On October 31, the president of FIFA, the body governing international football, confirmed via his personal Instagram account what already appeared a fait accompli: Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup tournament. The path to this outcome has been marked by extraordinary dispensations in the kingdom’s favor. The 2030 World Cup was granted to six countries spread across three continents, accelerating the return of Asia/Oceania as host for the subsequent tournament to be held four years later. The Asian Football Confederation promptly announced its support for a Saudi bid. That same week, the kingdom’s tourism campaign, Visit Saudi, was presented as a new sponsor for the confederation.

This remarkable series of announcements concisely illustrates Saudi Arabia’s new ambition in global football and the kingdom’s growing influence inside football’s governing bodies as well as the inherent tie-ins both have with Saudi Arabia’s self-promotion. As the kingdom seeks a larger role in global sports and to bring audiences to a new, visitor-friendly Saudi Arabia, the footballing world is feeling the impact. Saudi Arabia is spending billions of dollars domestically and internationally. This investment is directed at all levels of the sport – domestic league, Saudi national team, club ownership abroad, and the hosting of regional and international tournaments. This big bet on football is itself a part of broader stakes in sports and entertainment, which are themselves embedded within the larger Vision 2030 blueprint. The money and relationship building have already garnered widely publicized wins: the luring of star players and personalities, the purchase and rapid improvement of Premier League club Newcastle United, and successful bids to host major tournaments, culminating in the biggest of them all, the 2034 World Cup.

How are these different goals and platforms linked? Can they be successful and on what terms?  There are dangers as well as opportunities – for Saudi Arabia and the sport – in these multiple entanglements.

Saudi League Ambitions

In 2022, the Saudi Pro League was ranked 20th in the world in terms of spending. But the takeover of four clubs by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, with oil company Aramco assuming control of a fifth, has injected close to $1 billion in state funds into the Saudi league, upending the landscape of both Saudi and European football.

The summer 2023 European transfer window set a spending record in large part due to the committed pursuit of players by the Saudi Pro League. Some of the world’s most famous players – Neymar, Karim Benzema, Sadio Mané  ­– as well as a host of younger promising players, joined Cristiano Ronaldo in Saudi Arabia. The league ended the window with the second-highest net spending of all leagues internationally with three of the top five net spending clubs and Riyadh’s Al-Hilal and Jeddah’s Al-Ittihad taking the top two spots. British media reported the consternation of clubs in the top spending and earning Premier League, which are now working on the assumption that the Saudis “have enough money to keep hoovering up talent from across Europe for the next 10 years.”

The Saudi Pro League’s chief operating officer, Carlos Nohra, says the objectives for the league are to “improve on-pitch performance through the acquisition of world-class players, to fill the country’s stadia and ultimately to drive the commercialization of the vastly improved overall product.” Targets are to become one of the top 10 leagues in the world in terms of player quality, revenue, and viewership. As with other goals of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 transformation agenda, this is ambitious, even considering Saudi Arabia’s respectable football pedigree as a strong performer in Asian club and country competitions.

These plans do not suffer from a lack of resource commitment. After the recent spending spree, the market value of Saudi Pro League players was around $1.24 billion, placing the league at a similar level as the Turkish Super League ($1.25 billion), which is ranked the ninth-best league in Europe. While well below the player value of top-flight leagues in England (around $10.95 billion) and Spain (around $4.7 billion), the Saudi Pro League is not too far off the estimated market value of Major League Soccer ($1.27 billion), the U.S. league that lured superstar Lionel Messi (to the disappointment of the Saudis).

Of course, player value alone does not determine league quality and revenue. Opta, which provides a power ranking of pro leagues calculated by head-to-head matches and country and extant league hierarchies, rates the Saudi Pro League 27th internationally, with the MLS standing at 15th. However, the recent spending spree by the Saudi league did raise its Opta rank nine places in less than a year, suggesting persistent investment could result in further rapid advancement toward the goal of becoming a top-10 league.

Still, other factors will continue to constrain Saudi improvement in league quality and commercialization. The Saudi Pro League’s average game attendance is about half that of MLS. Though average attendance at Saudi Arabia’s top four clubs (all located in Riyadh and Jeddah) in the 2022-23 season did near the MLS average, other venues across Saudi Arabia are much smaller and regularly draw crowds under a thousand attendees. The disparities across the league in both ticket sales and player quality are larger than in many leagues the Saudi Pro League is seeking to displace. This will only be exacerbated by the PIF takeover and its focus on four big city teams, posing a challenge to achieving competitiveness and profitability across the league. The excessive heat in Saudi Arabia for much of the season also affects the intensity of league play.

Trade-offs may also appear between the improvement in the quality of the Saudi Pro League and the development of Saudi national team players. Currently, Saudi Pro League clubs are restricted to only eight foreign players, which is meant to protect space for developing local talent. However demands to improve the quality and international marketability of the league are already pushing demands to expand this cap.

Advancing the competitive level of the league will also be a challenge as Saudi Arabia competes in the Asian Football Confederation, whereas Turkish clubs, for example, play with the top international clubs in the much more prestigious and globally watched Europa and Champions League competitions. This has prompted speculation that Saudi Arabia will use its growing financial influence to force its way into the Champions League, a possibility rejected by the head of the Union of European Football Associations. The PIF does have a presence in the league competition through its purchase of Newcastle United, which qualified for the 2023-24 Champions League club competitions and offers licensing opportunities to Saudi brands.

What Does Saudi Arabia Really Want?

The expensive efforts to make the Saudi Super League more competitive are often explained as steps toward commercialization. As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman controversially stated in a recent Fox News interview, “If sport washing going to increase my GDP by way of 1 percent, then I will continue doing sport washing. I don’t care.” Plans to take the Saudi Pro League private speak to this financial motive, as do other sports investments, such as those in golf.

The Saudi government has set a target of quadrupling the Saudi Pro League’s annual revenue to $480 million by 2030, particularly through greater ticket sales and expanding broadcasting rights. Yet ticketing revenue did not meaningfully increase for the league as a whole after bringing international star Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia in January. Expanded broadcasting deals only brought in an estimated $710,000 in 2022, a pittance when compared to the Premier League’s revenue of more than $4 billion.

Simply put, it is hard to see a plausible profit rationale in the Saudi leadership’s direct investments in the Saudi Pro League. The $1 billion spent in the transfer market in 2023 will need to be supplemented with future investments and improvements in club training and performance facilities to continue to improve the league’s quality and position. The size of these investments will dwarf the stated goal of $480 million in annual revenue by 2030, even if that were to be met or even exceeded.

Rather, the emphasis on star signings and expanding broadcast coverage reinforces a media-driven strategy to bring global attention to the league and Saudi Arabia. This desire for an international audience is clear in Saudi actions and statements, such as that of sports presenter Walid Al-Faraj’s claim that the rivalry between leading Saudi clubs Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal was the strongest in the Middle East, discounting the historical Egyptian rivalry of Al Ahly and Zamalak as it “lacked a substantial international audience.”

And the arrival of world-renowned stars, such as Ronaldo, Neymar, and Karim Benzema, has enhanced the appeal of the Saudi Pro League for international sports media. New broadcast arrangements have been negotiated with Fox Sports in the United States, Canal+ in France, and DAZN for Canada and many countries in Europe. Global sports management group IMG will manage a live international feed with commentary in English. Prestigious European sports journalists can be found attending Saudi league games as far afield as Taif and recording sports podcasts for Saudi Arabia’s English-language daily Arab News. Many European sports journals and daily newspapers are now covering games in the Saudi Pro League, and there are reports that prominent social media personalities are being paid to promote the league.

This media-driven strategy and state investments only make sense in the broader context of Vision 2030 and its program of sports development, tourism, and, ultimately, global economic integration of the kingdom through trade, technology, and culture. This requires building international ties with elites in sports, arts, and technology – and ultimately changing views of the kingdom in fundamental ways to attract global elites and audiences to the rapidly evolving kingdom.

To pull that publicity, and ultimately comfort, in Saudi Arabia’s direction, there are few better known and followed brand ambassadors than global football stars, such as Ronaldo. His contract with Saudi Arabia extends well beyond football into promoting the kingdom and its new ventures. His universally recognized visage has been deployed toward national promotion, such as a video of him in a traditional thobe put out by Al-Nassr to celebrate Saudi National Day. Ronaldo’s recent Instagram post of a meeting with Mohammed bin Salman to discuss the launch of Saudi Arabia’s new esports ventures earned more than 10 million likes. And he can even be seen as a diplomatic goodwill ambassador, attracting hysterical fans in Iran when his team visited the country just as Riyadh was pursuing detente with Tehran. By enlisting these almost universally known and marketed personalities, Saudi Arabia is now better and differently known globally, from advertisements for its heritage and entertainment sites to knock-off Ronaldo Al-Nassr jerseys sold in Asian marketplaces.

Attraction or Disruption?

Saudi Arabia’s success in using its financial clout and growing ties with international governing bodies to attract global football to the kingdom is undisputed. Saudi Arabia’s success in securing the right to host the 2034 World Cup, the preeminent event in global football and indeed international sports, is remarkable, especially coming so soon after Qatar’s somewhat controversial hosting of the 2022 World Cup. The Saudi leadership paved the path to this achievement in stages. In 2027, Saudi Arabia will host the AFC Asian Cup, a competition held every four years to determine the continental champion of Asia. This will provide Saudi Arabia an early target to bring on new facilities and test new infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia likewise plays host to a number of cup tournaments for other league competitions. Saudi Arabia began hosting the Italian and Spanish Super Cups in 2018 and 2019, respectively, changing the format of both to four-team tournaments and proposing to extend the arrangements for 10 years. It likewise began hosting the African Super Cup in 2023. All provide promotional opportunities to introduce the kingdom to varied international audiences. These arrangements have proved profitable for the cash-strapped leagues but have been met with controversy from local fans, with these traditional cup competitions played far from home and reformatted to accommodate the Saudi move.

This speaks to the disruption Saudi Arabia has brought to the footballing universe, a point underlined by the flow of European stars to the kingdom and the inflationary entry of Saudi club teams into the market for European players. Yet, Saudi Arabia is following a direction already paved by other Gulf countries, notably Qatar. There are differences, particularly in Saudi Arabia’s size, which allows it to throw more weight around, and its willingness to work at times outside of governing rules and structures. The pervasiveness of Saudi, and other Gulf state money, across the support engenders many conflicts of interests, as the Saudi state in some form serves as owners, brand sponsors, and hosts, with financial connections across all of these mediums. It is indeed a future possibility for Saudi state-owned clubs, sponsored by Saudi PIF companies, to compete against each other in a regional club championship itself branded with Saudi state sponsorships.

Certainly, the entry of Gulf money pushes both Saudi Pro League and Saudi national football further toward a more global orientation, more reliant on broadcast media and global exposure than local stadiums and fans. Yet this global direction of football writ large is already well established and accelerating under the influence of Gulf money. The entry of states, with their own national agendas and governing cultures, does inject political and even moral questions to global football governance, but thus far governing bodies and elites have been willing to accommodate.