Newcastle have finalised a £25m-a-year front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with the leading Saudi Arabian events company Sela. The agreement will provide an early test of the Premier League’s new fair market value commercial regulations.

The multiyear contract is a sharp increase on the club’s £6.5m-a-season shirt sponsorship with the Chinese online gambling company Fun88, reflecting the team’s ascent to the top four and, with it, qualification for next season’s Champions League.

Money talks: how Saudi Arabia’s soft power project is shaking up sport | Sean IngleRead more

Given that Sela is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which holds an 80% stake in Newcastle, the tie-up will automat…

In the late 1980s, the makers of L&M cigarettes were looking to diversify. They settled on an old idea, something cigarette companies began doing in the late 19th century: Trading cards. In 1990, the company split its business and moved its sports card division into a company called Impel Marketing. You may know Impel Marketing by another name: SkyBox, the one it took in 1992 after launching its brand of glossy basketball cards. In 1995, Marvel paid $150 million cash to acquire the company; the comics giant merged it with Fleer, which it had purchased three years earlier for $286 million. You definitely know what happened next: The trading card market fell apart. Marvel sold the combined Fleer/SkyBox for $26 million in 1999. Really, it was just a great time in American business. …

Sportswriting as an enterprise is doing just fine, and there are any number of fine year-end wrap-ups celebrating the best work by the best people in our profession. But where's the fun in that? Here, in no particular order, are the worst sports things we read this year, every one of them special in its own particular way. Peter King, MMQB.com | Everything We Thought Was Wrong Peter King walks back his original reporting about the NFL league office fuckups in the aftermath of Ray Rice's domestic abuse case a second time, spooning the hand grenade a lying source very likely dropped in his lap. It was embarrassing. If league officials saw this video before issuing the two-game ban for Rice, all the scorn that's been heaped on Roger Goodell and his colleagues will be …