Just when you thought the footballing world was perhaps running out of moral crusades of which to embark on, Newcastle United’s well publicized sponsorship deal with payday loans company Wonga, gave us all a timely bandwagon to jump upon.
Indeed, as the Magpies announced the four-year deal – worth a reported £24million – the footballing world was seemingly overcome with scathing disdain for owner Mike Ashley and his bunch of merry men. But although observers are right to condemn the palpable immorality of Wonga’s interest rates and the wider context of their business model, the current uproar smacks of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
The recent critique of Newcastle’s latest commercial deal, has seemed to spread far and wide throughout the footballing fraternity. Nick Forbes, the leader of Newcastle City council, called the deal, “disgraceful.” Michael Martin, editor of the True Faith fanzine, described the imminent sponsorship as “tarnishing the club’s name, image and reputation.” A whole raft of blogs, column inches and editorials have come out deriding the club for having the audacity to accept such a tainted source of commercial partnership.
Slamming the Newcastle Wonga deal has appeared almost fashionable, in some circles. And why not? It’s certainly got a lot of the MP’s that have come out and slammed the sponsorship, some good, positive PR. It’s just that when you cast your minds back to the July of 2010, it’s difficult to find such a raft of similar, attributable quotes deriding Wonga’s sponsorship of Blackpool.
Indeed, when Heart of Midlothian agreed to plan Wonga over their shirts in the April of 2011, it wasn’t given anywhere near as much exposure as the NUFC deal. Granted, controversy is never usually too far away from their owner Vladimir Romanov and Hearts aren’t a club anywhere near the size of the men from St. James’ Park. But there are certainly some who appear to be picking and choosing their time to wield arms against footballing morality. This topic isn’t something new and it can’t be used as some political pawn when it suits people.
But this is Newcastle United. Club of the people and guardian of the community. They’ve already voiced their grievances against Mike Ashley’s pesky ‘Cockney Mafia’ and the prospect of getting involved with a bunch of perceived, sneering city types that appear to prosper out of bending over the working classes, probably doesn’t appeal at all.
Yet there is an underliyng hypocrisy from supporters, including Wansbeck MP Ian Lavery, who said that he’d “not step foot in the stadium again” while the deal was in place, lampooning their club’s latest sponsorship deal.
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Although fans were more than happy to step out wearing their Northern Rock sponsored shirts for nine years. Of course, Northern Rock were a lot more ethical, being a strong presence in the community and employing hundreds of local people within Newcastle upon Tyne, weren’t they? Not quite. As Julian Knight highlighted in The Independent, there certainly doesn’t seem anything that much more moral in a company that sold folks 125% mortgage deals and helped start the first British banking run in over a hundred years, that we are all still paying out for.
If we take Mr. Lavery’s viewpoint on face value, surely none of us would even be attending any top-flight games in the first place. Let’s not forget, Newcastle United play their games in the Barclays Premier League. A bank that was recently fined £290million for lying about a key banking interest rate that influences the cost of loans and mortgages, allowing them to try and make a profit during a financial crisis in which so many of us have made a loss.
You can take it further than Barclays, as well. If we look at some previous Newcastle United sponsorships, you’d hazard a guess that the damage Newcastle Brown Ale and alcoholism can bestow upon vulnerable people, is hardly in a different universe to Wonga’s interest rates.
Furthermore, online gambling companies sponsor a quarter of Premier League teams. Is the risk of gambling addiction potentially not as much of a hazard to the vulnerable than payday loans? Across the channel in France they seem to think so anyway, with a ban on the advertising of online gambling services in grounds.
No can deny that in the age of austerity and economic downturn that we’ve currently been living in, a company like Wonga has made an awful lot of money out of the misfortune of others. With the country seemingly permanently locked in economic gloom, financial institutions are hardly likely to garner positive PR.
But in the Wild West world of immorality that is the Premier League, the debacle surrounding Newcastle’s Wonga deal has given it far too much credence than it’s actually worth. There is a phrase that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’d be interesting to see how many more hits the Wonga website has had since this whole thing kicked off in the first place.
There’s been too much white knight journalism and hypocritical public figures throwing their right behind the Wonga argument for it to feel like quite the apocalyptic degradation in public standards, that they feel it represents. Wonga isn’t a company that deserves the time of day, but it’s not much more morally contemptible than the other multi million pound companies that are involved in football – or the people that run it, for that matter.
So maybe the next time we read an article lambasting a payday loan company getting exposure on a football shirt, we should think what else threatens the vulnerable person? Should we ignore alcohol companies, gambling companies and unscrupulous international financial institutions that have put us in the hole we’re in at the moment? Or the company that will charge you £266 if you took out £200 tomorrow? If you’re going to embark on a moral crusade, Wonga won’t be far off your list of targets, but there are far bigger fish to fry. Let’s get some perspective.
How do you feel about Wonga’s sponsorship deal with Newcastle United? Morally despicable or a deckchair off the Premier League titanic of immorality? Let me know on Twitter: follow @samuel_antrobus and tell me how you feel.
