Saudi Arabia

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Golf

      Phil Mickelson Praises Saudi-Backed Golf Tour Despite Khashoggi Killing

      by

      A biographer quoted Mickelson as saying that though he knew of Saudi Arabia’s “horrible record on human rights,” a new golf tour it was funding was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”The pro golfer Phil Mickelson faced a mounting backlash this week for his reported remarks about a Saudi-backed golf tour, with a biographer quoting him as saying that though he knew of the kingdom’s “horrible record on human rights,” the tour was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”Mickelson, a six-time major winner, made the comments during a nearly hourlong phone interview last November, Alan Shipnuck, a longtime golf writer who is completing a biography on the golfer, said on Friday.A former writer for Sports Illustrated and Golf magazine, Mr. Shipnuck reported the remarks on Thursday on The Fire Pit Collective, a golf site.Mickelson, 51, had been asked to comment about his connection to the Super Golf League, an upstart tour whose main source of funding is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a sovereign wealth fund totaling more than $400 billion.He called the Saudi authorities “scary,” using a profanity to describe them, and noted the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was assassinated in 2018 with the approval of the kingdom’s crown prince, according to U.S. intelligence officials. Mickelson also alluded to the criminalization of homosexuality in Saudi Arabia, where being gay is punishable by death.“We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” Mickelson was quoted as saying by the biographer. “They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”Representatives for Mickelson, who is one of the biggest names linked to the breakaway tour, and the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.A spokesman for the PGA Tour declined to comment on Friday.When reached on Friday, Mr. Shipnuck said that the golfer had previously declined to be interviewed for his biography, “Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colorful Superstar,” which is scheduled to be published in May. But he said that Mickelson had granted him an on-the-record interview in an attempt to explain his potential involvement in the breakaway tour.“Phil likes to play with fire,” Mr. Shipnuck said. “Sometimes when you play with fire, you’re going to get scorched. I don’t think he realized how hot this topic is with Saudi Arabia.”In his online account of the interview, Mr. Shipnuck said that the golfer had enlisted three other unidentified players to hire lawyers to draft the upstart tour’s operating agreement.Several top golfers criticized Mickelson for his remarks, including Justin Thomas, the eighth-ranked player in the world. Speaking to reporters on Thursday at the Genesis Invitational near Los Angeles, he said it “seems like a bit of a pretty, you know, egotistical statement.”Thomas continued: “It’s like he’s done a lot of great things for the PGA Tour, it’s a big reason it is where it is, but him and others that are very adamant about that, if they’re that passionate, go ahead. I don’t think anybody’s stopping them.”Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, the columnist Peter FitzSimons criticized Mickelson’s comments. He urged Greg Norman, a former golf champion and head of the breakaway tour, to cut ties with the new venture.“Well, anyone with a conscience would resign,” Mr. FitzSimons wrote. “But with you I guess that is beside the point here. Your best plan is probably to do what you have been doing, and do better than anyone — hold your nose and go after more money.”Jane MacNeille, a spokeswoman for LIV Golf Investments — the company who chief executive, Mr. Norman, is starting the breakaway tour — heralded Mickelson in a statement on Friday.“Phil is one of the greatest golfers in the history of the game, and we have an enormous amount of respect for him and his career,” she said. “Any league or tour would be lucky to have him.”Brandel Chamblee, an analyst for the Golf Channel and former PGA Tour player, said on Twitter on Friday that “those advocating for the Saudi backed tour, most notably Phil Mickelson, are trying to obfuscate their greed and masquerade that this is about growing the game.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Soccer

      Newcastle Players, Saudi Jets and Premier League Headaches

      by

      When Newcastle traveled to Saudi Arabia for a midseason training camp, it did so on a plane owned by a company seized by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.Well before Newcastle United’s players and coaches set off for a warm-weather training camp in Saudi Arabia this week, the new owners of the Premier League soccer team were facing the difficult task of persuading the world that the team would not be an asset of the Saudi state.It has not been an easy case to make: 80 percent of Newcastle, after all, now belongs to the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The P.I.F.’s chairman is Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler.Even the Premier League has in the past expressed concerns about the connections. It delayed Newcastle’s sale for more than a year until, Premier League officials said, it finally allowed the deal to go through in October after receiving unspecified “legally binding assurances” that the Saudi state would not control the soccer team.Those questions only returned this week, however, when Newcastle’s players and coaching staff shuffled down the steps of their private charter flight in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Monday. Photographs of the team’s arrival showed the plane was operated by a company called Alpha Star, an aviation business whose parent company was seized by Prince Mohammed after a purge of senior royals and business figures shortly after he emerged as the likely heir to the Saudi throne.The identity of the company and its seizure were documented as part of a lawsuit in Canada brought by the Saudi state against a former senior intelligence official. Alpha Star and its sister company, Sky Prime, another aviation supplier whose planes carried the group of assassins who killed and dismembered the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, were seized and transferred to the $400 billion sovereign wealth fund — on the orders of Prince Mohammed, according to legal filings — in 2017. The documents revealing the link between the aviation companies and the country’s ruler are part of a long running corruption lawsuit brought by a group of Saudi state-owned companies against the former intelligence official Saad Aljabri, a close confidant of Mohammed bin Nayef, a former interior minister whom Prince Mohammed ousted as crown prince in 2017.But the use of planes — owned by a company created and once contracted by the Saudi state to transport extremists and terrorism suspects — also made it harder, again, for Newcastle’s new British-based owners and executives to claim an arm’s length relationship from their Saudi partners in the P.I.F.State ownership of clubs has become one of the more contentious topics in European soccer in recent years as Paris St.-Germain and Manchester City have both used the seemingly bottomless wealth of their Gulf owners to reshape the economics and competitive balance of the sport. Newcastle fans generally have welcomed the arrival of Saudi riches — and the potential of an on-field revival — at their club, even as critics have raised questions about foreign influence and human rights concerns.Before his team left England, Newcastle United’s coach, Eddie Howe, was pressed about the purpose of the team’s weeklong visit to Saudi Arabia. Howe insisted the motivations were purely sporting, an effort to fine tune the team’s preparations in a warm-weather setting ahead of the second half of the season. But the club faced criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International, which said the trip risked becoming “a glorified P.R. exercise for Mohammed bin Salman’s government.”On Friday, Howe and his players were reported to have met with representatives of the P.I.F., whose board includes a half-dozen senior Saudi government officials.“I think it just shows, No. 1, why the sale was problematic in the first place and not separate from the Saudi state,” Adam Coogle, a deputy director with the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch, said of the trip. “No. 2, it shows they don’t care. They’re just going to flaunt it. They’re not even trying to pretend this isn’t what it is.”A spokesman for P.I.F. declined a request for comment. The Premier League and Newcastle United declined similar requests on Friday.The relationship between Newcastle and Saudi Arabia, though, continues to roil the Premier League. Late last year the league amended its regulations on sponsorships after rivals raised concerns about the prospect of a sudden rush of Saudi Arabian money flowing into the team’s accounts through deals with companies linked to its Gulf ownership.Under a compromise agreement, the league said it would assess all “related party” sponsorships to ensure the agreements were made in line with fair market value.Since the takeover, the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, has deflected questions about his organization’s ability to ensure that Newcastle did not contravene the assurances about its being separate from the state. When he was asked in November how the league would even know if the local ownership group was following the orders of Prince Mohammed, Masters acknowledged that the league could not know.“In that instance, I don’t think we would know,” he said. “I don’t think it is going to happen. There are legally binding assurances that essentially the state will not be in charge of the club. If we find evidence to the contrary, we can remove the consortium as owners of the club. That is understood.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Golf

      Greg Norman Takes Aim at PGA Tour With New Saudi-Backed Golf League

      by

      Norman has tried to get a competing league off the ground before, but top players like Rory McIlroy have shown only disinterest.A group headlined by Greg Norman is the latest new venture preparing to offer an alternative league to the dominant PGA Tour in professional golf.On Friday, Norman, 66, who is a multiple major champion and was the world’s top-ranked player for more than five years, announced his association with LIV Golf Investments, whose major shareholder is the Public Investment Fund, an investment arm of Saudi Arabia’s government.Norman’s group has committed to stage an additional 10 events on the Asian Tour in the next decade. But the enterprise’s goals are for a prominent worldwide presence, with play beginning as early as next year.“This is only the beginning,” Norman said in a statement. “LIV Golf Investments has secured a major capital commitment that will be used to create additive new opportunities across worldwide professional golf.”The announcement comes only weeks after a group led by the Public Investment Fund purchased the Premier League soccer team Newcastle United after a yearslong pursuit. That deal was nearly derailed by the fund’s involvement; critics of Saudi Arabia say the investments in sports by the PIF are merely an effort by the kingdom to obscure accusations of human rights abuses. For more than 25 years, Norman has hoped to create a global golf tour as a rival to the PGA Tour. In the 1990s, he proposed a world golf tour and tried to lure top players to play in a collection of small field events that would have enlarged purses. The PGA Tour commissioner at the time, Tim Finchem, succeeded in fending off Norman’s tour, which the PGA Tour viewed as unwanted competition to its circuit.Since then, several versions of a world tour that would challenge the PGA Tour have been proposed without a significant change in elite professional golf’s landscape. The latest was the Premier Golf League, based in London, which had a plan for more than 15 tournaments and limited fields of 48 players that would begin in 2023. A host of PGA Tour players, most notably Rory McIlroy, who was then No. 1 in the men’s worldwide rankings, were emphatic in their disinterest in the new league. The PGA Tour also informed its players that if they played in the upstart league they would not be permitted to compete on the PGA Tour.Norman, known for his bold play and attacking style — his nickname is “the shark” — is undeterred.“The Asian Tour is a sleeping giant and we share ambition to grow the series and unlock what we believe is significant untapped potential,” Norman said. “We see our promotion of these new events as a vital first step in supporting emerging markets, creating a new platform, rich with playing opportunities that create valuable player pathways.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Soccer

      Premier League Vote Targets Saudi Spending at Newcastle

      by

      The Premier League imposed a moratorium on sponsorships linked to investors only days after a Saudi-led group took control of one of its teams.Fearing that the arrival of another deep-pocketed ownership group from the Gulf might soon put even their own billionaire owners at a competitive disadvantage, Premier League teams voted Monday to restrict — for a short time at least — the new Saudi Arabian owners of Newcastle United from injecting some of their vast wealth into their newly acquired soccer team.The decision, reached at an emergency meeting of the league’s clubs, imposed a moratorium on teams’ signing sponsorship deals with brands or companies linked to their investors. The temporary rule change — to be in place for less than a month while a permanent one is considered — is not specific to Newcastle but is a clear sign of the worry among Premier League teams that a group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund could soon remake the economic and competitive state of the league.The clubs are concerned that Newcastle, now backed by resources of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, will quickly be able to buy its way to success in a manner similar to Manchester City, the Premier League team bought in 2008 by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi. Manchester City financed its rise from mid-table strugglers to perennial champions partly through a series of sponsorship deals with companies tied to the United Arab Emirates.Those deals, with partners like Etihad Airways and Abu Dhabi’s department of culture and tourism, are the subject of an ongoing dispute about possible violations of Premier League cost-control regulations.The degree of concern among Newcastle’s rivals was clear when it came to voting on the new regulation on Monday: 18 teams voted for the temporary ban, with only Newcastle opposed to it. Manchester City, after consulting with its lawyers, abstained.With the moratorium in place, the Premier League has now asked for feedback from its teams while it considers introducing a permanent rule outlawing so-called related party sponsorships, or at least a requirement that such deals be vetted for fair-market value by industry experts.Manchester City is not the only team in the Premier League with sponsors linked to its investors; under its previous owner, Mike Ashley, Newcastle plastered its stadium, St. James’s Park, in advertising for his discount sportswear company.But the timing of Monday’s emergency meeting left little doubt about its focus: It came one day after Newcastle played its first game under its new ownership, and after home fans rose as one before kickoff to cheer the team’s new Saudi chairman.The takeover of Newcastle had been delayed for more than a year but finally got the go ahead after the Premier League said the P.I.F. provided “legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle Football Club.”The Premier League has declined to provide details of those assurances. The chairman of the multibillion-dollar fund is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler, and Newcastle’s new chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the P.I.F. and the chairman of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.“Newcastle fans will love it but for the rest of us it just means there is a new superpower in Newcastle — we cannot avoid that,” Liverpool’s German manager, Jürgen Klopp, said last week when asked about the possible effect of an infusion of Saudi investment into one club. “Money cannot buy everything but over time they will have enough money to make a few wrong decisions, then make the right decisions, and then they will be where they want to be in the long term.”Team owners have privately fumed over the Premier League’s handling of the takeover, complaining that they were not informed about the progress of the sale until the transfer of ownership was announced on Oct. 7. Rival teams are also concerned, given the Premier League’s insistence that the P.I.F. is now viewed as separate from the Saudi state, that any sponsors from the kingdom not directly affiliated to the fund will not be barred regardless of the new rules.One version of a working document reviewed by The New York Times stated that “entities controlled by the same government” that had a stake in a Premier League team could not become a sponsor of that club. The Premier League declined to comment, and it has not made any public comment on the Newcastle sale beyond its news release announcing that the deal had been completed.The Premier League has struggled in the past, however, to enforce its cost-control regulations. An investigation into whether Manchester City breached the league’s financial regulations has now stretched into its third year with little sign that a resolution is near. City filed a series of legal motions that slowed the process, drawing a rebuke earlier this year from a senior judge who wrote, “It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made after two and a half years — during which, it may be noted, the club has twice been crowned as Premier League champions.”The type of financial regulations now being discussed by the Premier League are similar to rules that a group of 12 leading European teams had sought to include this spring in the failed effort to create a European Super League.Several of the clubs involved in the Super League planning, including Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool, had expressed concerns about their ability to compete financially with teams — notably City and Qatar-backed Paris St.-Germain — who could draw upon seemingly bottomless resources from outside of the game. “Club revenue must be obtained on an arm’s length basis,” one of the regulations in the Super League plans stated. Teams that broke those regulations faced permanent expulsion from the competition.Some of those same cost-control ideas, though, are now on the table at the Premier League, which will soon face outside scrutiny of its operations as well. Britain’s government this spring appointed a lawmaker, Tracey Crouch, to review soccer governance. Crouch has suggested that she will recommend the appointment of an independent regulator for the sport. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Soccer

      Saudi Arabia Mulls Bid to Host 2030 World Cup

      by

      Saudi Arabia is pursuing an ambitious plan to secure the hosting rights to soccer’s marquee event, but the effort faces political and technical obstacles.Nothing is off the table. Not a bid to buy one of England’s biggest soccer clubs. Not rich offers for multimillion-dollar broadcast packages. Not even an improbable bid to secure the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup.As Saudi Arabia sets course to spend its way to the top table of global soccer, the heart of those efforts is a bid to land the sport’s biggest prize. To accomplish its goal, Saudi Arabia has hired Boston Consulting Group to analyze how it could land the quadrennial tournament — one of the most watched events in sports — only eight years after Qatar will become the first country in the Middle East to stage the event.Several other Western consultants have been asked to help with the project, according to one of the advisers exploring the feasibility of a Saudi bid, and acknowledge that it will require “out of the box thinking” — including, potentially, an agreement to share the hosting rights with a European partner. And despite Saudi Arabia’s growing influence in soccer, the bid, particularly in its current form, is considered a long shot.A spokesman for Boston Consulting Group, citing company policy, declined to comment.Sports has fast become a central pillar of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 program — a strategic effort to pivot the nation away from oil dependency — but more recently, the country is making a concerted effort behind the scenes to join its regional rival Qatar as a major power broker in soccer.The strategy has had mixed success. Saudi Arabia has enticed leagues in Italy and Spain to sign lucrative contracts to bring domestic cup finals to the country. But efforts backed by its sovereign wealth fund to acquire an English Premier League club and the broadcast rights to the Champions League have so far failed.Regardless of the results, its ambition remains untrammeled. Saudi Arabia is determined to be in the ring for all of soccer’s major properties, and at the heart of those efforts most recently is the World Cup.Human rights groups have long been vocal opponents about staging major sporting events in Saudi Arabia, particularly since the country was accused of complicity in the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.But perhaps the most pressing difficulty to bring a World Cup to Saudi Arabia is a technical one. Since Qatar will stage the first Mideast World Cup next winter, any Saudi Arabian bid would require soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, which runs the tournament, to change its policy of continental rotation in order to bring the event back to the region.One option under consideration is to join with a major European nation also hoping to host the World Cup. So far, only Britain and a partnership of Portugal and Spain, a country whose soccer federation has forged close ties to Saudi Arabia, have publicly announced their intentions to enter the bidding process. Italy, another of Saudi Arabia’s soccer allies, is also considering an effort to host the event for the first time since 1990.Such a cross-continental offer would also require a change of policy from FIFA, which has never staged a tournament on two continents. The 2002 World Cup was shared by the Asian neighbors Japan and South Korea. And the joint United States, Mexico and Canada competition in 2026 will be the first time the World Cup, which by then will have expanded from 32 to 48 teams, is staged in three countries.For a Saudi bid to be successful, organizers could once again have to be persuaded to shift the dates of the tournament from their traditional June-July window to November-December to account for hot weather in the Gulf. The global soccer schedule had to be upended to ensure Qatar could stage the tournament safely, and European leagues whose schedules would be upended might be reluctant to repeat the interruption.Saudi Arabian hopes, though, are boosted by its close links to FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, who recently drew criticism from human rights groups after playing a starring role in a promotional video for the Saudi ministry of sport.In January, Infantino held talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the architect of Vision 2030. And FIFA’s membership agreed last month to a motion offered by Saudi Arabia’s soccer federation to study the possibility of holding the World Cup every two years instead of its current quadrennial format.That change could allow even more countries to enter the bidding.“It is time to review how the global game is structured and to consider what is best for the future of our sport,” the president of Saudi Arabia’s soccer federation, Yasser al-Misehal, said at the time. “This should include whether the current four-year cycle remains the optimum basis for how football is managed both from a competition and commercial perspective.”A spokesman for the Saudi Arabian soccer federation declined to comment on a possible World Cup bid, but did point out that the country was fast becoming a destination for high-profile sporting events. In recent years, it has staged major boxing matches, motor races and golf events.“We’re keen to take the stage in the global game as well, turning our passion into on-pitch success, as well as greater collaboration with the international football family,” the Saudi soccer federation said in a statement.Saudi Arabia, despite its largess, also needs to rebuild bridges with a soccer economy still smarting from the effects of a sophisticated pirate television network based in the country that for years stole billions of dollars worth of sports content, repackaged it and sold it to Saudi subscribers. FIFA, as well as major competitions like England’s Premier League and Spain’s Liga, were blocked from filing legal claims in Saudi Arabia to protest the piracy.The network that broadcast the stolen matches, BeoutQ, formed during a regional dispute with Qatar, is now off the air. And while the conflict with Qatar has largely been healed, beIN, the Qatari-owned sports broadcaster, remains banned in Saudi Arabia. That means the only way soccer-mad Saudis will be able to watch this summer’s European soccer championship, and a parallel event in South America, will be through illegal broadcasts.European soccer’s governing body on Wednesday rejected a Saudi offer of around $600 million to broadcast the Champions League regionally, preferring to stick with its current partner, beIN. More