The New Playing Field: How Authoritarian Petrostates Are Buying Global Sports for Power and Prestige

It is easy, at first, not to notice what is happening.

A football match flickers on somewhere, Paris, Newcastle, Manchester, and the logos blur together: airlines, tourism boards, vague promises of futurity rendered in minimalist typefaces. A Formula 1 car cuts through the night in Abu Dhabi, Jedda, or Baku, sparks tracing brief constellations against the asphalt. This spectacle is seamless. The audience is global. The moment passes as entertainment, as it is meant to. 

And yet, beneath the choreography of floodlights and broadcast deals, something more deliberate is taking shape. In July 2023, The Guardian reported that Saudi Arabia had spent at least $6 billion on sports investments since 2021, a figure that dwarfs the annual sports budgets and GDP’s of some nations and covers everything from a Premier League football club to a rival golf tour to Formula 1 hosting rights (Michaelson, 2023). The number is arresting not only for its scale but for its precision: this is not indulgence, not hobby, not even simply business. It is allocation. It is strategy. Across the same period, Azerbaijan’s “Land of Fire” branding traveled across European television screens through UEFA competitions, while its Formula 1 Grand Prix continued its annual ritual in Baku. These are not disconnected gestures. They form a pattern. 

State investment in global sports by energy-rich, authoritarian governments, including Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, alongside petrostate actors like Azerbaijan, is not casual commercial activity. It is a calculated geopolitical strategy, one that is more sophisticated than the term “sportswashing” typically implies. These states are using stadiums, clubs, and mega-events as instruments of soft power, legitimacy-building, and economic diversification away from oil and natural gas dependency. The strategy is deliberate: sports investment functions as an extension of foreign policy, not a supplement to it. And yet Western institutions such as regulatory bodies, sporting federations, and democratic governments, have responded with a pattern that is slow, inconsistent, and in many cases, complicit. Drawing from academic research in sport diplomacy, policy analysis from leading think tanks, and investigative journalism, shows how and why this happened. For policymakers, business leaders, and engaged citizens, understanding this phenomenon is no longer optional. Sport has become a legitimate arena of geopolitical competition.

Sports Investment is a Deliberate Foreign Policy Tool 

The most common misreading of Gulf state sports investment is that it is primarily financial, that sovereign wealth funds are simply diversifying portfolios into an attractive asset class. While there is a commercial dimension, this framing misses the deeper logic. As scholars Johnathan Grix and Paul Michael Brannagan argue, sports mega-events such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup “have become a key part of state strategies to achieve a multitude of foreign policy goals” (Grix & Brannagan, 2024). These events deliver diplomatic access, international visibility, and mass cultural reach that no bilateral summit or trade agreement can replicate.

The Gulf states have understood this better than almost anyone. Qatar’s acquisition of French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain in 2011 through its Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) subsidiary, Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), was not timed accidentally, it coincided with the country’s controversial but ultimately successful bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. 

Figure 1: QSI Chairman and PSG President Nasser Al-Khelaifi introducing new signing Lionel Messi in a press conference, displaying the financial ability to lure elite players to the French capital (Getty Images)

The UAE’s Abu Dhabi United Group purchase of Manchester City in 2008 transformed a mid-table English club into one of the most recognized sporting brands on Earth, now anchoring a City Football Group empire that spans 13 clubs across six continents (Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, n.d.). Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which manages nearly $650 billion in assets, has taken an even more dispersed approach, buying Premier League club Newcastle United, launching LIV Golf, securing Formula 1 and UFC and boxing hosting rights, and recruiting global football/soccer stars like Christiano Ronaldo to its domestic league at unprecedented salaries (Michaelson, 2023). 

Azerbaijan offers a notably different but equally instructive case. Without the financial firepower of the Gulf states, Baku has pursued a targeted sports diplomacy strategy anchored in high visibility, recurring events: the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, UEFA Europa League final hosting rights, and prominent tournament sponsorships. These platforms give the country sustained Western broadcast presence at a fraction of what Newcastle United cost. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that these states are "making their kingdoms central to global discussions about sporting, tourism, trade, and education — not by building vast militaries, but through increasingly savvy cultural and financial frameworks” (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023). Brannagan, Giulianotti, and Grix’s framework of “smart power” in sports captures this precisely: it is neither purely hard economic leverage nor purely soft cultural appeal, but a calculated blend of both, deployed to achieve specific foreign policy outcomes that conventional diplomacy cannot reach (Brannagan et al., 2025). 

The Strategy Serves Multiple Simultaneous State Goals

The term “sportswashing” has become the dominant shorthand for what these states are doing, and while it captures something real, it undersells the sophistication of the strategy. Sportswashing, as commonly used, implies a single motive: disguising human rights abuses behind a veneer of sporting glamour. But as Brannagan, Grix and Norrito argue in their 2026 assemblage theory analysis, authoritarian state investment in sport is driven simultaneously by an economic basin, a political basin, and an identity basin, none of which reduces to the others (Brannagan et al., 2026). Describing the entire phenomenon as reputation laundering, they contended “narrows the focus of investigation” and misses what is actually happening. 

Figure 2: The graph illustrates that authoritarian nations are hosting a growing share of major international sporting events, reaching 37% of all events between 2020 and 2024 after a sharp rise from the 1990s onward.

Consider the economic dimension first. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the Crown Prince’s sweeping plan to diversify the kingdom’s economy beyond oil, explicitly identifies sports, tourism, and entertainment as strategic growth pillars. Sports investment is not a distraction from this plan; it is the plan. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that sports’ contributions to Saudi GDP nearly tripled between 2016 and 2019, before the most high-profile investments had even occurred (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023). For Qatar and the UAE, similar calculations apply: hosting mega-events and owning elite clubs drives tourism, stimulates construction and economic development, and builds commercial relationships with Western corporations that persist long after the final whistle. 

The political and legitimacy dimensions are equally important. German think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP Berlin) documents how the Saudi PIF, QIA, and UAE’s ADIA and Mubadala are deployed not as apolitical financial vehicles but as active instruments of geopolitical influence, building ties with political actors, creating dependencies, and generating goodwill with recipient countries (Roll, 2026). Azerbaijan’s sports strategy is a particularly clear illusion of the political dimension: its investments are closely coordinated with its foreign policy goals, including cultivating goodwill among Western European governments during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and positioning the country as a “reliable” energy corridor alternative to Russia. When Baku’s “Land of Fire” logo appears on a UEFA broadcast, it is not selling holidays, it is selling authority, modernity, and strategic relevance to European audiences, regardless of whether or not any of that is true. 

Figure 3: UEFA Europa League Final 2019 held in Baku, Azerbaijan. At the time, Arsenal (red team) and Armenia player Henrikh Mkhitaryan declined from traveling with the team due to safety concerns as the two nations have been engaged in a ceasefire and simmering tensions over the autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh region. Arsenal went on to lose the match 1-4. (Getty Images)

Finally, there is the domestic dimension, which the sportswashing fame almost entirely ignores. Hosting a Formula 1 Grand Prix or owning a Champions League club generates enormous domestic pride and reinforces the legitimacy of the ruling regime at home. As Grix and Brannagan observe, authoritarian states do not only seek to influence foreign publics, they use sports investment to consolidate political loyalty domestically by ensuring key constituencies benefit and by constructing narratives of national strength and progress (Grix & Brannagan, 2024). Sport, in this sense, is doing at least three jobs at once: economic development, international image management, and domestic legitimacy production. 

Western Institutions Have Been Complicit in Enabling This Strategy

If the states investing in sports are the protagonists of this story, Western institutions, governing bodies, governments, and commercial partners, are its willing supporting cast. As James Dorsey documents in his Wilson Center analysis, UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations, supposedly designed to prevent wealthy owners from distorting competition, have been selectively enforced and repeatedly modified in ways that have benefited Gulf-owned clubs (Dorsey, 2024). Paris Saint-Germain was fined under Financial Fair Play rules following a controversial sponsorship deal with the Qatar Tourism Authority, yet Manchester City’s similar finding was ultimately overturned. Newcastle United’s Saudi-led takeover proceeded after the Premier League accepted what it described as “legally binding assurances” that the Saudi state would not control the club, assurances that SWP Berlin notes were “somewhat unconvincing” given the personal ties between the fund and the Saudi royal family (Roll, 2026). 

Figure 4: Picture of local Newcastle fans donning traditional Saudi  royal Ghutra outside the stadium celebrating after the Saudi PIF purchased an 80% stake in their club. (Associated Press)

Formula 1’s expansion into Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Bahrain, and Baku reflects the same commercial logic overriding any coherent ethical framework. THe sport now holds Grands Prix in five countries with significant human rights concerns, with no transparent criteria governing host selection beyond financial terms. FIFA’s award of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, a country that remains, as of writing, the sole bidder, follows a pattern established by Qatar’s 2022 hosting, which Amnesty International described as “blatant sportswashing” (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023). The pattern is consistent: governing bodies accept the money, issue statements about human rights progress, and move on. 

Western governments have been no more consistent. The United Kingdom approved the Newcastle United takeover despite its own stated commitments to human rights in Saudi Arabia. European governments have deepened energy partnerships with Azerbaijan even as Baku has expanded its sports sponsorship portfolio. The contradiction, criticizing sportswashing publicly while enabling it commercially and diplomatically, is not hypocrisy so much as a structural feature of a world in which the financial weight of Gulf sovereign wealth funds make principled resistance very costly. 

Bias and Counterarguments

Any honest assessment of this argument must grapple with its limitations and with the strongest objections to it. The most significant source-level concern involves the academic framing of sportswashing. Scholars like Grix and Brannagan write from within a liberal democratic tradition that treated transparency, civil society, and electoral accountability as baseline norms, a perspective that Gulf states and Azerbaijan would contest on sovereign and developmental grounds. Their framework is analytically powerful, but should not be mistaken for neutral description. Similarly, The Guardian’s investigative reporting, while credible and empirically grounded, carries an editorial posture skeptical of authoritarian investment that shapes how it frames the $6 billion figure. That number is real; what it means is a matter of interpretation. 

Although this perspective has merit, it fails to consider the notion that the Gulf states and Azerbaijan are engaged in genuine economic development and nation-building, not cynical manipulation. Saudi Vision 2030 has real domestic stakes: it is an attempt by a young Crown Prince to transform an economy that will lose its primary revenue source within a generation. Dismissing sports investment as purely reputational obscures the fact that tourism, entertainment, and global branding are legitimate economic development strategies. Many developing countries have used sports to “announce their arrival on the global stage” as one analysis notes, the difference in the Gulf’s case is primarily one of scale, not kind (Ettinger, 2024). 

On the other hand, it can be argued that the sportswashing label is applied selectively and reflects Western double standards. The United States used the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics for national brand projection; France used Paris 2024 similarly. The UK leveraged London 2012 to reintroduce itself as a cosmopolitan global capital. None of these efforts faced the sportswashing accusation. This critique has genuine force: the framework is applied most rigorously to non-Western, non-democratic states, which raises questions about whose standards are being applied and by whom. 

These objections, however, do not undermine the core argument but rather refine it. Acknowledging that sports investment serves real economic goals does not negate the fact that it simultaneously provides diplomatic cover for authoritarian governance. Acknowledging Western hypocrisy does not diminish the accountability gap that exists when states with documented records of political repression, journalist killings, labor exploitation, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing use global sports to generate positive association with billions of fans who will never read a human rights report. The point is not that these states are uniquely evil; it is that the strategy is real, it is working, and the institutions charged with managing global sport are not equipped to address it. 

Conclusion

Sport is no longer just entertainment or commerce. It has evolved to become infrastructure for geopolitical influence. When Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund acquires a Premier League club, when Qatar’s investment authority buys PSG, when Azerbaijan’s tourism authority sponsors a UEFA competition, these are not transactions, they are foreign policy instruments. They purchase not teams and logos but communication platforms, diplomatic assets, and legitimacy engines that reach billions of people who will never attend a summit or read a policy brief. The stadiums are full. The jerseys are on. The strategy is working. 

For policymakers, this means existing regulatory frameworks are dangerously inadequate. Sports governance bodies and national governments need proactive, coherent standards for sovereign ownership and state sponsorship, not ad hoc reactions after deals are signed and fan bases are captured. For business leaders and sports executives, the geopolitical logic behind sovereign investment carries reputational and political risks that purely commercial analysis will miss. And for students and general readers, following sport now requires some literacy in geopolitics: the clubs, tournaments, and events we love are embedded in a global competition for power, narrative, and legitimacy. The question is not whether that competition will continue, it will. The question is whether we will engage with it honestly, or look away because the soccer or MMA is good. 

References:

Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. (n.d.). Gulf countries invade the Euro football pitch. https://agsi.org/analysis/gulf-countries-invade-the-euro-football-pitch/

Brannagan, P. M., Giulianotti, R., & Grix, J. (2025). Sport and power: Hard power, soft power and smart power. Leisure Studies, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2025.2472728

Brannagan, P. M., Grix, J., & Norrito, A. (2026). Demystifying sportswashing: An assemblage theory perspective on authoritarian states’ investment in global sport. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481251352321

Barzani, H. (2021, November 29). Many European soccer teams are owned by Gulf states — but why? Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/many-european-soccer-teams-are-owned-by-gulf-states-but-why/

Council on Foreign Relations. (2023, July 13). Saudi Arabia’s investments raise questions of ‘sportswashing.’ https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/saudi-arabias-investments-raise-questions-sportswashing

Dorsey, J. M. (2024, July 17). Gulf investment in European soccer becomes a hot potato. Wilson Center. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/gulf-investment-european-soccer-becomes-hot-potato

Ettinger, A. (2024, October 21). More than money: The geopolitics behind Saudi Arabia’s sports strategy. Carleton University Newsroom. https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/saudi-arabia-strategy-sportswashing/

Grix, J., & Brannagan, P. M. (2024). Sports mega-events as foreign policy: Sport diplomacy, “soft power,” and “sportswashing.” American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241262042

Michaelson, R. (2023, July 26). Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s $6bn spend on ‘sportswashing.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/revealed-saudi-arabia-6bn-spend-on-sportswashing

Roll, S. (2026, February 4). Sovereign wealth funds and foreign policy: How Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar invest in their power (SWP Research Paper 2026/RP 03). Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/sovereign-wealth-funds-and-foreign-policy