As you watch LIV Golf or read another news story about a Premier League transfer paid for by Gulf money, you can’t help but ask yourself, “How did we get here?” The answer seems to be linked to Riyadh and the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is one of the world’s most powerful money-making tools.
Saudi Arabia is no longer just an oil exporter. Its sovereign wealth assets are now worth more than $5 trillion and are spread out among Gulf funds. PIF is at the center of it all. It is a buyer. A patient, aggressive buyer with a long-term view. With a 60 percent stake in Lucid Motors, major positions in Activision Blizzard and Uber, the creation of LIV Golf, and ongoing negotiations with the PGA Tour that have gone past multiple deadlines with no clear resolution in sight, it looks like it has a very long list of things it owns in part or in whole.
The simple explanation, and the one that most American news stories use, is that this is sportswashing. Many Americans still think of Saudi Arabia when they think of the September 11 attacks, the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the war in Yemen. The idea is that Saudi Arabia is trying to become liked by holding golf tournaments and signing soccer players. It is a clean story. It’s also likely too easy.
A 2023 interview with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made it clear that he doesn’t care much about the sportswashing charge as long as his strategy brings in the money he wants. Depending on your point of view, that kind of honesty can be either welcome or scary. But it does show that the investments aren’t just for fixing the image. They’re about something bigger: Vision 2030, the Kingdom’s big plan to get off of oil before it runs out, build a private sector, hire people (63 percent of the population is under 30), and grow industries like entertainment and tourism that don’t exist on a large scale in the country yet.
That’s not a PR stunt when it comes to sports. It is the infrastructure. The Saudi government’s Sports for All program, which began in 2018, has specific goals for all age groups, including housewives, to be physically active. By 2030, the government wants 40% of the population to be physically active. When you look at it that way, LIV Golf and hiring soccer stars aren’t just a way to show the world Saudi Arabia. They talk about setting goals back home.
There are real human stories behind this shift that don’t get much attention in the West. When Saudi Arabia allowed women to open gyms in 2017, it was a quiet policy change that didn’t make a lot of news around the world. But for women like Sara Rahimaldeen, a mother of four decades who went on to become a competitive athlete and personal trainer, it changed their lives in real ways. These days, girls also take PE in school. Saudi women compete all over the world. Kevin Kerns, an American tennis player who used to play, teaches the sport in more than a hundred Saudi schools and hopes to reach more than 70,000 kids this year. These aren’t just ideas.
That doesn’t take away from the fact that people are worried about human rights or the Kingdom’s political history. These worries are big and will not go away. But instead of putting everything into one frame, it’s worth taking a moment to think about how complicated things are.
Some of what PIF is doing in Western markets is the same thing that sovereign wealth funds do everywhere else: they put money into markets to try to make money and get a better position in the market. The difference is in size and maybe even in ambition. Only Saudi Arabia put in a bid for the 2034 World Cup. Reports say that it is looking into getting a big stake in Indian cricket. It’s not going away, and its use in Western tech and sports is only going to grow.
For American businesses and policymakers, the more useful question isn’t whether to fight PIF’s reach—that ship has mostly sailed—but how to work with it in a way that makes something useful happen. The other option, which is to be suspicious and create tension without using force, doesn’t seem to help anyone, especially the athletes, fans, and companies that are already in the middle.
