How Saudi Arabia is teeing up for global golf and disrupting the West’s dominance
- The Middle Eastern country, renowned for its oil and dubious human rights record, is using huge amounts of wealth to fund sports including golf
- Rebel circuit LIV Golf, backed by Saudi Arabia, is now pushing to merge with the US PGA and European DP World Tours after two years of disputes
The resulting riches are being diverted into sport, disrupting its traditional Western dominance.
While today’s big story is LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia’s involvement in sport will generate many more money-driven, politics-heavy headlines.
Welcome to the ‘party hole’
There are echoes here of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket and Rupert Murdoch’s Super (Rugby) League. An aggressive, well-funded competitor takes on the sport establishment, promising to shake up a rigid game, and bringing in new money and younger fans with lashings of razzmatazz.
LIV Golf offers shorter-stroke play contests and a competitive team format. In April, Australia got a taste of it in Adelaide. Large, raucous crowds turned up, witnessing innovations like a “party hole” complete with terrace, bars and a DJ.
LIV lured leading golfers such as Australia’s Cameron Smith with enormous contracts, in his case worth A$140 million (US$95.7 million). In response, the main tours banned LIV-signed golfers from most of their tournaments.
Inevitably, it ended up in the courts, with LIV suing the PGA Tour for what it said were restrictive practices, and the PGA countersuing for inducement to break contracts.
Peace suddenly broke out last week via a joint press release announcing that the tours and LIV Golf would morph into a collectively owned, for-profit entity. This came as a shock to tour golfers in an ostensibly player-run organisation, who found out via Twitter.
Golf’s turmoil is symptomatic of the impact of huge injections of capital into sport from outside the US and Europe. It does not only come from the Middle East. The Indian Premier League, both men’s and women’s, has comprehensively refashioned the economy of world cricket.
China has invested huge sums in football, and Beijing is the only city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
Money and image
Human rights come to the fore every time such non-Western countries host a major sports tournament or buy a major sports property. A 2021 report by human rights group Liberty found Saudi Arabia had invested more than US$1.4 billion in sports. Much more has since been spent on football, golf, motor racing, cricket and the like.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought English Premier League football club Newcastle United, and has recruited superstars such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to the Saudi Pro League.
The sight of a laughing Fifa president Gianni Infantino seated alongside MBS at the Qatar World Cup opening ceremony fuelled suspicions that the kingdom’s bid for the 2030 men’s World Cup could already be in the bag.
Critics of the sportswashing concept argue that it is imprecise, and moreover is a routine feature of national and corporate public relations all over the world. It is also used selectively, despite countries like Australia having their own deficient human rights records regarding First Nations peoples and refugees, and trading freely with repressive nations.
But sport attracts greater scrutiny because it is carried on television screens, not container ships. This profile was clear when Infantino was forced, after an angry response by players, to abandon plans to make Visit Saudi a major sponsor of the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
Saudi tourism may have missed out this time, but Saudi capital will continue visiting many more sports and countries.