Saudi Arabia Bought Golf, Boxing, and Football. The Athletes Said Nothing.

There is a photograph that tells you everything you need to know about what happened to professional sport between January 2023 and May 2026. It shows Phil Mickelson at a press conference in Jeddah, June 2022, the day before the inaugural LIV Golf tournament. He is wearing sunglasses indoors. He is not smiling. A Saudi official stands behind him. Mickelson had spent the previous month apologizing for calling the Saudi regime "scary motherfuckers" who had "killed Khashoggi" — and then he took their money anyway. The check was for $200 million. He has not spoken about Jamal Khashoggi since.

I am not sure what I expected the athletes to say, but it was not this: nothing. Not silence punctuated by contractual obligation. Not the studied neutrality of men and women who have built entire careers on personal brands, on telling us what they think, on selling us their authenticity. But that is what we got. In three years, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund spent an estimated $11 billion acquiring or creating professional leagues in golf, football, boxing, tennis, and esports. The athletes took the money. They posted the Instagram photos. They said almost nothing about who was paying them or why.

The silence is the point. That is what $11 billion buys: not love, not even approval, but the absence of dissent. The replacement of politics with spectacle. The conversion of athletes who once took a knee or wore a slogan into employees who have learned that some checks come with conditions that are never written down.

The Arrangement

The term is sportswashing, though the people who do it never use the word. The concept is simple: a state with a reputation problem spends its way into global sport, not to win tournaments but to purchase legitimacy. Qatar spent $220 billion on a World Cup. Russia spent $51 billion on a World Cup and a Winter Olympics. The UAE owns Manchester City, sponsors Arsenal and Real Madrid, and hosts Formula One. Saudi Arabia looked at what its neighbors had done and decided to do it faster and bigger.

In June 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced Vision 2030, a plan to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy away from oil. Sport was central to the plan. Not as a revenue stream — LIV Golf has never made a profit — but as a vehicle. By December 2023, the Public Investment Fund had acquired Newcastle United Football Club for $408 million, launched LIV Golf with $2 billion in funding, staged the Anthony Joshua vs. Oleksandr Usyk rematch in Jeddah for a reported $100 million site fee, and committed $1.5 billion to the new Saudi Pro League, luring Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar with contracts worth $200 million and $150 million respectively.

The money was never only about the sport. It was about changing the international conversation. In October 2018, Saudi agents murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing. For three years, Saudi Arabia was a pariah. Western executives canceled conferences. Investors stayed away. The Kingdom needed a way back into the room.

Sport provided it. By 2024, Mohammed bin Salman was sitting courtside at WTA Finals in Riyadh, shaking hands with Novak Djokovic, posing for photos with Ronaldo. The English Premier League, which had blocked the Newcastle takeover for seventeen months on human rights grounds, eventually approved it after Saudi Arabia settled a piracy dispute with Qatar. The deal was presented as about intellectual property. It was about rehabilitation.

What the Athletes Said

I went looking for dissent. I found almost none. When Cristiano Ronaldo signed with Al Nassr in January 2023, he told a press conference that he was "grateful for this opportunity" and that Saudi Arabia was "developing fast." He did not mention that the Kingdom had executed 196 people in 2022, the highest number in three decades. When Karim Benzema joined Al-Ittihad six months later, he said he was "excited for a new challenge." He did not mention that the Saudi government had arrested, tortured, and imprisoned women's rights activists for campaigning for the right to drive.

The golfers were more candid, at least at first. In February 2022, Rory McIlroy called LIV Golf "dead in the water." Six months later, he called it a "money grab." But by June 2023, after the PGA Tour announced a shock merger with LIV, McIlroy changed his tone. He said he "understood" why players had taken the Saudi money. He said the sport needed to "move forward." He did not explain what forward meant or who got to decide the direction.

The merger collapsed what little resistance remained. The PGA Tour, which had suspended players for joining LIV and described the Saudi league as an existential threat, signed a framework agreement to create a joint commercial entity with the Public Investment Fund. The deal has not been finalized — the U.S. Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation in July 2023 — but the message was clear: there is no alternative. The Saudis won by spending enough money that opposition became unsustainable.

The tennis players said even less. When the WTA announced it would hold its season-ending Finals in Riyadh starting in 2024, the reaction from players was muted. Ons Jabeur, the Tunisian world number five, said she was "honored" to play in Saudi Arabia. Aryna Sabalenka, the Belarusian number two, said it was "a great opportunity for women's tennis." There were no boycotts. There were no public letters. There was a press release from the WTA about "progress" and "dialogue" and "using sport as a force for good." The Finals went ahead. The players cashed their checks. The conversation moved on.

The Precedent

There is a history here, and it is not encouraging. In 1936, the International Olympic Committee awarded the Summer Games to Nazi Germany. The U.S. Olympic Committee debated a boycott, then voted it down. Avery Brundage, the American IOC member who led the opposition to a boycott, argued that "the Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians." Eighteen Black American athletes competed in Berlin. Jesse Owens won four gold medals. Hitler used the Games to present Germany as a modern, peaceful nation. Kristallnacht came two years later.

The pattern repeats. The Soviet Union hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Sixty-six countries boycotted over the invasion of Afghanistan; eighty-one attended. China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Protests over Tibet, Darfur, and domestic repression were held outside the stadiums; inside, athletes competed and said the Games were "not about politics." China hosted the Winter Olympics again in 2022, three years into a campaign of mass detention and forced labor in Xinjiang that the U.S. State Department called genocide. The IOC instituted a "diplomatic boycott" that allowed athletes to compete but discouraged government officials from attending. The Games went ahead. China declared them a success.

What is different now is the ownership model. Qatar and Russia hosted tournaments; Saudi Arabia is buying the leagues. The Public Investment Fund does not just sponsor Newcastle United; it owns the club. It does not just fund LIV Golf; it controls the tour, sets the schedule, hires the players, writes the rules. When you own the infrastructure, you do not need to persuade the athletes to stay quiet. You employ them. Dissent becomes a breach of contract.

Who Benefits

The answer is obvious but worth stating plainly: Saudi Arabia benefits. The Kingdom gets access to global markets, to Western executives, to political leaders who take meetings they would not have taken in 2019. It gets photographs of smiling athletes in Riyadh, which it uses in promotional campaigns. It gets to host concerts, conferences, and tournaments that signal normalcy. It gets younger Saudis who associate their country not with Khashoggi or Yemen but with Ronaldo and the Saudi Grand Prix.

The athletes benefit, too, though they do not like to say it this way. They prefer to talk about "growing the game" or "expanding opportunities" or "building bridges." What they mean is: I got paid. Ronaldo's contract with Al Nassr is worth $536 million over three years. Neymar's contract with Al Hilal is worth $150 million per year. Phil Mickelson reportedly received $200 million just to join LIV Golf, before prize money. These are not salaries; they are geopolitical investments with a golf swing attached.

What It Means to Lose

There are people for whom this is not an abstraction. Loujain al-Hathloul, the Saudi women's rights activist, was arrested in May 2018 for campaigning to end the male guardianship system and allow women to drive. She was held in solitary confinement, tortured with electric shocks and waterboarding, and sentenced to five years and eight months in prison. She was released in February 2021 under a travel ban that remains in effect. She has not been able to leave Saudi Arabia since.

In March 2024, the WTA announced that its season-ending Finals would be held in Riyadh. Al-Hathloul wrote an open letter to the players. She asked them to use their platform. She asked them to speak about the women who had been imprisoned for advocating for rights that the players took for granted. She asked them to remember that their freedom to play tennis in Saudi Arabia had been built on the backs of women who were still in prison for demanding freedom.

I do not know if any of the players read the letter. I know that none of them mentioned it in Riyadh. Iga Świątek, the world number one, won the tournament and collected a check for $5.15 million. In her victory speech, she thanked the Saudi Tennis Federation for their "incredible hospitality." She did not mention al-Hathloul. She did not mention the other women's rights activists still imprisoned or under travel bans. She thanked her team, her sponsors, and the fans. Then she left.

The Reckoning

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The story we tell about sport is that it is pure, that it transcends politics, that it belongs to the athletes and the fans and not to the men who pay for it. That story was always incomplete. Now it is unsustainable. Saudi Arabia is not hiding what it is doing. Mohammed bin Salman has said explicitly that sportswashing "is something that I continue to do." The athletes know who is paying them and why. They have chosen to take the money anyway.

That is their right. Professional athletes are not human rights activists. They do not owe us political bravery. But they also do not get to claim that sport is separate from politics when they are cashing checks written by a government that imprisons dissidents and dismembers journalists. They do not get to wear rainbow laces in London and play in Riyadh without comment. They do not get to tell us that sport is pure and also that it pays $200 million per contract. The contradiction is the point. The silence is the product they are selling.

I know what I am talking about here. I have watched this happen before. I watched Russia host the Olympics and then invade Ukraine. I watched Qatar host the World Cup while migrant workers died building the stadiums. I watched the IOC take Chinese money and call it "engagement." The pattern is always the same: the state spends, the athletes compete, the critics are told that sport is not the place for politics, and the regime gets exactly what it paid for.

What is different now is the scale and the speed. Saudi Arabia is not waiting for the Olympics to come around every four years. It is buying the infrastructure, owning the teams, controlling the leagues. It is making the arrangement permanent. And the athletes are not resisting. They are not even pretending to resist. They are showing up, playing the game, taking the check, and moving on. That is the sportswashing playbook in 2026: you do not need to convince anyone that you are good. You just need to make dissent expensive enough that no one can afford it.

The question is not whether this will continue. It will. The question is whether we will keep pretending that it means something other than what it obviously means: that we have decided, collectively, that there is no amount of money we will not take and no number of imprisoned activists we will not ignore if the price is right. The athletes made that decision. So did the leagues, the sponsors, and the broadcasters. So did we, every time we bought the ticket or streamed the match or argued about the tournament without mentioning who paid for it or why. The Saudis did not buy sport. We sold it to them. And we are still pretending we do not know what we did.