Beyond 2034: can the Saudi Arabia soccer dream truly be sustainable? | World Cup 2034

Last week’s confirmation that Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup was met with a strangely muted reaction throughout the footballing world – and at the Fifa Congress itself, which took the form of an extended Zoom call. Mostly this was because the announcement itself was a foregone conclusion; with no other countries bidding to host the 2034 tournament, and the vote in favor of the 2030 hosts effectively dependent on simultaneous approval of the Saudis’ 2034 bid, there was little of the fanfare that usually accompanies Fifa’s biggest proclamations, and none of the shock that accompanied the revelation of past World Cup bid winners like Qatar. The debate about the Saudis’ suitability as a World Cup host was lost well before last week’s Fifa Congress; the country’s appalling human rights record and odious history of internal oppression are no secret to Fifa, but football’s peak body brushed all that aside and went ahead with last week’s formalities regardless.

If the spectacle of Fifa member states raising their hands to applaud over Zoom in support of the Saudis’ 2034 bid felt like a strange way to seal the petro-monarchy’s footballing coronation, however, it’s perhaps because a vague sense has started to come into focus that all is not well with the Saudi sporting project. This is not to suggest that the Saudis will not succeed in holding the 2034 World Cup; the tournament is the showpiece event in crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s long-term initiative to wean the Saudi economy off oil and turn his country into a hub of the global leisure economy, so no expense will be spared in ensuring it is a success.

But the world looks very different today to 2016, when bin Salman’s Vision 2030 blueprint for the Saudi economy was first released, or even early 2023, when the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, took over four teams in the Saudi Pro League and tossed off almost $1bn in transfer fees to lure the world’s top footballing talent to the Arabian peninsula. Viewership of Saudi football in the major western TV markets is appallingly low; the spigots of cash that foamed the runway for Ronaldo and the rest to head east appear to have dried up; the median team in the Saudi Pro League remains a strange jalopy of veteran Champions League talent bolted onto a weak spine of local recruits; and the league itself has made virtually no impression on the global footballing consciousness, except as a money pit. Football fans outside Saudi Arabia have, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to thrill to the prospect of weekend clashes between Al Hilal and Damac FC, and there are signs that fans inside Saudi Arabia are beginning to feel equally lukewarm: the league’s average attendance this season is just 7,880, which makes the Saudi league roughly as popular as Peru’s Primera Division.

Money, potentially, could help cure some of these ills, but money seems in increasingly short supply: recent reports indicate that the Saudi government has now de-prioritized work on the NEOM giga-project amid construction delays and rising costs, and the general direction of travel in Saudi public finances is toward retrenchment rather than expansion. As Riyadh shelves plans for the exotic mega-cubes and vast linear cities that were set to be at the heart of NEOM, there’s now a real question of how sustainable the Saudi dream of turning its own football league into a competition to rival Europe’s best really is. The macroeconomic environment that favored a raid on European football in 2022 is no longer so helpful: oil prices have dropped considerably and remain well below the level the IMF says the Saudis need them at to balance the national budget; oil supply from countries like the US, Brazil and Canada is on the rise, which increases the likelihood of sustained softness in the price of crude; and consumer demand from China, the key market for hydrocarbon economies like Saudi Arabia’s, looks set to plateau in the coming years.

Saudi public finances remain relatively healthy – public debt, for instance, is well below the levels commonly seen throughout the developed world – but the era of spending without consequence, spending for fun, seems definitively over. Meanwhile the developed world, and the US in particular, has exited the cycle of persistently low interest rates that characterized the period following the financial crisis; despite the Saudis’ recent move to streamline foreign investment laws, this means that the easy structural logic that smoothed the passage of institutional money from the low-interest-rate West into fast-growing, high-yield “emerging economies” like Saudi Arabia no longer holds. All of which suggests that there are real economic clouds gathering on the horizon as the Saudi state attempts to sustain the spending needed to realize its sporting ambitions.

Geopolitical distractions have multiplied for the Saudis at the exact moment that the global economic backdrop has begun to sour. Riyad Mahrez, Neymar, Ruben Neves and the rest touched down in Saudi Arabia at what appeared to be a moment of growing stabilization across the Middle East: Neymar arrived in Riyadh just a few weeks before Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN that Israel was on the verge of a historic peace deal with Saudi Arabia. Now the Saudis face a region ablaze, and the fall of Bashar al-Assad has created a real contest for influence in Syria, long considered a client state of Russia and Iran, in which the Saudis will wish to be decisive. This will place further strain on already-stretched public resources.

There’s a mild historical irony here in that the whole impetus for Vision 2030 was to escape the vagaries of the oil price cycle. But oil rents are still the Saudis’ main source of revenue; escaping the resource trap still depends, under bin Salman’s plan at least, on the money that energy sales bring in. Structurally, diversifying away from energy makes sense as long as the revenue streams that energy reserves guarantee remain in place. But the comparatively docile and predictable world that triggered the Saudis’ “footballing turn” – a world of high oil prices, bottomless Chinese consumer demand, frisky western capital, and geopolitical stasis throughout the Middle East – simply does not exist anymore. To be fair, the Saudi state still has a good amount of fiscal room to continue spending to fund its various national development projects. But Riyadh’s increasing recourse to debt – issuing bonds to global investors – suggests that it is beginning to feel the financial strain of juggling multiple priorities simultaneously.

Recent footballing history is littered with cautionary tales of unsustainable league growth, and the story they tell will be worryingly familiar for the Saudis. The J League expanded aggressively in the mid-1990s, attracting foreign stars like Gary Lineker, Paulo Futre and Basile Boli, but several clubs quickly ran into financial difficulties amid the bursting of the Japanese real estate bubble; eventually a number of franchises folded and the league was restructured in the late 1990s on a more modest foundation. Chinese president Xi Jinping approved a “football reform plan” in 2015 under which the government’s stated goal was to qualify for, host, and eventually win a World Cup.

This ambitious plan effectively gave the green light for breakneck development of the Chinese Super League, and it wasn’t long before astronomical transfer fees and eye-watering salaries lured some of the biggest names in the world game – Hulk, Carlos Tevez, Oscar – east. “China looks to have the financial power to move a whole European league to China,” Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger fretted at the time. But the bubble burst almost as quickly as it inflated: a new mood of austerity took hold across China as Xi moved to curb irrational spending and excess among top Communist party cadres, and eventually this found a form of local expression across the Super League in a new “luxury tax” that effectively terminated the era of big-money transfers to China.

Meanwhile the slow implosion of the Chinese real estate sector took several of the league’s splashiest clubs – many of whose owners, such as the troubled Evergrande Group, had significant exposure to the domestic property market – down with it: the death of the Chinese Super League project was meaningfully linked to the market correction that came from over-zealous domestic development, especially in construction. The final blow came with the pandemic, which led to a general slump in broadcasting and sponsorship revenues. The Chinese Super League today is a far more humble project than it was in the go-go years of weekly £200,000 salaries for Graziano Pelle and Marouane Fellaini, and China has now effectively abandoned its dreams of global footballing supremacy; the national “football reform plan” will not be troubling the text of a Xi Jinping oration any time soon.

In both Japan and China, economic conditions intervened to kill the dream of national footballing supremacy. In both places, a nationwide construction boom (hello, NEOM) mirrored and in some senses fostered an unsustainable expansion of the domestic soccer league. That may, however, be as far as the analogy can take us here. Modern Saudi Arabia is not Japan in the 1990s or pre-Covid China. In those countries, the failures of various sporting-developmental projects could be absorbed at no great political or cultural cost; both the Japanese and Chinese economies were far bigger and more meaningfully diversified at the point of their league implosions than Saudi Arabia’s is today. The Saudi Pro League could very well be too big and important to bin Salman’s plans for his country to fail. But how long can the poorly attended party last?