Saudi Arabia is now stealing sporting headlines as prince pursues global ambitions
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Saudi Arabia has been in the headlines a lot lately – this time because they are trying to find their place in the sporting world.
A lot of money is spent. In an announcement that shocked the sporting world on Tuesday, the US-based PGA Tour of golf announced a merger with its rival, Saudi-backed LIV Golf and Dubai-sponsored DP World Tour (formerly known as the European Tour) on, ending a feud that has defined men’s professional sport for the past year.
The shocking partnership has caused a stir in capital cities and on links courses around the world.
Already home to Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, who is reportedly receiving a $200m annual package, the Saudi Pro League also welcomed Ballon d’Or winner and France international Karim Benzema this week.
The last time most people paid that much attention to the kingdom was in 2018, when Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated by Saudi government agents inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The kingdom’s golf coup is perhaps future Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s (MBS) greatest sporting achievement to date.
He’s already secured a place on the Formula 1 circuit, hosted all-star boxing matches and has orchestrated a number of global and regional music events to delight local audiences, for whom it all seems almost unreal.
Before MBS came into power, none of this was possible.
The speed and scale of his changes have earned him an unexpected and rare popularity in Saudi Arabian history among many of the country’s youth.
In sport, reputation is built on moments of brilliance. Conversely, in politics, awards are usually slow to earn. It can take years for decisions to take effect. It’s different with MBS.
He is in a hurry, as a disruptor. In fact, he consolidated his power by shaking off the old guard in 2017, many of whom were potential rivals for power.
More than 200 royals and businessmen have been jailed at the Ritz Hotel in Riyadh this year over corruption allegations. The result has been that formerly flamboyant and talkative royals with potentially powerful royal lineages now have far less influence and little chance of gaining it.
It’s fair to say that he’s still considered a potentially dangerous interlocutor among MBS’s former western partners.
To them, he is credited with dispatching the hit team that killed, dismembered and burned Khashoggi, who criticized MBS’s rapid reforms. MBS denied any personal involvement in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, but accepted full responsibility as the country’s leader.
Khashoggi’s assassination has tarnished MBS’s reputation and potentially dashed his father King Salman’s ambitions to modernize the kingdom.
When King Salman ascended the throne in 2015, the country was ossified, its royal court and bureaucracy bloated, encrusted and, many Saudis report, deeply corrupt.
Conservative Islamist police ruled the streets and women were banned from driving. The country has been stuck in a cultural time warp since its rulers panicked when Muslim radicals stormed Mecca in 1979. Fearing for their future, the kings appeased the Islamists by giving conservative religious scholars an outsized role in running the kingdom.
When King Salman came, the 21st century passed Saudi Arabia.
The largest and most powerful of all Gulf kingdoms was a cultural outlier, lagging behind its neighbors in economy and development by decades and remaining woefully under its weight.
Until King Salman empowered MBS, not his eldest but his chosen son, to fix the problem.
The LIV Golf Tour is the most recent example, not only of his intention to make it happen, but the effort he is willing to put in to make it happen.
Since taking power, he has banished the religious police almost overnight, diminishing Islam’s place in public life and replacing it with a new breed of Saudi nationalism.
Women were allowed to go to soccer stadiums with men, national holidays were held out in the streets with music and dancing, something unheard of before the MBS era.
However, the changes didn’t stop there. Liberalization allowed unmarried men and women to sit together in cafes, work in the same office, and shop together in the same stores. New neighborhoods in Riyadh emerged to accommodate a new way of life.
State-of-the-art office complexes with fountains and palm trees and sidewalk cafes that looked and felt like Dubai lured the young countries out of their homes.
For many, MBS is the architect of a new and freer way of life, but those who get in his way and question his decisions on social media are in danger of disappearing. Even the few released under international pressure, like Loujain Al Hathloul, are out but cannot leave the country and have been warned to keep their thoughts to themselves or risk going back to prison.
But despite the hard edges, a gentle force is at work. Saudi Arabia has recently begun building a top-flight football league, with rosters featuring high-priced European stars.
MBS wants the world to take it as seriously as many of its citizens seem to be doing now.
Moscow and Beijing got the message. Chinese President Xi Jinping has become an increasingly close geostrategic partner, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is benefiting, at least for now, from MBS curbing oil production and ignoring US concerns that high oil prices are helping Moscow to delay its war in Ukraine finance.
The Crown Prince has also embarked on a regional and international diplomatic path aimed at making the kingdom a bigger player on the world stage. Saudi Arabia has been at the forefront of efforts to pull Syria out of the crisis, trying to mediate in conflicts like those in Sudan and even Ukraine. MBS has begun repairing fences with former enemies such as Turkey, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and even archenemy Iran. The thought is that for the success of his economic plans he must guarantee stability.
In oil, he made Saudi Arabia a bolder player. After quickly heeding US demands to open faucets and cut prices, the kingdom is now ignoring those demands, at the risk of damaging its decades-long partnership with Washington. The message is that Saudi interests come first. And those interests are to bring in as many petrodollars as possible so the kingdom doesn’t run into a budget deficit or its mega-projects fail.
Like Putin and Xi, MBS wants what he believes is best for his country, and for him that means breaking the old paradigm of access to affordable energy in exchange for Western security guarantees that has pushed Saudi Arabia into a cultural impasse, an option no longer exists.
perception is everything. America’s alignment with Asia, its failure in 2011 to stand by its ousted allies during the Arab Spring, and now its support for Ukraine, which most in the Gulf see as a rather misguided Western hegemony tied to failed wars in Iraq and remembered in Afghanistan help take MBS’s tracks to a new level in a relationship in which he also has some leverage.
The US wants to increase oil production, support Ukraine and achieve normalization with Israel.
But on the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah lie the potentially greatest challenges for MBS.
The clock is ticking for his 2030 Vision, a bold and bold reimagining of city life backed by non-oil industries. It’s not just a new way of life, but a necessary employer to support the country’s outsized young population. Two-thirds of Saudis are under the age of 35, and thanks to MBS, they’re finally enjoying what their peers in the outside world have been enjoying for years.
Saudi officials say the 2030 Vision for a new Red Sea city and another mega-project – the new Murabba – in the capital Riyadh may never partially materialize but is intended to inspire the country and investors.
These are big bets, to keep people at work for a happy life, and less of a challenge to the MBS’s autocratic rule.
Plans of this magnitude are realized more often over generations than in the lifetime of a generation that is already alive and yearning for a meaningful future.
MBS is in a hurry. He relies on stability through an intoxicating cocktail of ambition and panacea for the people. The image makeover is in full swing, but the longer it takes to implement the substance, the higher the risk of failure.