Saudi Arabia is throwing more money at sports.
The Middle Eastern nation is leveraging its huge sovereign wealth fund to lure football athletes to join Christiano Ronaldo in the Saudi Premier League. The offers for around 20 foreign players are worth over $1 billion, according to the New York Times.
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The exact size of the Saudi fund is unclear, though the majority of the fund is from the Public Investment Fund which is led by Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s crown prince.
Saudi Arabia has taken a deep dive into sports in recent years, most infamously through the LIV Golf Tour. The tour offered professional golfers unworldly sums of money to ditch the PGA Tour, such as the $200 million for legend Phil Mickelson and $100 million for 2023 PGA Championship winner Brooks Koepka.
Ronaldo received an annual salary of $200 million in 2022 to sign with Saudi club Al-Nassr, and there have been rumors of late that football legend Lionel Messi has been offered a larger sum on the heels of his triumph at the 2022 World Cup.
The Times reports that the league would operate differently from most of Europe in that signings would be centralized with the league rather than with the teams. That means that clubs are not independent in acquiring talent, instead needing to work with the league and potentially having players assigned to them.
However, many have claimed that the country is “sportswashing” -- a term for using sports as a means to cover atrocities and injustices. Saudi Arabia has faced criticism regarding many human rights violations against women and the LQBTQ+ community, on top of the controversy surrounding the government’s murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
