The Saudi takeover of European football is about power, not sportswashing

In early 2019, a rising star of the Italian far-right took to Twitter to lambaste Serie A’s decision to hold the Supercoppa in Saudi Arabia for the second consecutive year. Giorgia Meloni was at that point the leader of a small but growing movement in Italian politics; her Brothers of Italy party had won a little over 4% of the vote in the 2018 general election. The Supercoppa has long been staged outside Italy: previous editions have been held in New Jersey, Beijing, Tripoli, and Doha. But for Meloni, the decision to stage the 2019 final in Riyadh was beyond the pale: she labeled it “an absolute disgrace,” describing Saudi Arabia as a country that discriminates against women “and our values.”

Meloni’s protest did nothing to throw the Italian football authorities off course. Following a two-year Covid-enforced hiatus, the Supercoppa last year returned to Saudi Arabia, where it will be played until 2029 under the terms of a new deal reportedly worth €138m. This year saw the inauguration of a four-team format for the competition, contested by the winners and runners-up of the previous season’s Serie A and Coppa Italia; in Monday’s final, staged in the 25,000-seat KSU Stadium in Riyadh (home of Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr), Inter triumphed thanks to a late goal from Lautaro Martínez. After sweeping home Benjamin Pavard’s clever cut-back, Martínez ran the length of the field to celebrate with the thousand or so Inter fans gathered behind a big “CURVA NORD” banner placed over the sideline hoardings.

I watched the match from my desk in New York. What struck me was how utterly unremarkable it was, how little it differed from the standard TV spectacle of a European cup final: the coverage on Paramount Plus, with commentators Chris Wittyngham and Matteo Bonetti calling the match from a studio in Connecticut, was slickly assured, and the action on the field unfolded before a full house of mostly engaged and enthusiastic spectators. The fireworks and lasers at the trophy presentation were the same as the fireworks and lasers at any trophy presentation. It was a similar story at the final of this year’s Spanish Super Cup and last year’s Club World Cup, both held, like the Supercoppa, in Saudi Arabia. Apart from the ghutras in the stands and the visitsaudi.com ads around the stadium, these contests felt indistinguishable, in their pre- and post-match rituals, from finals played in any capital city in Europe. They offered yet more evidence of football’s transformation into a modular product that can be plucked and plugged into any country at any time; they were sport from nowhere.

They could take place anywhere but increasingly, there’s only one country into which these big matches are being plugged. Seamlessly, suddenly, Saudi Arabia has disrupted the traditional home-and-away geography of competitive sport and become European soccer’s third place – a stage for the wholesale transplantation of increasingly significant chunks of the professional football calendar.

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The recent return of Jordan Henderson to Europe a mere six months after signing for Al Ettifaq, like the reported desire of Karim Benzema to abandon Jeddah for Lyon, has been presented by many media outlets as a setback for the Saudi Pro League in its quest to establish itself among club football’s elite. But the Saudi authorities, one imagines, will not be overly perturbed by the occasional defection. Many ageing stars are still happy to collect the Saudis’ millions and play out their careers on the Arabian peninsula, and the success of events like the Italian and Spanish Super Cups shows the outlines of a secondary strategy emerging: if the world does not want to embrace the Saudi league, other leagues can simply be moved to Saudi Arabia.

Plenty of professional sports leagues play games overseas. This year, for example, MLB will travel to Seoul (for the season opener), Mexico City, London, and the Dominican Republic, while Australia’s NRL will kick off in Las Vegas; the NFL tours Europe every season. But the internationalization of professional sport is usually led by individual leagues and is fairly limited in scope; roadshow events are seen as a kind of publicity tool, an exercise in global evangelization. The Saudis are doing something quite different: importing a whole sport for their year-round enjoyment. Football is not being “sold” to them in the PR meaning of the term but in a literal, commercial sense.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Meloni, now her country’s prime minister, had nothing to say about the location of this year’s Supercoppa. Her vociferousness on the subject of Saudi incursions into Italian sport ended the moment she took office in 2022; one of her early acts as prime minister was to tweet her gratitude for the message of congratulations the Saudi king and crown prince sent her following her electoral triumph. “Italy is strongly interested in Middle East stability and further cooperation on energy security, investments and human rights,” she wrote. The human rights piece of that cooperation pledge has been quietly dropped, but there’s been plenty of action on the energy and investment front: last year Italy and Saudi Arabia signed a deal to deepen economic relations, and Meloni has aggressively courted the Saudis for investment in her government’s new strategic “Made in Italy” fund, which has an initial endowment of $1bn.

The political context is important because it points to a larger purpose behind the Saudi takeover of football. It’s easy to forget how many sports the Saudis have upended in recent years: soccer, golf, motorsport, tennis, mixed martial arts, horse racing, snooker, gaming, tennis, and chess have all received major injections of Saudi cash since 2016, the year that crown prince Mohammed bin Salman released his Vision 2030 blueprint for the transformation of the nation’s economy. Saudi Arabia’s designs on international sport are usually presented as part of an effort at reputational laundering, or “sportswashing”. By welcoming the world’s athletic elite and cementing itself as a regular stopover on the international sporting circuit, this argument goes, Saudi Arabia will somehow rehabilitate its image in the eyes of the global consumer, forcing everyone to forget about all those pesky human rights abuses and embrace Saudi Arabia as a vacation destination like any other.

But the abuses have not been forgotten; if anything the Saudi takeover of football has triggered more discussion of Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record than ever. The staging of events like the Spanish and Italian Super Cups suggests that a quite different strategy is at play. The Saudi sport project is not about outreach, or soft power, or presenting a cuddly image of the House of Saud to the world. It’s about making the world accept Saudi Arabia on its own terms. It’s about the consolidation of Saudi economic and strategic power, rather than some goofy exercise in trying to make westerners want to holiday in Riyadh.

The channel through which this is being achieved, of course, is cash. The power of Saudi money – of which there is, thanks to the country’s vast oil reserves, an abundance – to the weak economies of Europe has only grown in an era of high interest rates and scarce global investment capital. Saudi Aramco, the largely state-owned oil concern, has been described as “the most profitable company in the history of the world”. Aramco and the Public Investment Fund, which is rapidly being transformed into the biggest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, give the Saudi state unrivalled spending power: the government plans to make more than $3tn in investments, across sectors as diverse as energy, transport, logistics, tourism, and sport, by 2030.

Internazionale took home €8m in prize money for winning the Supercoppa, enough for a decent addition to the playing squad over the winter transfer window. For cash-strapped clubs in Italy and Spain, the money on offer to hand over whole segments of the football calendar to another nation is simply too good to refuse. Although Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin has ruled out Saudi clubs participating in the European Champions League, there’s nothing – beyond fan outrage and domestic authorities’ fealty to history and tradition, of course – to stop Saudi Arabia from throwing money at other competitions and leagues in Europe to get them to partially relocate to the Middle East.

Buying up European soccer is a way of ensuring internal and external adherence to the Saudi regime’s economic and strategic interests. Historically, Saudi Arabia’s leaders have practised what political scientists refer to as “omnibalancing”, a balancing of interests that uses external support to nullify internal threats and internal legitimation to counter external dangers. Bin Salman’s Vision 2030, the economic plan that triggered the Saudis’ “sporting turn”, was a response to two major exogenous shocks that occurred around 2014-15: the global oil price slump, which illustrated to Saudi authorities the dangers of excessive reliance on oil rents and the need for economic diversification; and the nuclear deal-led rapprochement between the US and Saudi Arabia’s arch-enemy Iran, which mandated a form of strategic hedging against the Saudis’ traditional military dependence on America.

The Saudi takeover of football addresses both of these aims, and needs to be understood within the context of this history. The government in Riyadh uses its vast oil windfalls to sponsor a complex system of transfers and subsidies for much of the country’s population, but part of the ambition of Vision 2030 is to wean Saudis off the teat of entitlements and foster a more entrepreneurial society. Sport is one of the public goods that can, theoretically at least, take the place of state welfare – the date of the country’s long-term vision just so happens to coincide with its bid to host the 2030 World Cup. Offering the Saudi public a diet of high-quality European and local football to enjoy is a way of building the leisure economy that will ensure protection against oil price volatility and popular compliance with the ruling order, the “circuses” part of a classic bread-and-circuses strategy of power consolidation; it’s also a consolation prize, of course, in the absence of real political freedom.

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But pouring money into soccer also binds Europe to Saudi national interests in meaningful ways that often get lost in the conversation around “sportswashing”. Europe is another geostrategic pole for the Saudis to cultivate in addition to the US, China, and Russia. As advertisers, football associations and the investors (European and American) who control many of the continent’s major football clubs become entangled in the Saudi economy, the pressure on Europe’s political leaders to pursue cooperative relations with bin Salman’s regime grows. The alignment between international finance and the Saudi regime inevitably enhances Saudi Arabia’s authority on the world stage, since it heightens the financial risks of contesting Saudi actions, even when they offend western values.

For the Saudi royal family, buying up a single sport – or several sports – is more than a simple act of reputational scrubbing; it’s designed to secure the ruling regime’s legitimacy, both internally and externally, and by extension to validate the Saudis’ view of their own region and place in the world. Sport may seem trivial when assessed against the global contest of economic and military power, but for the Saudis it is anything but.

As the fireworks fizzed into the night sky over Riyadh after Inter’s Supercoppa victory, British and American forces were busy bombing the Houthis who’ve brought maritime commerce in the Red Sea to a halt. The Houthis, as is well known, are backed by Iran, and have been the target of a brutal years-long Saudi military campaign. Lautaro Martínez’s stoppage-time winner did not cause the US-led bombing campaign, in case that needs to be made clear, but the juxtaposition – of Martínez holding the cup aloft at the precise moment when western powers were striking off the Arabian peninsula in accordance with Saudi strategic aims – provided a neat illustration of the hard interests behind the Saudi takeover of football.

Power is what the Saudis want – and Europe’s highest soccer authorities are eagerly doing their bit to give it to them.