SAUDI OUT-RICH PROGRAMME

With the middle-eastern country making its presence felt across multiple sporting disciplines, Vishnu Prasad takes a look how it all happened, the history and complexity of sportswashing, and what lies ahead...

- Vishnu Prasad

In 2023, world football was punctuated by two developments at either end of the calendar, and they confirmed an already visible shift away from status quo.

The first came just a couple of days after the new year had dawned. Cristiano Ronaldo, either the world’s most famous or second-most famous — depending on where your allegiances lie — footballer stood waving to fans, not on the hallowed turf of the Santiago Bernabeu or the Juventus Stadium, but in the little-known Mrsool Park (since rebranded the Al-Awwal Park) in Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Before Ronaldo set foot inside it, the stadium’s biggest claim to fame was probably hosting a couple of WWE events. It was still being built when Ronaldo won the third of his five Ballon d’Ors in 2014 and had about a third of the capacity of Old Trafford, the ground he previously called home. Yet here was one of the greatest footballers of the modern era, clad in Alnassr’s yellow shirt, waving happily to his new fans.

The second was actually a series of smaller developments that happened throughout the month of October that tied into one larger endgame, not unlike how a series of bizarre clues often come together to make perfect sense at the end in a Hercule Poirot novel. On October 11, a FIFA Council Meeting chaired by its president Gianni Infantino confirmed that the 2030 World Cup would be hosted not by three countries, but by three continents — Portugal and Spain from Europe, as well as Morocco from Africa would host the bulk of the matches while Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay from South America would stage a game each. The decision to take the tournament to South America for just three nights was explained away as a nod to Uruguay hosting the first-ever World Cup a century ago in 1930.