Take two sporting stars. Cristiano Ronaldo will believe that he deserves the Ballon d’Or even when the barn door is beyond him, while there is talk of Bryson DeChambeau asking for upwards of half a billion for his next trick. What happens with this duo may tell us much about the next phase of the Saudi sports binge.
Ronaldo refused to play for Al-Nassr in the Saudi Pro League (SPL) on Monday because of dissatisfaction with the Saudi Public Investment Fund. PIF owns four teams, and Ronaldo believes they are favouring others, namely Al-Hilal, who have just signed Karim Benzema.
In a strongly worded riposte, the league highlighted the supposed independence of the four PIF teams: “No individual, however significant, determines decisions beyond their club.” Not even an ambassador for Saudi’s 2034 World Cup on a contract said to be worth £500,000 a day.
Ronaldo refused to play in a game for Al-Nassr over his disappointment at a lack of investment in the squad
HAMAD I MOHAMMED/REUTERS
Meanwhile, it has been a difficult month in LIV Golf. You would have to go some to beat the time Greg Norman said “we all make mistakes” when asked about the dismembering of a dissident journalist in the Saudi embassy, or the time a former White House press secretary was chased out a room at the Centurion Club by a scribe asking, “Have you got blood on your hands, Ari?” but they have lost two big players in Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed. DeChambeau is now renegotiating his contract from a position of strength, but the bigger question is whether PIF will continue to pay massively inflated fees for sports stars?
LIV had a partial victory this week, gaining world ranking points for the top ten players at events. The number of points given are similar to the top ten at a regular DP World Tour tournament. This is important because a player’s ranking is a means of qualifying for the majors, and, hence, points make LIV more attractive as a suitor. If they also strike a deal with the DP World Tour to quash fines for its members playing in clashing LIV events, another barrier to recruitment will fall. Not dead yet, then, but LIV chiefs are deeply frustrated that the points were restricted to only ten players in a 57-man field.
The backdrop to this is PIF’s shift in approach. Hit by falling oil prices, some things are now deemed implausible. The $8.8trillion Neom giga-project is being drastically scaled back and the plan for the Asian Winter Games in 2029 has been scrapped. The Saudi Vision 2030 is due to be amended and target sectors such as AI, while there is an increasing desire for each part of its portfolio to earn its keep.
DeChambeau has grumbled about the state of LIV as he renegotiates his contract
STRINGER/REUTERS
“The heady days of 2023 when it did seem as if PIF had access to limitless resources are over,” said Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute think tank and author of Kingdom of Football. “It is likely that the Saudi authorities will want to see more of a financial return on investment going forward, beginning with the sale of PIF’s majority stakes in the four Saudi Pro League teams and the sale of the franchises in LIV Golf.”
According to Ulrichsen, previous PIF investments targeted less tangible returns including “access to political and economic networks, and legitimacy in Western markets as part of the Kingdom’s post-Khashoggi diplomatic rehabilitation”.
LIV has cost PIF more than $5billion (about £3.65billion) so far and Scott O’Neil, LIV’s chief executive, said this week that he did not expect the circuit to turn a profit for at least five years, and possibly ten. He stressed that the PIF commitment is there, but how much of one is unclear.
Looking through a broader lens, Ulrichsen said oil prices and lower government revenues meant Saudi authorities would need to make “difficult choices” as we approach 2030, long pinpointed as a year of transformation.
“There are signs that the Saudi sports bubble is losing momentum with LIV facing setbacks and remaining loss-making and the indefinite postponement of the 2029 Asian Winter Games,” he said.
The plan to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games has been scrapped — they were due to take place at a purpose-built mountain resort in the Trojena area of Neom, the Saudi’s mega-city project
AFP
“The attempt to create a winter resort at Trojena was always among the more fanciful of the Saudi sports objectives, but any pruning of objectives to reprioritise scarcer resources around key projects such as the World Cup makes sense.”
As well as falling transfer fees in the SPL, the Saudis have cancelled a deal with the IOC to host the Olympic Esports Games and withdrawn a bid for the Handball World Championships in 2029 and 2031. Saudi still sees the value in sport and has varying degrees of influence in boxing, tennis and Formula One. PIF’s spending on Newcastle United has had to fit Premier League spending rules, although it is pushing ahead with plans for a new training centre, but events in Saudi, itself, have attracted mixed reviews. For all the fawning to Saudi officials, heavyweight title fights at 3am do not make for a febrile atmosphere, and after playing in the World Series of Darts in a 1,000-seater theatre Riyadh last month, Nathan Aspinall said: “I feel like they weren’t all there of their own accord.”
The World Cup is the clear centrepiece of the revised programme. As for a Ronaldo resolution, Ulrichsen added: “His value goes far beyond that of LIV golfers by virtue of his global recognition and the reach of his posts on social media and his presence at key events in Saudi Arabia.”
DeChambeau says talks about a new deal are progressing but his recent remarks have included unprecedented notes of dissent. It started with: “Things have changed. Things have got to improve.” Then he said the switch to 72 holes was not what he had signed up for. If this was 2022, then you could imagine PIF saying money was no object for LIV’s Ronaldo, but the vista has changed.
LIV restarted this week with a better UK broadcast platform on TNT Sports and players lining up to damn the world-ranking decision. “Doesn’t seem fair,” Jon Rahm said. “Small fields out there [on other tours] get full points.”
Lee Westwood posted: “I have no idea how they came to this conclusion. I’m sure they’ve run projections to suit. At the end it seems like they ran out of excuses to at least award a few points.” Ian Poulter added: “First and foremost it’s good to get LIV recognised. On the flipside I’m not sure what algorithm they have used.”
O’Neil pointed out that 82 per cent of the field will not get points whereas that figure is 15 per cent in other no-cut tournaments. Nevertheless, he added that in the unanimous Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) vote, the outgoing PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan backed LIV to get points. So did the DP World Tour chief executive, Guy Kinnings. That would once have been inconceivable.
Kinnings and O’Neil have also been talking about dropping future DP World Tour fines. This has become a thorny issue because Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton are among those with multimillion dollar bills to pay if they want to stay on tour and play in the Ryder Cup. They have appealed against their sanctions. A compromise is likely.
If the fines do go away, even with case-by-case conditions, DPWT members will have less to lose by signing for LIV. And in the background the gossip rumbles on about the DP and LIV joining forces. At present the DPWT has a strategic alliance, and money, from the PGA Tour but there is a break clause in 2027. Westwood’s view: “The European Tour [DPWT] are in a hole, caught between the funding from the PGA Tour and needing LIV players to boost their fields to keep sponsors, promoters and TV happy.” Scoff at that if you like, but there were 11 LIV players at the DPWT’s first big event of the year in Dubai. On the women’s side the Ladies European Tour already has the $15million PIF Global Series.
Four years on from LIV’s launch, few people in golf talk about sportwashing anymore. How can the Trump-loving PGA Tour seriously do that when the president cosies up to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the White House? In the new Saudi, LIV’s fight is no longer to break into American golf; it’s to break even.