What does Saudi Arabia really want from sport?

Phil Mickelson should be as alarmed as he is tempted by his extraordinary $100 million offer to become the de facto head of sport's latest rebel breakaway.

Another week goes by and this time it's golf that has been targeted by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund - AKA its crown prince’s “personal piggy bank”.

The escalating Super League Golf saga, emerging amid ongoing attempts to bring the Joshua-Fury fight to Saudi, is the most audacious raid of all from Riyadh backers.

Telegraph Sport revealed on Tuesday how formal offers worth $30m to $50m up front are being mulled over by 11 players, including - alongside Dustin Johnson and Justin Rose, as well as the $100m offer for Mickelson. Following embarrassment in the football world last year over the failed Newcastle United takeover, it is suggested the Saudis are not taking “no” for an answer from golf.

However, with the sporting establishment again in open revolt over another scheme that will surely be derailed, academics insist there is method behind the madness of Saudi’s sudden sporting obsession.

“This is bread and circus to fill the civil societal space,” says Dr Andreas Krieg, of King's College London and the Royal College of Defence Studies. Audacious sporting bids are domestic appeasement in a nation where political debate is potentially deadly. “The public sphere is entirely consumed by entertainment and sports because you’re not allowed to speak about societal or political issues.”

With jail and floggings among reported punishments for dissidents of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the social media void is filled by the country’s rulers drip feed sporting and entertainment gossip. Hype around Saudi hosting Formula 1 this year as well as a previous Anthony Joshua fight in Riyadh dominated national dialogue for weeks, with Saudi Arabians now accounting for the eighth biggest population of Twitter users globally.

Observers say life in the country is more authoritarian than ever since MBS came to power. The murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been disastrous for MBS’ efforts to earn new Western allies, but domestically the case is just one of countless claims of human rights atrocities.

“The very strict enforcement of Sharia law simply goes beyond what Islam intended,” the academic adds. “It’s quite literally chopping people’s hands and heads off, and capital punishment is being used routinely against minors.”

Pressure on MBS following Joe Biden's election to the White House has led to prisoners of conscience being freed in recent weeks, but Krieg says there can be no moral justification for bringing a major fight to a nation where citizens have been imprisoned just for campaigning on women’s driving rights.

“These people were imprisoned because there can be zero toleration of any form of opposition, any form of critical voices, whether online or offline,” he adds. “When you think about Saudi we always thought about a more repressive, authoritarian country, but it was never as bad as it is under MBS, because at least there was some sort of discourse going on - now it is absolutely zero tolerance.”

Aside from helping fill the vacuum in public debate, bringing big sport to Saudi also helps MBS attempt to convince the world he is a global player. Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), is among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world due to the oil boom of the previous century, with total estimated assets of almost £300 billion. It has become a so-called “piggy bank” for MBS, who is reported to have extracted funds directly from it to add to the total pot for Joshua’s previous fight in Riyadh against Andy Ruiz Jr.

What else is motivating the Saudi sporting takeover? Much of MBS’ competitiveness is drawn from a ‘Keeping up with the Jones’s’ eye on progress on his contemporaries in Qatar and UAE. One has the World Cup, the other owns Manchester City. MBS’ trump card in return is his extraordinary ambition to build an equivalent of Dubai from scratch - the 10,230 square mile Neom development that could cost £400bn. The shiny marketing materials suggest the city could one day become a major international sporting hub, perhaps one day staging an international sporting competition, but observers, again, are sceptical.

Dr Krieg says progress at the site currently amounts to an airport and little else as questions mount over the stability of Saudi's long term financial outlook with oil prices unstable. “Nobody has any real numbers on unemployment but they are at more than 25 per cent among 18 year olds to 35 year olds,” he says.

Bill Law, a Middle East analyst and editor of Arab Digest, says much of MBS’ Vision 2030 - a dramatic remaking of the Saudi economy and Saudi society - will be dependent on sport as “a big part of that agenda”.

The ambition promises to encourage women into sport, creating 40,000 new jobs, but has effectively justified authorities in using the PIF to pursue Newcastle, F1, and now potentially tabling a £100million-plus offer for the Fury-Joshua fight.

“MBS will take anything he can get his hands on because it gives him a much better image and it feeds into his narrative that Saudi Arabia is open and changing, becoming moderate,” Law says.

“He's been very successful in engaging sports. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised to see Major League Baseball have an exhibition series too. It's all too irresistible for these big sporting bodies.”

The Joshua-Fury fight or indeed attempts to bankroll the controversial golfing breakaway will do little to benefit soaring numbers of unemployed, Law explains. “As much as these sporting events are popular with young Saudis, most of them quite frankly can’t afford to go to them because they don’t have jobs,” he said.

“He needs to deliver over a million jobs, and he’s showing no signs of doing that. Young Saudis can’t get married because they can't afford to get on the housing ladder. So while he's bringing in all of these splashy big sporting events, and spending hugely on Neom, the basics are not getting done. And I think the longer that goes on, and the more the oil revenues contract, the more difficult it's going to be for him. That's where again sports-washing is useful.”