Yes my point is that if as you say "they do well for the club people won't have a problem with what else they do because it's easy to separate one from the other" then actually the fans aren't separating the club and owners at all but mixing them together. The success on the pitch impacts how the owners will be perceived.
I would disagree, i think success on the pitch will impact how they are perceived at running the football club nothing more.
For example lets say they chuck a load of money into the training ground and youth set up. Someone asks me what i think.... i'll say great, spot on of them. If the following week the Saudi's drop some mustard gas on someone and i get asked what i think i will be just as appalled as i would have been before they bought the club. It's not like anyone is going to say yer that's cool they built a new training ground so i'll ignore that.
To be honest I think the whole sport washing thing is smoke and mirrors and people like Amnesty use it as way of creating awareness (not saying that's a bad thing creating awareness is good). If you take Newcastle out the equation as club rivalry muddies the waters.
look at the Joshua fight in Saudi.
The claim Amnesty made just as they are now is that the Saudi's are sports washing, people won't notice the bad things they do because of the high profile of the sport. Their actions will be masked by the profile of the sport and go unnoticed.
The exact opposite happens to what they claim happens, there is a huge amount of awareness generated around the human rights issues because of the sport.
Most people in the west pass most days without giving human rights issues in the middle east a seconds thought. Joshua fights there, or they buy Newcastle and look how much attention people are paying to the human rights issues.
It seems to me the high profile sports draw attention to these issues not mask them.
