Why Saudi Arabia Is Spending Millions on Soccer Stars

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

Saudi Arabia has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars snapping up international soccer stars in recent months, including legendary players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, to boost the rosters of its Saudi Pro League. It's not the first time we've seen a country spend a lot of money to try to build up a domestic sports league, but it does have some key differences to previous attempts like we've seen in China, or in the US with Major League Soccer. For a start, the kingdom is spending a lot of money, opening up thorny questions about competition worldwide and Financial Fair Play rules in Europe, specifically. More importantly, it's also doing this at a governmental scale, with the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund and state-owned oil giant taking active roles. So what exactly is Saudi Arabia trying to accomplish and will it succeed? And what does this huge influx of money mean for soccer in the rest of the world? On this episode, we speak with Michael Caley and Mike Goodman, co-hosts of the Double Pivot Podcast, to discuss the big business of football and why turning a profit is not always the primary goal.

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0:56.3	Hello and welcome to another episode of The Adlots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloy.
1:14.4	And I'm Joe Wasntel. Joe, I think we need to figure out something extremely important
1:20.1	before we even begin this discussion. I know what you're going to say. And I was wondering if we
1:25.6	should have figured this out before that we started. Let's force our work process on everyone
1:32.3	listening to this. No, are we going to call this soccer or football? No, this is a call
1:37.2	whatever you want. It's fine. I say soccer, but I also don't really pay attention to this
1:43.2	board. And I know you do. So maybe you should get to choose. I don't as much as I used to, but
1:48.1	for Adlots listeners, I lived in the UK for more than 10 years. And in the UK, soccer is kind of
1:54.4	inflicted on you, whether you like it or not. So let me just say, if we do start saying football
2:00.6	in this conversation, unless otherwise specified, we mean soccer. Unless we say American football.
2:07.1	What do they call it in Japan? I don't know. That's a good question.
2:10.6	What do they call it in Austria? Fussball. Fussball, right. What do they call it in Hong Kong?
2:18.1	Soccer, I think. No, it must be football because that's British. I have no idea. Okay, look,
2:23.8	soccer and football are going to be interchangeable on this discussion. But I think we've given away
2:28.3	what we are going to be talking about. Yes. Yeah. And we brought it up very briefly,
2:33.2	in an episode with Brad Sensor, because at the time I asked him, I was like, what's the deal
	...

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