Last April, at the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield, Barry Hearn joined the BBC panel for a fireside chat. The tournament had been overshadowed by sensational claims that its days at the Crucible were numbered and that it could be packed off to Saudi Arabia. The possibility was widely condemned as an act of vandalism against the game’s traditions and in the BBC studio Ken Doherty led with his heart.
“Does the history and nostalgia of the Crucible not mean something?” said Doherty to Hearn. “Aren’t there things in life that money cannot buy?”
“No,” said Hearn, rushing to the bottom line – the lifelong source of his fortune.
Doherty wondered, innocently, if Saudi Arabia could not build its own snooker tradition?
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“These people are not renowned for not getting what they want,” said Hearn, “and they want it now.”
In Saudi Arabia’s rampant colonisation of sport, snooker was a small nation with porous borders. No more than 15 years ago the game was on its knees, gasping for investment and attention. That memory is fresh. So, the World Snooker Tour signed a 10-year deal with Saudi Arabia to stage tournaments in the kingdom, including ranking events. Once that relationship had been established, Saudi showered the game with money.
Earlier this year the World Masters of Snooker was held in Riyadh, an invitational event that included the top 10 players in the world rankings. As a distinguishing feature a gold ball, worth 20 points, was added to the table, but it could only be potted in the event of a player hitting a 147. The prize for potting the golden ball was $500,000, rising to $1 million for next year’s tournament.
At this year’s event, nobody gave themselves a chance to pot the gold ball, but that was not the point. In snooker, 147 has always been the maximum score, just like 180 in darts. In Riyadh, in March, the maximum was 167. They took the most sacred number in snooker and subjected it to financial doping. The tradition of the game meant nothing.
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Another tournament, the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters, made its debut earlier this month. With a prize fund of over $3 million it is already the second richest event on the circuit – behind only the World Championships – and has instantly been ordained as one of snooker’s four major tournaments. This is precisely what the Saudis are seeking: instant status.
By now, their playbook is familiar. In each of the sports that Saudi Arabia has targeted they have tried to forge relationships with its most famous players, at whatever cost.
In snooker, they signed Ronnie O’Sullivan as an “ambassador”. In tennis, it was Rafa Nadal. In golf, they have spent hundreds of millions poaching some of the biggest names on the PGA Tour to play on their rival LIV Golf circuit: Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, and tens of others, on a sliding scale of celebrity and talent.
In football, they pumped industrial levels of Botox into their domestic league with Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema and a host of other players from the top European leagues, and when they couldn’t persuade Lionel Messi to join they made him an “ambassador”.
A contract seen by the New York Times indicated that the Argentina captain would receive about $25 million over three years for a range of promotional activities, including 10 favourable posts a year to his 470 million social media followers, and sharing images from an annual, all-expenses-paid holiday to the kingdom.
After one of his trips to Saudi Messi was suspended by Paris St Germain for missing training, an absence which the club described as “unauthorised”. Messi apologised to his team-mates and the fans, but also insisted that “he couldn’t cancel it”. In a diary clash, his day job had come second.
The basic premise of Saudi’s strategy is that everything can be bought, and everyone has a price. The venality and greed inherent in professional sport was a perfect vessel for their desire to launder Saudi’s image in the world and expand its footprint in the endlessly lucrative leisure industry.
Unsurprisingly, professional boxing has been one of their most successful conquests, a sport with a long history of accepting money from any source, without filters or conscience.
Last weekend at Wembley Stadium 98,000 fans – a British record – witnessed Anthony Joshua being schooled by Daniel Dubois in a card underwritten by the Saudis. In a light show beforehand the arena was bathed in the colours of the Saudi flag and the Saudi national anthem was played. Nobody was in any doubt who was running the show.
Joshua has a contract with Riyadh Season – described as “a series of entertainment, cultural, and sporting events held in the Saudi Arabian capital” – and there is one fight left on his deal. By midweek it was clear that Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi’s General Entertainment Authority, and a boxing fan, wanted a rematch between Joshua and Dubois. The two promoters involved – Hearn and Frank Warren – will do as they are told.
In the British media, and on social media, there was pushback against the playing of the Saudi anthem, but in a midweek press conference Hearn licked the boots of his paymaster. “You know what? I’ll play the anthem if they want, for what they’re doing, at every show.”
The Telegraph sportswriter Oliver Brown had his accreditation withdrawn after he described the event as a “brazen assertion of the Saudis’ sporting supremacy in the heart of London”. He also wrote that London had been transformed into a “Saudi Disneyland”.
In the kingdom, dissidence of all kinds is treated with extraordinary punishments, including death. In London on Saturday night they applied that intolerance for free speech with the only sanction available to them. Hearn, with effortless obsequiousness, made the risible claim that the only issue had been capacity on the press benches, and nothing political.
Boxing is so splintered, though, that it is ripe for a Saudi takeover. During the summer it was reported by Reuters that Saudi’s Public Investment Fund [PIF] was planning to sign “200 of the top male boxers in the world”, divide them into 12 weight classes and establish a global league, with regular bouts. This business model – based on UFC – would disembowel the current array of sanctioning bodies and big-fight promoters.
The chaos inherent in boxing makes it low-hanging fruit for a disrupter with the resources of PIF. That plan seems to be in a holding pattern. Nothing has been confirmed.
The Saudis, though, continue to invade sport on all fronts. The $20 million Saudi Cup is now the richest horse race in the world. The total prize money for races on that card is more than $33 million. This year horses came from 14 different countries, including Ireland.
Irish trainers have been sending horses since the event began five years ago, without experiencing any of the hostility that Graeme McDowell encountered for joining LIV Golf or Shane Lowry met when he played in the mega-bucks Saudi International a few years ago. In the court of public opinion Leona Maguire also seems to have a free pass to participate in events on the women’s tours sponsored by Saudi Arabia.
At the beginning of this year Saudi made what was reported to be a $2 billion bid to take over tennis, which would have involved merging the men’s and women’s tours under one umbrella. When the tours didn’t bite, three other tennis sponsorship deals were announced instead: the men’s and women’s rankings are now sponsored by PIF and the women’s end of season championships will be staged in Riyadh for the next three years. Prize money for the event this year will be a record-breaking $15.25 million, a staggering increase of 70 per cent on 2023.
Last January, before the deal was done, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post, expressing their trenchant opposition to the proposal.
“We fully appreciate the importance of respecting diverse cultures and religions,” they wrote. “It is because of this, and not despite it, that we oppose the awarding of the tour’s crown jewel tournament to Riyadh. The WTA’s values sit in stark contrast to those of the proposed host.
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“Not only is this a country where women are not seen as equal, it is a country where the current landscape includes a male guardianship law that essentially makes women the property of men. A country which criminalises the LGBTQ+ community to the point of possible death sentences. A country whose long-term record on human rights and basic freedoms has been a matter of international concern for decades.”
Their objection was ignored, and this is part of the Saudi game plan too: ignore the objections until the objectors are no longer the story. When PIF bought 80 per cent of Newcastle United about 7 per cent of the club’s fans were opposed to the takeover. For a while, Eddie Howe, the Newcastle manager, faced questions about the owners in his weekly press conferences – including in March 2022, when 81 prisoners were executed on one weekend.
That line of questioning has tailed off, though the executions have continued. The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights recorded 100 executions this year, until mid-July, which represented a 42 per cent increase on last year.
Saudi Arabia’s motives in this arena, though, are more complex than simply “sportswashing”. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the demand for oil will start to decline after 2040, and the Saudi regime is acutely conscious of diversifying its economy. Of its 32 million citizens, about 20 million are under the age of 30. Positioning Saudi Arabia as a prosperous destination for tourism, and sports tourism, is central to their futureproofing.
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Saudi’s investment in sport is essentially about their economy. “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of 1 per cent, then I will continue doing sportswashing,” Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said in a Fox News interview last year.
“I don’t care. One per cent growth of GDP from sport and I’m aiming for another one-and-a-half per cent – call it whatever you want, we’re going to get that one-and-a-half per cent.”
The process continues apace. In December, Saudi Arabia will be confirmed as hosts for the 2034 World Cup, as the sole bidders. Before that they will host the 2027 Asian Cup in football and the 2029 Asian Winter Games. A bespoke venue, amply supplied with snow and ice, is being built in the middle of the desert.
If sportswashing is a game, there is no point trying to keep score now. Saudi Arabia are so far ahead that they cannot be caught.
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