viral for that reason. But what interested me was the way he was talking about how this wasn't just a big deal for football fans, but for Newcastle itself, like he thinks this will bring economic development to Newcastle, and to use Boris Johnson's phrase, levelling up by attracting Saudi billionaires. Do you think he's right? Oh, 100%. I mean, if you look at the historic winners of the English championships, and that's the Premier League, it used to be Division One. Historically, it was towns and cities outside of London. London clubs historically weren't that competitive. So you've got obviously the Northwest, historically, Liverpool, Manchester, Everton, you've got Northeast, Sunderland, Newcastle, you've got more titles between them than people realize. Burnley, Wolverhampton, Portsmouth have got two titles. Historically, the Southeast wasn't really the powerhouse of English football. And that changed a little bit. You now have in London, massive clubs, Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal. I mean, Arsenal were a bit bigger, but they weren't on a level with Manchester United or Liverpool, West Ham playing at this huge stadium now. They've won a European trophy historically, but again, not a massive club. And there was a concentration of power to London clubs and to some of the older giants like Manchester United and to Liverpool. And I feel like there's a good way of understanding Brexit, which is towns that historically had really good football teams who performed well 20, 30, 40 years ago, and now are in sort of league one. I think Derby. Derby in the mid-70s made a European Cup semi-final under Brian Clough. Now the club's basically facing bankruptcy. You know, Derby is economically left behind. That's the exact kind of place where they look at the football club as a totem of civic pride. And it's been decimated as much as the local economy. And so you can see why somewhere like Newcastle, I mean, Newcastle has done it magically better than Derby in recent decades, but you can see why somewhere like Newcastle, it is everything, it's the quintessence of the city. But at the same time, Michael also, you know, I mentioned earlier, the Premier League is this huge, huge global industry. People will talk about Newcastle if they finish in the top four because every week hundreds of millions of people around the world will be watching Newcastle United games. You know, my dad's a taxi driver in Bournemouth. Bournemouth were in the Premier League for four years. They're top of the championship. They might go back next year, hopefully. And you would get people go to watch Bournemouth every week from Norway or wherever, just tourists. They want to see Manchester United and they don't want to go to Old Trafford. And Bournemouth is a bit different. And people all around the world, you go somewhere, you know, you might meet somebody and you'd say, I'm from Bournemouth. 10 years ago, they've never heard of Bournemouth because they're in the Premier League. They know who Bournemouth are. So in terms of building a stronger sense of place, in terms of attracting money to the area, in terms of building its brand, having a really successful Premier League club makes a massive difference. Now, Newcastle was already was already in the Premier League, but going up another level, of course, you know, if you're trying to attract Chinese students, if you're trying to attract, you know, Indian entrepreneurs, you've obviously got a vibrant local economy there already. You know, you've got University of Durham, you've got a bit of a tech sector in Newcastle. It's huge. Of course, it's huge, Michael. It's massive. It's a really big thing for them in Newcastle. And importantly, you know, we're not pontificating about the Saudis. Just the fact they've left Mike Ashley behind is, you know, is good enough, I think, to get absolutely wasted and party. Because, you know, on the one hand, yes, you've got somebody like Ben Salman, deeply a moral man, part of, I think, an evil regime in Saudi Arabia. What kind of owner do you want? Do you want somebody like that putting money into your club? I mean, I personally want neither, but you want somebody like putting money into your club, or people like the glazes nowhere near as bad, who take money out of the club and make you less successful as they're doing with Manchester United or as they have done with Manchester United. They've taken more than a billion out of the club. I think that's an archibald. So, yeah, it's a massive, massive thing. And you can see how Johnson might sort of say this is part of his leveling up agenda. You know, the fact that you're going to have a big club in the Northeast competing for honours. Yes, Newcastle were doing that in the mid-90s, but over a long sustained period of time, that's not happened for, well, I mean, 60, 70, 80 years. Very interesting to compare this to sort of the politics around the super league, because at the time, lots of people read it, including us sometimes, a sort of this big revolt against these big billionaire owners who were making these decisions in a non-democratic way. Now we're seeing scenes of people saying, thank God, a really rich billionaire has bought our club. So there's some mixed messages going on here. Presumably, I mean, because football fans don't actually have that much agency in this situation. So you are a bit of a rock and a hard place. Well, good friend, actually the best man at my weddings in Newcastle United fan is Jordy. And he didn't just start supporting them in the mid-90s because of Kevin Geegan. And, you know, when he said to me, he's very political and he was like, oh, I feel bad. You know, this is obviously brilliant news for the club, but it's terrible. And I just think, you know, enjoy it while you can. We saw in the mid-90s, Portsmouth football club had a multi-millionaire, you know, millionaire owner who was meant to take them to even greater heights. They had Milan Mandiric, he sold it to somebody else. He was meant to build a new stadium. The guy was a con man. He was a fraudster. So, you know, it doesn't always work out well. I think it's fair to say that won't be happening within some enough.