In April 2016, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud – MBS to his friends – launched Vision 2030. The project aims to affirm Saudi Arabia as the heart of the Arab world and transform it into a global powerhouse for decades and centuries to come.
To achieve these aims, Saudi Arabia needs to reduce its economic dependency on fossil fuels and modernise its deeply conservative society. It also needs to energise and inspire a mostly overweight population to be more active. These reasons, among many, are why sport is so central to his plan.
Since 2017, Saudi Arabia has invested tens of billions of dollars in sport across three main verticals: event hosting, asset ownership and sponsorship. The strategy has been quickly rolled out across almost every major global sport, as well as esports and professional wrestling.
This three-pronged strategy isn’t so different to the playbook of other Gulf nations like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Nor, to date, is the amount of money spent. However, the scale and breadth of Saudi’s investment is unprecedented in the history of sport.
The Saudi Public Investment Fund has poured money into almost every sport on the planet over the past four years, but there are plenty of terms and conditions for the recipients.
Sports organisations must at least be willing to host marquee events in Saudi Arabia and advertise the Kingdom in the best possible light. They must also close their ears and mouths when it comes to criticism of the Saudi regime.
Throughout its sports spending spree, Qatar’s human rights record remained in focus right through the Fifa World Cup in 2022. Saudi Arabia faces many of the same criticisms, but they are noticeably quieter than they once were.
Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered in the country’s consulate in Istanbul, seems like old news now. Questions around the Kingdom’s human rights record – once asked publicly of LIV golfers and Newcastle United managers – are now barely even whispered in private.
Unlike Qatar, which focused primarily on football, Saudi Arabia has put money into every nook of an industry desperate for growth. In the process, they have shifted the balance of power. The West no longer dictates the rules of engagement.
In late 2023 and early 2024, the notion that Saudi Arabia was ‘taking over’ world sport was mooted by leading newspapers like the New York Times and respected broadcasters like the BBC. When football’s Saudi Pro League began spending comparable sums to England’s Premier League to attract players it was immediately labelled a ‘threat’ to European football – perhaps the most subscribed-to religion on the continent.
The notion of a ‘takeover of world sport’ may prove to be hyperbole, but Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly set to become one of the world’s sporting powerhouses. The questions are: Will it be able to achieve its ultimate goals, and does it really know what it’s doing?
The structure
For outsiders looking in, it is not always easy to understand the complexity of Saudi Arabia’s interest in sport. From a distance, it can appear as if the nation state has a completely centralised and coherent plan, closely following the MBS script. The reality has been far messier.
Although the money can all be traced back to the state, almost a hundred different Saudi-based entities have been involved in sports investments since 2017, each with their own slightly different goals. These range from the omnipresent Public Investment Fund to government departments, individual royal family members, national sports federations, commercial rights agencies and state-linked companies such as Aramco.
With so many different arms of the state pursuing similar goals in sometimes very different ways, some European sports bodies have told The Long Game of the intense ‘stakeholder management’ required when approaching the Kingdom for investment and managing ongoing relationships.
The perception of many in European sport is that the Saudis saw what the UAE and Qatar had achieved and are now playing catch-up, but in a far broader and less organised fashion. The Saudi sports empire created since 2017 is so vast and sprawling, some say, that it has been almost impossible for it to stick to a coherent plan.
Those who operate in sport closer to the country say this scattershot approach has evolved more recently and now has a clearer structure, built on two foundation stones.
Since the summer of 2023, SRJ Sports Investments (SURJ) has assumed responsibility for all outbound investment in sport, while the ministry of sport has had overall responsibility for all events taking place in the kingdom.
SURJ was set up in August 2023 as a subsidiary of PIF to ‘accelerate’ Saudi Arabia’s development in the sports sector, ensuring that projects align with the ministry of sport’s strategy and that investment in ‘global sports assets that can be localised both in the kingdom and Mena region’.
The investments, the ministry said, are expected to deliver financial returns.
In October 2023, Danny Townsend, formerly chief executive of Australian Professional Leagues, was made chief executive. Board members include Ioris Francini, former president of media at the IMG agency. Townsend reports to Raid Ismail, head of Mena direct investments at PIF and Bander Bin Mogren, chief operating officer of PIF and chairman of SURJ.
Since 2017, the minister for sport has been Turki bin Abdel Muhsin Al-Sheikh – Turki Alalshikh to those that know him from his very public profile in the boxing world.
Alalshikh has the final say on which events are hosted in the kingdom and is also principal actor on the General Entertainment Authority, organiser of the Riyadh Season of sports and cultural events. A former bodyguard and close friend of MBS, he is seen by many as the real powerbroker in the Kingdom.
Total virtual control
Before Alalshikh and SURJ became the joint fulcrum of all Saudi investment in sport, the Kingdom poured billions into football and golf with relatively little to show for it other than some mixed publicity.
In the case of golf, in particular, the Saudi masterplan to make LIV Golf the sport’s primary tour – or at least an undeniable bargaining chip – was obstructed by an increasingly rare thing in sport: people with enough money to say ‘no’.
The Kingdom had attempted to skip the steps of influence and control, hurrying straight for total ownership of a historic, proud sport.
Its failure to bring the golf world to heel has been a very expensive lesson, but one that has been immediately learned from. Almost every single Saudi sports investment project since then has focused on sports – and people – almost entirely motivated by making a stubborn line go up.
Boxing, esports and snooker are prime examples of the new, centrally-organised Saudi sports playbook. These were sports ripe for disruption due to their undemocratic governance and commercial growth being a shared goal among each sport’s stakeholders.
SURJ and Alalshikh have chosen these sports knowing that a relatively small cash injection can potentially mollify all stakeholders, eliminating internal division and dissent.
The Saudi esports project, in particular, has been emblematic of how a decentralised, struggling ecosystem came to be almost entirely controlled by Saudi Arabia. Given that the total commercial value of esports remains relatively small (especially by Saudi standards), the entire apparatus of esports could simply be bought.
The PIF’s acquisition of storied esports tournament organisers ESL and FaceIt signalled Saudi Arabia’s intention to place itself at the centre of the esports world – something that industry was more than happy to accept in return for financial security.
In the space of three years, Saudi Arabia has gone from peripheral actor to the undisputed home of global esports, hosting its own ‘Esports World Cup’ with a $33m prize pool – about the same amount paid to the average Saudi Pro League star each year.
In return for its single-digit billion-dollar investments in esports, Saudi Arabia has bought a relatively small but captive Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience that will grow up with the Kingdom at the heart of their cultural sphere.
It is a blueprint that Saudi Arabia would have loved to replicate in more established sports. But over the course of its project, the Kingdom has learned that influence is the next best thing.
Influence, control, ownership
Behaviour theorists talk of people and organisations having a ‘circle of influence’ and a ‘circle of control’. It is useful to look at Saudi Arabia’s recent sports strategy through this lens.
After billions spent (and arguably wasted) on LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia has pivoted hard toward a strategy of influence when it comes to more stable, established sports structures.
SURJ and the GEA has now learned that any sports organisation that is (in theory) democratic and has highly developed commercial models is unlikely to hand over the keys, no matter how much is offered.
Golf and tennis are oft-cited examples of decentralised but coherent sports, and the Saudi strategy of minority investment, event hosting and sponsorship across the ATP and WTA Tours is a direct result of its LIV Golf learnings. If you can’t beat them, join them.
PIF has opted for a hosting and sponsorship-based relationship with the ATP and WTA Tours, growing its influence in tennis without immediately upsetting its existing structure.
It includes naming rights to the ATP Rankings, sponsorship of five ATP Tour events and more inventory around the Next Gen ATP Finals already slated for the Saudi port city of Jeddah until 2027 under an existing agreement.
In time, it is thought that PIF will acquire an ATP and WTA tournament of its own, paying enough to secure a prime spot on the tennis calendar that coincides with Riyadh Season – the Kingdom’s sports, entertainment culture festival that spans from October to March.
PIF, SURJ and the GEA are now laser-focused on smart investments and generating long-term cultural and financial upside from sport, with two major exceptions: the Fifa World Cup and the Olympic Games.
Saudi Arabia will host the Fifa World Cup in 2034 – an expensive but necessary cherry-on-top that the Kingdom hopes will cement Saudi’s lasting position as a global sports hub. Its ambitions to host an Olympic Games are also well known, but have begun with a much more manageable influence-based project: The Olympic Esports Games, also to be held in Saudi Arabia.
Nobody questions the ambition behind Vision 2030, or the logic behind Saudi Arabia’s plan to use sport as a tool of cultural power. But the acid test will be whether the billions of investment poured into sport can help produce the thriving economy and vibrant society MBS craves.
By 2034, we’ll know.
