A League of Their Own

Why Saudi Arabia bought your favorite athlete.

The kingdom of sports

Something strange is happening in the world of soccer.

Exceptional talents, including World Cup champions and former FIFA Players of the Year, are leaving top clubs to find new homes, and hardly a day passes where headlines do not blare the latest splash signing. This shuffle of talent is typical to every offseason—but what’s different this year is the destination; these players aren’t landing in Milan, London, or Paris, as one might expect, but in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Mecca.

Last summer alone, Saudi Arabian soccer clubs shoveled hundreds of millions into purchasing the best players in the world and bringing them to the kingdom. What was once a steady trickle has become a violent downpour. While the Saudi Pro League still lacks the depth of the world’s top domestic leagues, its Best XI — or all-star team — now boasts as much pure talent as any top league in the world.

Since 2021, the kingdom has also poured billions into foreign soccer tournaments, gobbling up parts of Great Britain’s world-straddling domestic league. In that year, Saudi’s flagship $776 billion Public Investment Fund completed its takeover of Newcastle United. The club’s fans gathered outside its stadium by the thousands to cheer their new, very rich benefactors. British soccer, the most-watched in the world, has just had its cupboard raided, all part of a relentless global offensive by the world’s most infamous petro-dictatorship.

Why?

With a median age of around 30, Saudi Arabia has a young, highly literate population: a demographic which reflects its 38-year-old crown prince, prime minister, and absolute monarch Mohammad bin Salman (MBS). Often perceived as acting against the wishes of the ossified, corrupt elite, the crown prince is thought to be dragging the country into modernity — at sword point, if need be. At the core of his signature Saudi Vision 2030 plan is the aspiration for his country to be a premier power leading from the position of prominence that he feels its wealth ought to accord it.

There’s just one problem: Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is abysmal. The kingdom still regards beheading by sword as the proper Islamic method of execution. Last year, 81 people were executed in a single day, many belonging to the country’s Shia minority and convicted of vague offenses like “monitoring and targeting officials and expatriates.” Women are intensely surveilled and restricted, and extraordinary privilege is wielded by a sheltered, out-of-touch few. From an international perspective, one episode in particular stands out — the grisly, squalid, and allegedly MBS-directed 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist (and member of the Saudi elite) Jamal Khashoggi, from which the kingdom’s relations with the West remain seriously damaged.

MBS knows that if Saudi Arabia is to have a hope of leading on the global stage, the country desperately needs to change its reputation. So he has launched a world-wide, multi-billion-dollar charm offensive aimed at doing exactly that. His kingdom has courted intimate relationships with many of the world’s biggest sport stars, celebrities, companies and financial institutions, who are flown out and feted at its pop-up awards shows, EDM festivals, professional conventions and tradeshows, as well as athletics competitions that are streamed to audiences of many millions around the world. Lacking the dynamic civil society required to spontaneously generate the vibrant collisions of talent, will, and perspective necessary to organically dominate in these spheres, Saudi is instead flexing its staggering petro-wealth.

Imagine that you ask someone in the West what they think of when they think about Saudi Arabia. The resulting word cloud would likely include “rich,” “deadly,” and “totalitarian.” Soft power of the sort MBS is trying to wield, when deployed in the right way, is one of the tools states have to change this. Saudi Arabia’s chief objective in pouring billions of dollars into buying the world’s best athletes consists in moving “soccer,” in large-type font, to the center of that word cloud — along with “racing,” “golf,” “cycling,” and, just maybe, “the future.” The hope is that a historically unprecedented array of bread and circuses, paid for dearly, might one day come to completely occlude words like “bonesaw,” “dismemberment,” or “decapitation.”

To compliment its massive oil wealth, its hard power, Saudi needs more of what the political scientist Joseph Nye termed “soft power.”

Rather than coercing by force of arms, or cold hard cash, soft power is how a nation achieves its global aims by sheer charisma. If wars are won with missiles, tanks, and (increasingly) drones, then the ensuing peace is won by soft power — by securing their respect, capturing their imagination, and providing a model for what all other nations should aspire to, soft power can co-opt one’s opponents rather than defeating them, win ideological allies, and shape the world in one’s image. “Smart power is neither hard nor soft,” writes Nye. “It is both.”

That’s very grand. But it’s not always clear what soft power does, exactly, though almost everyone agrees that you’d rather have it than not. The end of the Cold War was multivariate and complex, but only a cynic could totally discount the potency of rock n’ roll or Coca-Cola — it was conspicuous, mused my Russian studies professor, a former refusenik, that a user of the late urban Soviet black market might forgo basic necessities to get their hands on a pair of blue Levi’s jeans.

Anyone familiar with the popular Sid Meier’s Civilization series might recognize similar dynamics in exaggerated form: You can win the game simply by amassing in your nation the world’s most impressive works of art, literature, music, and architecture, which in turn generate the most tourism and world sympathy. Eventually, you conquer the competing bloc without firing a shot, just by the evident superiority of your ways of living.

MBS figures, somewhat sensibly, that the kingdom’s best hope to lead is to spend — and Saudi’s launched a glitz-krieg.

As a strategy for getting world-class players to hold their noses and accept Saudi money, it appears to be working. Speaking to ESPN, Odion Ighalo, a Nigerian soccer player and former top Saudi league scorer, made no bones about what motivated his, or anyone else’s move to the kingdom: “When you are young, yes, you play for passion… I’ve played for passion all my life. Now, it’s for money…” Ighalo pointed to Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer star who also recently moved to the peninsula. “Ronaldo has earned 100 times more than I have in my entire life and yet he went to Saudi Arabia. Did he do that out of passion? It’s for money.”

In golf, which the kingdom has also made a run at purchasing, players formerly blacklisted from the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) for taking Saudi money will now be welcomed back into the main tour just as it is swallowed whole by LIV, a new, for-profit Saudi-led venture. Known for its thumping electronic music soundtracks (for the past few centuries, golf has been played in near-to-absolute-silence), LIV enlisted some 50 former PGA Tour members, prying loose multiple former champions and several of the top players in the sport. Asked by CNN to comment on his new bosses, American pro-golfer Bryson DeChambeau responded that “Nobody’s perfect”:

It’s unfortunate what’s happened, but it’s something I can’t necessarily speak on because I’m a golfer… I’m not going to get into the politics of it, I’m not specialized in that. What I can say is they are trying to do good for the world and showcase themselves in a light that hasn’t been seen in a while.

There are simply very few individuals or institutions in the West equipped to respond: “More cash? No, thank you.” Glitz and glamor have the almost unmatched facility of papering over ugliness. Jeers fade, and money has a way of sticking around. Though there are exceptions — Messi chose to go to America, and Tiger Woods reportedly turned down nearly $1 billion to remain in the PGA — in the dimly construed battle between money on one side, and principle on the other, money has been kicking principle’s ass.

That’s the story so far. But there’s reason to doubt that accruing sporting prestige will launder the kingdom’s reputation in the long run.

Soft power primarily works its magic in the world as a form of cultural export. Saudi Arabia, as custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, already enjoys considerable influence in the Sunni Muslim world. But casting about for similar relevance in the West, it is attempting to import prestige on a large scale. It’s doubtful that this will confer the same benefits. Other soft power heavy-hitters like “Cool Japan” or South Korea reap the advantages by their status as originators (of cars, of Oscar-winning movies, of anime), rather than as curators.

More fundamentally, Saudi reinvention is characterized by a fanciful, almost deluded impulse that could really only exist in a monarchy. It’s of a piece with massive MBS-backed building projects like The Line, a neofuturistic metropolis forming a “linear smart city” in the middle of the Arabian desert. Everyone knows the kingdom is a parochial society which brooks little dissent or difference. Stinking of inauthenticity, artificiality, and hypocrisy, Saudi’s cultural-offerings-in-a-can may only serve, in the end, to draw more negative attention to its human rights abuses. “Nobody’s perfect” isn’t all that useful a spin when it comes to human lives.

And ultimately, if Western culture, often wildly lunging at mass appeal, is cloying or corny in its eagerness to please, it is still, at its best, truly open to all and decidedly opt-in. By contrast, Saudi’s pitch is something more final, less an invitation than a dictum: You will love us. You don’t have a choice. Resistance is futile. Seeking to replicate the fruits of a free society, a system maintained by coercion will, in the end, fall short.

Saudi Arabia may one day look out on the world and see itself, having bought much of it. Whether the world will ever see itself in the kingdom is another matter entirely.

A version of this article was originally published at Persuasion.

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