A year ago today, Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Saudi Arabia. This begins an unprecedented attack on football. Within a year, the kingdom turns the sporting world on its head, while FIFA applauds – and many people experience incredible suffering.
Nobody saw this attack coming. Somehow it was already certain, but many people didn’t want to admit it. And no one could have guessed how abrupt and powerful it was. Like a dark shadow, Saudi Arabia’s offensive will eat into the entire sports world in 2023. With dangerous consequences for people without the power of sports stars. Threatening, powerful – and unstoppable.
Sure, pompously staged boxing matches presented as mega-events have been taking place in the kingdom for a few years now. Even when the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi was just a year ago. This was first followed by smaller sports such as snooker and then, in 2022, the major attack on golf. And Saudi Arabia has also not been a stranger in football since 2021 at the latest, when the English Premier League club Newcastle United was bought up and, according to “The Independent”, it provided decisive support for the founding of the Super League, which ultimately failed for the time being.
But that the shadow could mutate into such a dark ghost that the existing football system would suddenly be threatened. That a kind of attack on the old bulwark of Europe, including the top leagues and Champions League (there are always rumors about a team from the kingdom in the premier class) is taking place and could overshadow them in the future. That Saudi Arabia actually wants to hijack, take over and dominate football and other sports.
That Cristiano Ronaldo and Co. would serve as a means to an end so that people don’t talk about Salma al-Shehab, the 35-year-old doctoral student who was sentenced in August 2022 to a 34-year prison sentence and a subsequent 34-year travel ban. because she complained on Twitter about the lack of women’s rights in the kingdom. Nobody really expected that.
Benzema and Neymar follow Ronaldo
The football offensive is taking place with an odyssey costing almost a billion euros – just transfer fees, of course; Salaries, Neymar’s luxury hostel with 25 rooms or golden thrones on planes are not included. Ronaldo starts in January, followed in the summer by Brazilian superstar Neymar, Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema, ex-Bayern star Sadio Mané and many others. There is a lot of rattling in the framework of the top European clubs, also because no one can keep up with the Saudi millions (the financing rules of the European association UEFA obviously do not apply here) and the clubs in the Saudi Pro League are still allowed to buy when the transfer window in Europe has already closed .
According to an analysis by the auditing firm Ernst & Young, the value of the sports events industry in Saudi Arabia is growing by eight percent annually (from two billion euros in 2018 to an estimated three billion euros in 2024). The final goal is: Football World Cup 2034. The largest sporting event on the entire planet. But more about these plans later.
Next up is tennis, even if the type of investment is not yet clear. “There are discussions here at Wimbledon and it is said that the Saudis are getting closer with an offer,” said DTB President Dietloff Arnim to ntv.de on the sidelines of the Wimbledon tournament in London. Also in cycling (the leading racing team Jumbo-Visma is to be taken over), in handball (after the Club World Championships of the last four years, the state also wants to host a World Cup tournament in 2029 or 2031) and esports (after purchasing German esports companies, Riyadh will be organizing its own annual Esports World Cup from summer 2024 – of course with the largest prize money in the history of esports) Saudi Arabia will meet with open ears.
Islam and a “pot of money”
All of these investments require a lot of money. Or even a “pot of money,” as Uli Hoeneß described it in an interview with ntv/RTL in the fall. What the honorary president of FC Bayern meant was the PIF, the almost inexhaustible public investment fund. The kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, which owns some clubs in the Saudi Pro League, is said to be worth around 600 billion euros. The country also recently founded a new investment company that focuses exclusively on sports companies.
The sports takeovers are part of “Vision 2030”, with which Saudi Arabia wants to open up and modernize to the West and make the economy independent of oil within just two decades. But it’s about much more. For example, about power, because the Saudi ruling family wants to use big football stars and sporting events to contain the danger of rebellion and to calm and satisfy the young population (63 percent of the 32.2 million Saudis are 29 years old or younger). National identity should be strengthened.
But as is so often the case in the region, it is also about religion. Many summer newcomers belong to the Muslim faith. In addition to the generous transfer fees and salaries, religion and the feeling of security and belonging are also reasons for their odyssey to their homeland of Mecca and Medina.
Islam is a key ideological currency for the kingdom as it seeks religious soft power supremacy in the Muslim world. The goal: The kingdom will become a respected great power in a new multipolar world order through football and other glittering sporting events. In this context, Riyadh acts just as confidently as it does in the world of sport, as demonstrated by its rapprochement with Israel before the war in the Middle East. Geopolitics can hardly be separated from the world of sports.
“Torture and ill-treatment” in Saudi Arabia
The West and Germany are often initially critical of new players from the Middle East. But because the West has long been insisting on human, women’s and LGBT rights, Saudi Arabia sees itself encouraged to define what Islam stands for in the 21st century. And to rebuke the secular West, as it has long done to non-Western countries. A confident Riyadh not only wants to show that there is more than one way to organize sport and hijack football, but also to organize society.
On the one hand, the West must be able to endure this and accept that sporting events in the Gulf region and the Middle East represent highlights for the many local fans that they have never seen before. The jubilant mood of many Muslim fans from various countries at the World Cup in Qatar, for example when Saudi Arabia defeated Argentina or Morocco advanced to the semi-finals, demonstrated how great the desire for Ronaldo and Co. can really be.
On the other hand, the West is not raising its finger without reason. The kingdom is rightly highly controversial due to its various human rights violations. And anyway, the 20 percent of Saudi Arabia’s 32.2 million citizens who live in poverty – many of whom are women or members of households headed by women – cannot attend the glitzy football, boxing or golf events participate.
The Human Rights Watch 2023 Country Report sees “peaceful dissidents, intellectuals and human rights activists arrested” and citizens “sentenced to decades in prison for posting on social media.” Like Salma al-Shehab. Abusive practices in detention centers, “including torture and ill-treatment”, prolonged arbitrary detention and confiscation of assets without due process, remain pervasive.
Bin Salman stands by sportswashing
But that’s not all: “The human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is deteriorating in many ways,” said Stephen Cockburn, who is responsible for economic, social and cultural rights at Amnesty International in London, at the end of November. War crimes in Yemen? The alleged killings of hundreds of Ethiopian asylum seekers at the border? 81 executions in one day? Also Minors are not immune from the death penalty. The Saudi rulers want to disguise this dark shadow – and this is where sport, with its powerful appeal, comes into play.
The principle is called sportswashing. Use major events and investments in sport to hide the crimes and human rights violations. Images of Ronaldo and not Salma al-Shehab or Jamal Khashoggi should dominate abroad. At the end of September, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom, spoke out for the first time about these allegations and admitted that this method is a kind of state policy. In an English-language interview recorded in Saudi Arabia with US broadcaster Fox News, “MBS” said that he “didn’t care” about the allegations against his country. For “MBS” only the increase in gross domestic product counts. “If sportswashing increases my gross domestic product by one percent, then I will continue sportswashing,” he said. And so, little by little, sport is being swallowed up by the shadow of crime.
Bin Salman, who has also been the country’s prime minister since 2022, is one of the most powerful men on the planet and cares neither about the allegations nor about the people in his prisons and those executed. Nevertheless, the crown prince, who is responsible for one of the darkest periods of human rights abuses in the country’s history, has long found great admirers in FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino. The FIFA boss walks in and out of the kingdom, diligently shaking hands and grinning eagerly at cameras. According to the British “Times”, the Saudi oil giant Aramco is to become a new major sponsor of FIFA for around 100 million euros per year.
However, FIFA and Infantino not only legitimize the sportswashing methodology and the large investments in football and the like while the human rights situation is deteriorating; they go a huge step further. At the end of November, they will make Saudi Arabia the quasi-fixed host of the 2034 World Cup, although the actual award will not take place until the last quarter of 2024. That’s fitting: Back in 2013, then-FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke said when explaining the world association’s strategy for selecting World Cup hosts: “I’m going to say something crazy, but sometimes less democracy is better for organizing a World Cup.” Valcke was later convicted of corruption, but his love for autocrats remained.
Migrant workers in Saudi Arabia “as disposable goods”
For Riyadh, the summit is near. The end goal of all efforts in the attack on the sports world. The ultimate football tournament as the brightest diamond in the sportswashing crown to date. The takeover of world football is guaranteed for at least one summer (or rather winter). Qatar has shown the way, Saudi Arabia will go one step further in terms of pomp and “the best World Cup of all time” (O-Ton Infantino).
And with regard to human rights violations in the labor sector, the situation in the kingdom is similar to that in the emirate. Trade unions, strikes and protests are prohibited. A Human Rights Watch report ruled just a few days ago that the Gulf states were treating migrant workers “as disposable goods.” Although the sports world will continue to suffer until the 2034 World Cup, the real next catastrophe that is looming is a human one.
Meanwhile, Cristiano Ronaldo earns 200 million euros a year, shakes Mohammed bin Salman’s hand and smiles for the cameras – and Salma al-Shehab suffers in prison because she stood up for women’s rights.