The World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, has indicated that his sport is prepared to welcome any investment from Saudi Arabia – but insists he will prioritise guaranteed crowds over cash when it comes to future world championships.
Lord Coe has been delighted to see Budapest’s National Athletics Stadium close to its 35,000 capacity every day at the World Athletics Championships, especially given the empty stadiums at the 2019 championships in Doha and the lack of interest in the event in Eugene, Oregon last year.
But when asked whether World Athletics would welcome any Saudi interest in the sport, Coe sounded keen but cautious. “It will probably be with my successors, but yes. However, it won’t be because we’re simply going there to cash the cheque and then move on.”
He added: “We can’t afford to have empty stadiums. I don’t really care where it is, it just makes you look marginal. If you’d had just a handful of people in for the morning sessions, and the evening session has looked a bit rinky-dink, then you set the tone and the style, and you guys would have probably written it.”
The 2025 championships are set for Tokyo. It is understood that five major cities have bid for the 2027 edition, but only Beijing and Istanbul have indicated their interest publicly. “We wanted it to be about us identifying our own strategy and seeing which cities, countries we thought could best match those,” said Coe. “So we’ve got some really interesting runners and riders this time.”
Coe also praised the Budapest organisers for staging an event that has widely been seen as a success, with well over 300,000 tickets sold, especially after Doha and Eugene.
“I’m not prepared any longer to listen to organising committees tell me that everything is fine and the tickets are going really well, and then suddenly at our April council meeting we hear that they’ve sold 15% of the tickets,” said Coe. “We’ve been to places where, frankly, I’m not sure most people two weeks later would have remembered that they were in this city.
“So we started a long time ago with Budapest. They’ve been really proactive. They’ve connected with a lot of the countries around us so we’ve sold many thousands of tickets outside of Hungary.”
Coe added that the sport’s growing popularity had helped it attract three new sponsors in recent months. “We’re just better at this now,” he said. “And you’re right, we don’t just sit there, waiting for a federation to nominate a city that’s important. You want the federation behind it. Whenever I go into a country, I say to the federation: ‘I will come but you need to sit me down and the finance minister, you need to sit me down with your tourist agencies.’ And I’m spending probably as much time on that side of the sport, as I am sitting with the federations.”
The governing body’s president also acknowledged he was in talks about staging a world championships every year when there was no Olympics, starting in 2026. “I’m certainly not ruling that out,” he said. “The first four years I was stopping this ship from sinking, the second four years was about doing all the things that my predecessors probably should have done – transfers of allegiance, female category, Russia, Belarus, all those things. The next four years have got to be about the product.”
That, Coe has indicated, could lead to some less popular events being scrapped. “It’s got to be about competition,” he said. “We’re not jettisoning the sport, but we have to be tough about it. There are things that are more popular than others.
He added: “All our all our tentative conversations which have started here, with the groups that we need to work with, whether they’re the coaches, whether they’re the member federations, we’ve got member federation sessions here, whether it’s commercial partners with the broadcast, or the shoe companies, they all want to be part of that journey. And you know, there’s only one risk for us at the moment given where we are and that’s just our innate conservatism.”
