Cristiano Ronaldo grabbed the scarf in the colours of the Saudi Arabian flag and waved it at the sparse but enthusiastic crowd, who responded with rapturous cheers. It was a gesture of defiance rather than a victory salute, encapsulating the Saudi equivalent of “Keep calm and carry on”. Monday night’s Asian Champions League Elite game between Al-Nassr and the Uzbek side Neftchi Fergana had ended with a 3-1 win for the Saudi club coached by Ange Postecoglou, with Ronaldo, supported by Sadio Mané, scoring, the smattering of star names indicative of the lure of the Saudi Pro League.
Yet this isn’t quite how Ronaldo and co would have anticipated life in Riyadh. The meagre attendance aside, Monday’s game was delayed by a threat of missile attacks from Yemen’s Houthi rebels. A safety warning issued 15 minutes before kick-off came two days after 13 people died and more than 300 were wounded by Houthi strikes on Riyadh’s King Khalid international airport.
Saudi Arabia’s hosting of football’s Asian Cup in January and February is being questioned – it insists preparations are on track – and a combination of rapidly changing geopolitics and a reality check being applied to the more quixotic projects means the kingdom’s position in the sporting landscape looks hugely different from a year ago. Golf’s Asian Tour has postponed next month’s Saudi International indefinitely, next month’s cycling urban world championship in Riyadh has been cancelled, the Fifa esports World Cup – which had been due to start on Friday – has been postponed and the Six Kings Slam tennis event, due to be held next week, has been pushed back until late December. Alongside the humiliating collapse of LIV Golf, the planned 2029 Saudi Winter Asian Games has been relocated to Kazakhstan, which has actual mountains with snow.
In the football sphere, it has been reported that five proposed new stadiums for the 2034 World Cup may not be built. One of them is the Neom stadium, which was planned with an elevation of 350 metres, after huge cuts to the fantastical city development project known as the Line. In September last year there were signs all might not be what it seemed.
At a Washington DC investment thinktank the Newcastle chair, Yasir al-Rumayyan, dressed in suit and tie, very much in sync with the patrician vibe of the event, addressed hedge fund chiefs and entrepreneurs along with the private equity billionaire David Rubenstein. Unsurprisingly, Newcastle’s Carabao Cup triumph was barely mentioned. Al-Rumayyan was principally there as the chair of Aramco, the Saudi oil company, and as the governor of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund.
PIF is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom and the man accused by US intelligence of approving the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Al-Rumayyan took time, in between banter about how the result of his golf match with Donald Trump was a “state secret”, to lecture the audience on history and why the need for Saudi to divest from oil was existential “Portugal was one of the richest countries in the world with all the gold that they had,” he said. That’s what the crown prince always talks about … ‘We have the oil disease.’ We cannot rely only on oil because this will make you more dormant, less active.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
