The word sports appears seven times in about 50 pages of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund's new five-year strategy, and six of those are about video games.
Five years ago the same fund was leading a wave of investment into world sport, from a breakaway golf tour to Newcastle United to Formula One. The day before this episode, the golf tour filed for bankruptcy.
"Around five years ago, the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund led a wave of investment into sports around the world, and now it appears to be in retreat."
Henry Tricks is The Economist's US technology and media editor, and he came at the collapse as a business story rather than a sports one: "As business journalists, we're always looking at examples of disruption in industries that have been around for ages, and sports is one of those."
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Here are the 8 lessons that matter.
👤 Guest: Henry Tricks, The Economist's US technology and media editor
🎙️ Host: Rosie Blau, who presents The Intelligence
👥 Also on: Kinley Salmon and Abhishek Kumar, in the episode's other segments on Argentina and India's elephants
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on the Economist Podcasts feed
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | 📝 Transcript | ⏱️ 22 min
Key Takeaways
The fund's new five-year strategy mentions sports seven times in about 50 pages, six of them e-sports
Tricks reads that as the retreat showing up in writing, not just in one bankruptcy
Money bought the players and never bought the fans, and without fans there is no broadcast income
Tricks says the fund "spent five billion on it since 2021" and still turned off golf's existing supporters
Trying to disrupt an established sport almost always fails, however deep the pockets
Investors who tried to take control of the World Cup retreated; Michael Johnson's Grand Slam Track went bankrupt in December, less than a year after its first fixture
Sport itself is not a bad investment right now — financial institutions are buying into it
His example is the sale of the LA Lakers, which he says netted the seller a gain in a single year
Winning the 2034 World Cup gave Saudi Arabia somewhere else to put the money, at home
American soccer's breakthrough this summer came 50 years after Pele signed for the New York Cosmos
Tricks says the sportswashing charge partly misses the point, because a domestic participation push was real
1. Golf But Louder
Blau set the segment up herself, and the framing was hers rather than the guest's.
Her opening argument was that the idea was implausible from the start. "Saudi Arabia, a country that looks like a bunker but has no tradition of golf, tried to disrupt one of the world's snootiest sports"
The product was designed to annoy exactly the people who already watched golf: "The slogan, Golf But Louder, with pop blasting the fairway, was never likely to go down well with sporting conservatives, nor was changing the way the game was actually played"
The money stopped before the filing did. "Last month, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund pulled the financial plug"
The bankruptcy filing came the day before the episode ran, which is what put the segment on the show
2. The Fund Is in Retreat
Tricks' first point was that the golf failure is not an isolated one.
He framed it as a reversal of a five-year policy, not a single bad bet. "Around five years ago, the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund led a wave of investment into sports around the world, and now it appears to be in retreat"
He said the golf tour is the most high-profile example but that the same appears true of the fund's other international sports investments
The evidence he reached for is the fund's own document rather than the news. "The Sovereign Wealth Fund recently published a strategy for the next five years, and the word sports was mentioned only seven times in about 50 pages, and six of those referred to e-sports, which is gaming rather than the physical version"
He drew the distinction explicitly, so the count is not misread: e-sports is gaming, not the physical version
3. What the Saudis Bought
Blau asked what else the fund had invested in besides golf.
Football was the biggest of them: "They had investments in many international sports, possibly the most high profile one besides golf was football"
The football spending ran through both a club and the domestic league. "They invested in Newcastle United and also the Saudi government paid to attract major international soccer players such as Cristiano Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia to play in its clubs"
The rest of the list is long: "And there was also investments in tennis, in boxing, in martial arts, and in motor racing, Formula One. So it was a really wide spectrum of sports"
4. Soft Power and Sportswash
Asked what the appetite for all this was in the first place, Tricks gave the stated rationale, the accusation made against it, and his own partial defense.
The primary purpose was projection. "So the main reason why they got involved in this in the first place was as a form of kind of projecting Saudi Arabian soft power on the world"
The secondary one was the diversification story: "We know, everyone knows that Saudi Arabia is rolling in petrodollars and this was a way of showing that actually it could diversify its economy a bit beyond oil into sports and also adjacent activities like tourism"
The tourism angle was concrete: "So the idea was to attract tourists to Saudi Arabia in order to watch some of these mega competitions"
He put the sportswashing charge on the table and then said it is incomplete. "Now, of course, at the time, many people accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of sports washing, the phrase that they use to try and divert attention away from questions about his human rights record and that sort of thing. And I think that partly misses the point"
What he says it misses is a domestic program: "There was a very strong effort to use sport as well, to galvanize activity within Saudi Arabia, to get the young people more active, to get them off the couch and out onto the playing fields. And they're still trying to do that"
The international appetite is what has gone, and one reason is that the money is needed at home. "But despite the ambition, Saudi Arabia's interest in sports investment, especially on the international stage, appears to be waning"
"Well, I think the first thing is that Saudi Arabia has other things to do with its money"
"I mean, one of the things that it has achieved in the last five years is to attract the World Cup to Saudi Arabia in 2034. And that requires a lot of investment internally in stadiums and that sort of thing"
The second reason is the one the rest of the segment unpacks: "But I think they've also realized that money doesn't buy you everything in sports"
5. Fans Are Not for Sale
Tricks said the retreat yields three lessons, and named the first as the one the fund most underestimated: the importance of fans.
His first lesson is that supporters are the asset money cannot buy. "Saudi Arabia may have loads of money but it's difficult to buy your way into supporters hearts"
He put the spending at "spent five billion on it since 2021", aimed at "hoping to create a kind of a rival to America's PGA tour, to bring a new form of razzmatazz to the game"
The people it needed to convert were the ones it repelled. "But it turned off golf's well-heeled supporters"
The failure mechanism runs through television money: signing high-profile players was not enough, because with too few fans "they couldn't generate enough broadcast income for this to be sustainable"
Blau summarized it back to him in one line: "Money can't buy you love, in other words"
6. Disruption Usually Fails
The second lesson generalizes the golf case to every attempt on an established sport.
He stated it flatly. "The second lesson is that creative destruction is hard"
The professional bias runs the other way, which is his point: "As business journalists, we're always looking at examples of disruption in industries that have been around for ages, and sports is one of those. It's been here for generations"
"It seems as though it must be ripe for disruption, and many try to shake up established sports. Sadly, many of them fail as well"
His football example is an attempt on the governing body itself. A few big investors tried to buy a chunk of FIFA and take control of the World Cup, partly to weaken Europe's dominance of the world game. It was "an abject failure and they retreated with their tails between their legs"
His athletics example is more recent and shorter-lived. "Something similar has happened in athletics Grand Slam track which was started by Michael Johnson the former American sprinter"
"Again, it was meant to create an alternative athletics league, but it filed for bankruptcy last December, less than a year after its first fixture"
7. Money Still Wants Sports
Blau suggested the read-across was that this is simply a bad time to invest in sport. Tricks said the opposite.
Capital is arriving, not leaving. "Curiously, this is a time when there is actually a lot of investment in sports, especially from financial institutions who see it as a great long-term investment"
His example is a basketball team rather than a golf tour: "And a good example of this is the sale of the LA Lakers basketball team not long ago, which was sold by its former owner, Mark Walter, to the head of a New York venture capital firm, as well as to Bob Iger, the former boss of Disney, for $12.5 billion"
Tricks said the sale netted the seller a large gain on what he had paid only a year earlier
What separates the Lakers from the golf tour is not the asset class but the clock. "So there is interest, but time or timing is important, and therein lies the third lesson, if you like"
8. Building Takes Generations
The third lesson is about how long a sports property takes to become worth what someone paid for it.
The unit of time is a generation, not a funding round. "Building a winning sports franchise can take generations"
His evidence is the tournament the segment had already touched: "We've talked about the World Cup, and we had the World Cup in America and Mexico and Canada this summer. It looked as though American soccer really started to come into its own this year"
The lag behind that moment is half a century. "And that's great, but it's 50 years after the great Brazilian footballer, Pele, went to play for the New York Cosmos for the first time"
His closing inference is about patience rather than money. "It takes really a long time for these kind of changes to embed themselves, so perhaps the Saudis were not prepared to wait around for generations for their investments to pay off"
Bonus Insights
Blau, not Tricks, supplied the segment's sharpest lines — the bunker, the snootiest sport and "Golf But Louder" all come from the host's scripted opening rather than from the guest
Tricks separated e-sports from sport throughout, which is what makes the seven-mentions count meaningful: on his reading the fund has not stopped writing about sports so much as changed which kind it means
He was careful to say the domestic side of the Saudi sports push is continuing — "And they're still trying to do that" — even as the international investing stops
The segment ends with Tricks thanking the host rather than the other way round: "Thank you Rosie, great talking to you"
Tricks' bottom line is that Saudi Arabia's retreat is not a verdict on sport as an investment, because money is still pouring into it, but on the belief that a league can be bought into existence — the thing that makes one valuable is fans, and on his evidence fans take generations rather than seasons to arrive.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (Led the five-year wave of sports investment and, on Tricks' reading of its own new strategy, is now in retreat from it)
LIV Golf (The breakaway tour the fund backed from 2021; it filed for bankruptcy the day before the episode ran)
PGA Tour (The incumbent the tour was built to rival, per Tricks)
Newcastle United (The fund's highest-profile football investment)
Formula One (One of the other sports on the list, alongside tennis, boxing and martial arts)
FIFA (Tricks' example of a failed disruption — investors tried to buy a chunk of it and take control of the World Cup, and retreated)
Grand Slam Track (Michael Johnson's alternative athletics league, bankrupt last December less than a year after its first fixture)
Los Angeles Lakers (Sold "for $12.5 billion", Tricks' evidence that money is still flowing into sport)
Disney (Bob Iger, its former boss, was named as part of the buying group)
Books & Resources Mentioned
LIV Golf's failure shows how not to invest in sport (The Economist's written piece behind the segment, carried in the episode's own notes)
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