As part of his efforts to whitewash his foreign image, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) continues to spend heavy amounts of money on international entertainment and sports events. However, these billions of dollars failed to achieve any of his goals.
Sources familiar with the matter revealed that Saudi Arabia’s football spending spree may have transformed it into one of the world’s biggest transfer markets, but relatively low attendance numbers and minuscule revenue from media rights illustrate the scale of the challenge facing the local league.
The Saudi Professional Football League has so far averaged 8,500 spectators per game this season. While that’s a 24% increase from last year, it’s lower than the average for Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham AFC which until recently competed in the fifth tier of British soccer.
The latest season runs through May 2024 and will include more games featuring clubs backed by the Public Investment Fund, which may help boost attendance figures. Still, that’s a modest return for teams in the kingdom, which spent $875 million bringing in foreign players from June 1 to Sept. 1.
Brazilian star Neymar and Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema made the move to Saudi Arabia this year for big money contracts, following Portuguese icon Cristiano Ronaldo who signed on in late 2022.
Those signings helped the Saudi league secure deals to broadcast games in more than 130 territories bringing in four times as much as last season’s total revenue of about $710,000. That’s still a fraction of the $4 billion of revenue from broadcast rights in the 2022/23 season of the English Premier League.
“They are not massive revenues to finance all the activities that we’ve got, but it’s certainly significant movement,” the Saudi Pro League’s chief operating officer, Carlo Nohra, said.
The sources pointed out that Saudi Arabia has spent at least $6.3 billion in sports deals since early 2021, more than quadrupling the previous amount spent over a six-year period, well-informed sources revealed.
Saudi Arabia has deployed billions from its Public Investment Fund over the last two-and-a-half years, according to the sources.
The Saudi spending on sports on a large scale has completely changed professional golf and transformed the international transfer market for football, in what critics have labeled an effort to distract from its human rights record.
It dwarfs data compiled by Grant Liberty two years ago, estimating that Saudi Arabia spent $1.5 billion in the period between 2014 and early 2021.
The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, with assets estimated at $620 billion. The PIF has spent lavishly to attract players from around the world and organize international sports events.
Despite the domestic and global difficult economic crisis and its involvement in Yemen’s war, Saudi Crown Prince MBS spent an insane amount of money in one game or company’s ecosystem.
Dot eSports revealed that MBS was one of the biggest spenders, affirming that he has already spent more than $6,000 on The International 2020 Battle Pass.
Over the last three years, he spent a combined $69,494 and counting on the Battle Pass alone, with $42,100 of that coming from 2018. He has been the top contributor in each of those years and set a record by reaching Level 175,000 in 2017.
Saudi Arabia’s interest in gaming and eSports comes from the very top, with the Crown Prince said to be an avid “Call of Duty” player.
