The last time the United States changed presidents, the incoming leader of the free world said he was going to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are”, then snubbed the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, by saying he would only deal with the prince’s father, King Salman — the president’s “counterpart”.
This was early 2021, just over two years after former Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was captured, murdered and dismembered. It is a crime that many intelligence agencies, including America’s, believe was ordered by the crown prince.
Bin Salman, or ‘MBS’, as he is better known, had won the Saudi royal family’s game of thrones to become the real power in the kingdom by 2015 and, initially, there was widespread hope he would move his homeland to a more moderate, tolerant and business-friendly form of Islam.
But Khashoggi’s murder prompted Western leaders to reassess this view. Suddenly, MBS’s relaxation of the ban on women driving cars, the reopening of cinemas and huge investments at home and abroad did not seem like the first steps in an inexorable march forward, and everyone remembered that he had also ordered an aerial bombardment of Yemen and economic blockade of Qatar, two neighbouring Gulf states, and that Saudi Arabia still had a dismal human-rights record.
That reassessment did not last long, though.
In the summer of 2022, that same United States president, Joe Biden, fist-bumped the prince in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city, and now the kingdom has formally got the job of hosting the most popular sporting event on the planet, the men’s World Cup, in 2034.
The world’s largest oil exporter was the only candidate for the job and has already aced the entrance exam. Officially, there was still an interview of sorts but FIFA, the game’s global governing body, decided to replace that with a round of applause.
It is fair to say that nobody is snubbing MBS or his country anymore.
Take last week, for example. France’s President Emmanuel Macron was in Riyadh for a three-day visit. The headline announcements were about bringing stability to the region but the small print mentioned that the bosses of 50 French companies had tagged along and there were also discussions about Saudi Arabia’s latest order of French-made fighter jets.
Elsewhere in the sprawling Saudi capital, the world’s leading experts on land management were gathering for the latest United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, while the World Football Summit Asia 2024 attracted hundreds of job-seekers, opinion-formers and sales types from that industry to a two-day powwow in the King Abdullah Financial District.
Eighteen miles north (a taxi ride that can take half an hour or half a day, depending on traffic), several of the world’s best golfers had jetted in to add some glitter to the season finale of that sport’s Asian Tour. Australia’s 2022 Open Championship winner Cameron Smith would eventually lose a play-off to Chile’s Joaquin Niemann, with English star Tyrell Hatton a couple of shots further back.
Delicate touch 🙌🏻@joaconiemann chips in for eagle on the 15th to grab a share of the clubhouse lead at PIF @SaudiIntlGolf 💪🏻@intseriesgolf @TorqueGC_ #PIF_SaudiIntlGolf #InternationalSeries #ThisISEverything #TimeToRise pic.twitter.com/vhJr9J5Hrw
— Asian Tour (@asiantourgolf) December 6, 2024
Former world No 1 Dustin Johnson, another of the hired hands from the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour, did not enjoy his rounds at the revamped Riyadh Golf Club quite so much, missing the cut, but the American two-time major champion did leave Riyadh with a new role: ambassador for Saudi Golf.
To the west in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city, the Red Sea Film Festival had attracted quite the cast, with Minnie Driver and Spike Lee on the judging panel and Johnny Depp, Vin Diesel, Michael Douglas, Eva Longoria, Will Smith and Michelle Yeoh walking the red carpet. Several of them also made it to the big Saudi Premier League football match on Friday, where they saw Karim Benzema’s Al Ittihad beat Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr in front of 55,000 fans. Diesel went through the media’s mixed zone after the game, chanting “Saudi, Saudi, Saudi”.
Benzema greets Ronaldo before their Saudi Pro League game on Friday (AFP via Getty Images)
The United Kingdom’s new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was also in Riyadh this week to see MBS. Responding to British criticism of his visit, including comments from Khashoggi’s widow, the former human-rights lawyer said he went because UK jobs depend on a good relationship with the kingdom.
There was another Western liberal who visited the Gulf state for the first time last week.
Like Biden, Starmer and many others, he has also had a few things to say about Saudi Arabia’s treatment of migrant workers, repression of free speech, medieval attitudes to sexuality and the role of women in society, as well as other areas of concern.
But, also like all those other well-meaning types, this guy has realised Saudi Arabia is also a real country, with real challenges, and it has arrived at a crossroads moment in its relatively young history.
That visitor was me.
Given I am going to be talking and writing about Saudi Arabia’s investment in sport for the rest of my career, I thought it was time I saw the place for myself. Of course, a week split between Riyadh and Jeddah is not going to make anyone an expert on the country but I returned to my wet and windy European island a little less unhappy about global football’s direction of travel.
Later this week, you will be able to read a more analytical piece about how Saudi Arabia’s big splurge on football is playing out, and next week, in the build-up to the Tyson Fury-Oleksandr Usyk rematch in Riyadh, an article on the Saudis’ wider sports project.
But if you are interested in my opinion — and that is all it is — on whether the place is a suitable host nation for a men’s World Cup, this is it.
Inside Saudi Arabia’s growing influence
When it became clear last year that Saudi Arabia was not going to wait any longer for its crack at a World Cup and FIFA was going to do everything in its power to facilitate that, my heart plummeted a few floors.
Not because I am a racist or an Islamophobe, as I was routinely called on social media in the run-up to the previous World Cup in Qatar two years ago, but because that experience — more than a decade spent reporting on migrant workers, LGBTQI+ rights and regional squabbles — had been so unpleasant.
I left Qatar in December 2022 satisfied that I, like most journalists who had stayed with the story since the small-but-rich Gulf state shocked the world 12 years earlier by winning the right to stage the tournament, had done a reasonable job of holding the host nation and FIFA to account on their many promises, but was utterly exhausted by it. And, having just turned 50, I thought it was unlikely I would have to report on a story like that again.
Silly me.
Like Biden and company, I had forgotten that Qatar’s much, much bigger next-door neighbour wanted a World Cup, too, and what MBS wants, MBS usually gets.
MBS, FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2018 World Cup opening ceremony in Moscow (Pool/Getty Images)
At the outset, I will point out we are talking about an event previously staged in Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1934, an Argentina run by a military dictatorship in 1978 and Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2018 before it got to Qatar.
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, accepted the Russian Order of Friendship from Putin in 2019, by the way. So, yes, Saudi Arabia is as suitable as those hosts were.
If that bar is too low for you, and it is pretty low, ask yourself if any of those World Cups made the host nations better places after the football finished.
Qatar, maybe? But then, remember that Qatar is effectively a city-state, with 300,000 citizens, dominated by its ruling family, the House of Thani.
The Al Thanis decided to spend north of $200billion (£156bn) of the state’s enormous fossil-fuel wealth on the World Cup and its related projects. Hundreds of migrant workers died building the tournament’s infrastructure and while their lot certainly improved over the 12-year construction cycle, it started from a very low base and there is little evidence of any appetite in Qatar to continue improving standards now the world’s focus has moved on.
Doha, Qatar’s only major population centre, is an easier and more interesting place to live and work in than before but there are few signs of any great sport-participation boom in the sun-scorched peninsula or evidence that the tournament did much to diversify its economy away from natural gas and being another international hub with six-star hotels and glitzy malls for a weekend stopover. That does not sound like a particularly impressive return on investment in terms of money or the blood, sweat and tears of the men who did the hard work.
Saudi Arabia is just as hot and also has a large population of migrant workers who do most of the building, cleaning and standing guard. One of the most worrying aspects of the next decade is how, when I spoke to migrant workers in Qatar two years ago, many of them told me they would rather be there than in Saudi Arabia.
But the Saudi ratio of citizens to migrant workers is very different from Qatar’s, where those 300,000 golden ticket-holders are bolstered by 2.7 million expatriate workers, a 1:9 citizen/non-citizen split. Estimates of Saudi Arabia’s current population vary, mainly because it has grown so fast over the past 30 years, but it is believed to be in the region of 35 million, with about 60 per cent of those being fully-fledged Saudis.
This means that, unlike Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, another neighbour, it actually has relatively poor citizens. Perhaps the biggest single revelation from my week there is that it is not a spectacularly wealthy country.
(Matt Slater /The Athletic)
Yes, a century of accessible and plentiful oil has transformed it from a loose collection of nomadic tribes and bickering elites in a large desert into a member of the G20 group of the world’s richest economies, but Saudi Arabia’s per-capita wealth is not quite so impressive, and progress on that front has been minimal for decades as it has struggled to do anything other than energy.
So, while it has the world’s most profitable company, Aramco, it does not have many other businesses to get excited about. Furthermore, the stereotype of the playboy Saudi prince ligging about London or Paris exists for good reason. Riyadh and Jeddah both have plenty of fancy shops, but there are millions of Saudis who live in subsidised apartment blocks that are not that impressive when you get up close, in scruffy parts of its cities, with broken pavements and streets lined with dented cars.
And these people are young — almost two-thirds of the population is under 30. That is why I am now convinced many of us in the West are wrong about Saudi Arabia’s huge recent investments in sport and entertainment simply being exercises in “sportswashing“.
By spending big on things we like — such as great nights of boxing, star-studded golf tournaments and famous English football clubs — MBS may think we will forget or make excuses for Khashoggi, what is happening at the Yemeni border, the kingdom’s use of torture and executions and so on. But what if that is a fringe benefit to what he really cares about? Which is jobs.
What motivates him is surely not what we think about him and his country but what happens to his country, and his family’s place in it, when the oil finally runs out or the rest of us finally realise a good way to combat desertification would be to stop using so much of Saudi’s good stuff.
Riyadh in October 2023 (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
MBS, who is only 39 years old, has a plan to avoid this existential threat — Vision 2030, an all-encompassing strategy for economic and social change. It is not the first such national plan in the history of mankind — Saudi Arabia has gone through several, all of them failures — but it is driving everything that’s happening there. It is also probably the best-resourced plan to ever leave a consultant’s laptop.
Blood And Oil, the best-selling account of MBS’s rise by American journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck, described one of the crown prince’s early big bets like this.
“Other world leaders controlled more powerful militaries and bigger economies (than MBS) but he had more distilled power than just about anyone else on Earth, and a willingness to follow a gut feeling with action,” they wrote in 2020.
Even before he was officially named as the crown prince, and therefore heir to King Salman, in 2017, MBS had taken control of the levers that will decide what type of country Saudi Arabia is in 2034, and beyond.
Those early, liberal-pleasing, social reforms were about making the kingdom a more attractive place for foreign investors and tourists. He wants more of us to visit and for some of us to stay. He also wants more of his people to feel they can spend more time and money in Saudi Arabia, and not have to go to Dubai or Europe to let their hair down a little, hence the reopening of cinemas, letting men and women eat in restaurants together, and the arrival of music festivals and major sports events.
The crown prince watches Oleksandr Usyk take on Anthony Joshua alongside Infantino in Jeddah in August 2022 (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images)
But at the same time as he was telling Saudis he wanted them to be part of a more moderate Islamic country, he also introduced a set of legal reforms to make it easier for foreign firms to do business there, with the proviso that they create jobs for Saudis, not just themselves.
Because it is the home of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites, Saudi Arabia has always had a tourism industry but it has not been particularly profitable; not on the scale MBS is aiming for, anyway. So, after centuries of not caring about the many pre-Islamic cultural sites in the country, the Saudi state now wants us to come and see them. It would also like to us know that the kingdom has mountains, where it even snows in the winter, and an unspoilt Red Sea coast that could put Egypt’s beaches out of business if it is developed and marketed properly.
And to pay for all this — and the new metro system in Riyadh, a new airport, a new airline, 11 football stadiums (including one in a new city in the sky) and everything else his imagination is spitting out — MBS needs money.
So, he brought in a sales tax, sold five per cent of Aramco and rounded up 500 of Saudi Arabia’s richest men, including his relatives, detained them in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel, and shook them down for more than $300million in cash and assets.
Much of that new money flowed into the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a previously inconsequential sovereign wealth fund MBS has turned into one of the world’s biggest pots of cash. It is also, despite those “legally binding assurances” the Premier League obtained before approving PIF’s purchase of Newcastle United, unquestionably his.
So, you have a leader, who at his age could rule Saudi Arabia for another 50 years, determined to transform his country, making it less reliant on a product which is slowly killing the planet and more open to the rest of the world, armed with the money and power to do so.
(Matt Slater/The Athletic)
He has also made it clear he thinks sport will play a big part in this process, saying he wants to create a domestic sporting industry that contributes more than 2.5 per cent to the economy, and he has acknowledged that being more active is the best way to tackle Saudi Arabia’s alarming obesity and diabetes problems. Being more active applies to girls and women, too, so he has already lifted the restrictions on sport for girls in schools and encouraged investment in women’s professional sport.
Yes, of course, this is coming from the lowest of bases — it was not happening at all only a few years ago — but it is also undeniably progress.
When I add all this up, I come to the conclusion that if we truly believe sport brings people together and can impact changes that other governmental levers cannot — and I do believe that — might Saudi Arabia actually be a good choice for a World Cup?
I have not fully made my mind up on that yet, but I am certainly more open to the possibility.
I remain very concerned about what is happening on the building sites of MBS’s giga-projects and I struggle to understand why women still need to wrap themselves up in black abayas and niqabs when their husbands and children can wear football shirts and jeans. I would also like to have the choice to have an alcoholic drink while I’m there, though I suspect that is something that will change before 2034.
But there is one final point I want to make, which is that we do not need to worry about regular Saudis not being up for this tournament.
My two best experiences in Qatar were playing Friday-morning cricket on a building site with Indian workers — the car-park cricket with Bangladeshis was pretty good, too — and travelling to Saudi Arabia’s incredible 2-1 win over eventual champions Argentina in the tournament’s first week.
The latter taught me that many Saudis are passionate and knowledgable football fans who can moan about their team when things go wrong but sing and dance when they don’t. They are also very friendly, and interested in the world outside of Saudi Arabia.
I saw that again in Jeddah last Friday, when the home side beat Ronaldo’s lot from the capital. It was the happiest and most fun place I visited in my week there.
It was the best of Saudi Arabia.
That’s not a bad starting point for a World Cup.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
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