Expo and football, all the maneuvers of Saudi Arabia also on Rome
To clean up its image, Saudi Arabia has launched significant investments in sport. And it invested in AS Roma to promote itself on Expo 2030. Here are Riyadh's numbers and objectives
What happens in Rome and Rome? The Roma Sports Association confirmed today that it is in negotiations with "a private group from Riyadh", the capital of Saudi Arabia, interested in becoming the main sponsor of the football club: it is Riyadh Season, an event initiative linked at the Saudi Ministry of Culture, presented as “one of the world's most important entertainment events”. The agreement is worth 25 million euros over two years.
AS Roma had already specified that the sponsorship agreement would be "strictly commercial" and not linked to Expo 2030, which both Riyadh and Rome (the capital of Italy, not the club) are candidates to host.
The decision on the city where the next universal exhibition will be held will be made at the end of November by the Bureau international des Expositions, which is based in France .
AS Roma's clarifications on Riyadh
AS Roma specified that the agreement with the Saudi sponsor, later revealed as Riyadh Season, will be "strictly commercial" and completely unrelated to the competition between the two capitals for Expo 2030.
Last August the Saudi national airline Riyadh Air announced the main sponsorship of Atletico Madrid, one of the most important football teams in Spain.
Politics steps aside
According to Il Messaggero , in the Roman and national political buildings the position towards the agreement between AS Roma and Riyadh is one of detachment: "we cannot enter into the choices of a private company", reports the newspaper.
Why didn't Meloni promote Rome to the UN?
But is Giorgia Meloni's government really interested in bringing the Expo to Rome? Because the Prime Minister, unlike the Saudi representative, did not use her speech at the recent United Nations General Assembly to promote the candidacy of the Italian capital: the mayor of the Democratic Party Roberto Gualtieri (a Roma fan, moreover) and the president of the Lazio Region Francesco Rocca (at the head of a centre-right council).
Various reconstructions maintain that the lack of promotion to the UN is due to two things: the fact that Rome's victory in the Expo 2030 tender would first and foremost benefit Gualtieri's Democratic Party (Rocca, however, is an expression of the Brothers of Italy); and to the fact that Meloni would have understood that the Saudi candidacy is the one that has the greatest chance of winning (it is the most appreciated by France ). Thanks to the lobbying of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is reportedly promising large investments in exchange for support for the Expo.
You spend it and spend it on Saudi Arabia
Spend and spread seems to be the development formula chosen by Saudi Arabia with investments bordering on megalomania, such as those in football and even in the planning of a 170 km long linear city in the desert. Here is what ISPI writes about the "geopolitics of sport" undertaken by the country also with the aim of cleaning up an image deteriorated by past complicity with terrorism and the terrible state of human rights.
The geopolitics of sport
Until a few years ago, Saudi Arabia was known to most for being the guardian of the holy places of Islam, of which the kingdom espoused the most extremist views, and for its immense reserves of crude oil. But in recent times the House of Saud has been working to renew the image of the country compromised by the terrible state of human rights, and to relaunch the economy by freeing it from the structural dependence on hydrocarbons.
The cornerstone of this renewal effort is represented by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the richest sovereign funds in the world which, under the leadership of the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), has begun to pursue a strategy oriented towards the main international sports and based on the recruitment, through very wealthy contracts, of players, technicians and coaches.
The first step involved boxing, followed in cascade by all the other disciplines, from golf to martial arts, Formula 1, cricket and even skiing.
But the culmination of this strategy involves football, with the disruptive event represented by the hiring of superstar Cristiano Ronaldo who joined Riyadh's Al-Nassr in December 2022 with a contract worth 200 million dollars per season.
Will Saudi Arabia be the new Mecca of football?
But the symbolic date could be another: it is November 22, 2022 when, at the World Cup in nearby Qatar, the Saudi national football team beat Messi's Argentina who would win less than a month after the championship.
It is from that moment, writes ISPI, that "the PIF's signing campaign in the world of football took on increasingly aggressive contours". This summer's transfer market was literally monopolized by the Saudi Pro League, which secured, by shelling out astronomical sums, stars of the caliber of Karim Benzema, Neymar Junior, N'Golo Kante, and Kalidou Koulibaly. At the culmination of this process, coach Roberto Mancini arrived from Italy as the new coach of the Saudi national team.
Attracted by the pharaonic salaries, more or less famous athletes, both young and at the end of their careers, have abandoned the European leagues to join a championship that this year will go from sixteen teams to eighteen.
To ennoble their ranks, Saudi clubs have spent around nine hundred million dollars, a record sum that guarantees the Kingdom the television broadcast of matches around the world and the related revenues.
Why?
But why did the PIF decide to invest so much in sport and in a culture not exactly similar to the native traditions once heralded by the Kingdom as the non plus ultra?
As the Economist recently observed, the offensive desired by MbS pursues two strategic objectives: to drastically reposition the image of the monarchy in the world and to direct a reform of the economic system that distances it from exclusive dependence on oil and diversifies its sources.
The PIF's major initiatives in the sports field are in fact part of MbS's great plan known as "Vision 2030", designed to modernize the country and its society by the end of the decade.
In fact, the Kingdom really needed a restyling. The reputation in matters of politics and human rights is in fact still disastrous today for a country that until a few years ago was also put on the index for its complicity in Islamic terrorism, one of whose absolute protagonists was Saudi Sheikh Osama bin Laden.
As if that wasn't enough, the Khashoggi crime occurred in 2018, which according to a CIA report from three years later saw MbS as the instigator.
Sustainable model?
Saudi Arabia's terrible reputation is now counterbalanced by the glossy image of football superstars who, ISPI notes, are transforming "not only the monarchy but global sport itself, with effects that are not yet foreseeable".
But is this business model actually sustainable? The answer should be positive given that leisure and entertainment represents just 1.6% of PIF investments.
But this does not change the fact that this expensive plaything is not supported by individual entrepreneurs, but by the State. And, as the Institute directed by Paolo Magri points out, “a combination of low revenues and high costs could mean that many sports businesses would not be able to sustain themselves or compete globally without subsidies”.
Saudi Arabia's other follies
But sport is not the only center of the spend-and-spend mania of the new Saudi direction.
The announcement of a megaproject to build a linear city in the desert, called The Line , "on a scale never seen before in human history" dates back to 2021.
Developing not with the usual orthogonal layout but on a single 170 km long artery, this megalopolis is designed to be car-free and connected by a high-speed rail transport system capable of covering the entire stretch in just twenty minutes.
Also participating in the creation of The Line is the visionary Italian Archistar Massimiliano Fuksas.
As Fuksas himself explained in an interview with the Saudi Football website, The Line will be “an incredible city, 170 kilometers long that will go from the shores of the Red Sea, through the desert, up to the mountains. The entire structure will be two hundred meters wide and five hundred meters high. It will have a mirrored coating on both sides which will give it a unique appearance in the world and inside there will truly be everything you can imagine in a city of the future."
This futuristic city will also be, underlines the architect, a smart city “that will be completely self-sustaining and will produce within itself everything it needs to sustain itself. Of course, there won't be an energy problem. The sun is not lacking."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/expo-calcio-geopolitica-arabia-saudita/ on Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:15:40 +0000.