Some of the highest-paid sportsmen in history, the golfers of the LIV league, had bad news recently. Saudi Arabia said it was pulling out of LIV Golf after sinking $5-6 billion into it. The highest-paid golfer was reported to have been on a $600 million contract over four years; others were getting more than $100 million. The men in plaid are, in a sense, victims of Donald Trump’s war with Iran.
The LIV announcement is not just sports news. The Saudis were, by their standards, already in financial trouble, and then they had to spend tens of billions on defence and propping up their economy during the 38 days of the war. Crude oil prices have gone up but not enough to compensate, given the difficulties in exporting it. Saudi Arabia can no longer afford to engage in so-called ‘sportswashing’ on the grand scale of the past few years.
LIV Golf was part of an ambitious plan by the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to rebrand the kingdom and improve its international image. The chief reason its image needed to be improved was that – as the CIA found – MBS’s henchmen killed one of his critics, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and cut him up with a bone saw.
Now that Trump’s war is so clearly failing, the Saudis are trying to distance themselves from it
