This is about LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia’s move into pro sports, but it’s also about rich people in general, so let’s talk about Succession for a second. Some of my favorite parts of Succession are the chyrons that air on ATN, the Roy family’s right-wing news network. ATN is a parody of Fox News. Chyrons are the little bits of text that sit at the bottom of the TV screen, under the news anchor. The chyrons on ATN are both comically absurd and not exaggerated all that much relative to the Fox versions.
“Gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice,’” one reads. “I smiled at her by the photocopier—now I’m facing chemical castration,” reads another. There’s also “Ivy League school considering intimacy coordinators for first dates.” And then there’s my personal favorite, “Deep state blunder: classified docs displayed on NBA Jumbotron.”
What makes the chyrons so funny and so chilling—or at least one of the things that makes them both funny and chilling—is that no one on the show talks about them. No one even seems to notice they’re there. All these shouty, manipulative, button-pushing messages, all these micro-narratives calibrated to provoke instant emotional response, and to the rich people on the show, they’re just wallpaper. They’re background noise. You know that somewhere in the imagined world of the series, millions of regular people are seeing them, believing them, getting worked up about them, and having their worldviews warped by them. But the protagonists don’t belong to that group of deluded saps. They’re billionaires. They’re the ones doing the deluding.
I’ve been thinking about fake political chyrons this week because golf’s U.S. Open is underway in Los Angeles, which means that everyone is once again talking about the PGA Tour’s stunning merger (lol, “merger”) with LIV Golf, which means that everyone is once again talking about Saudi Arabia’s aggressive incursion into the worldwide professional sports market, which means that everyone is once again talking about the incursions of oil-rich Gulf states in general. To all appearances, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, now controls professional golf in the United States. This is a startling development; it seems like just a short time ago (because it was just a short time ago) that the commissioner of the PGA Tour, Jay Monahan, was fiercely invoking 9/11 and the Saudi government’s horrific human-rights record in defending the role of the PGA Tour. It seems like just a short time ago (because it was just a short time ago) that Monahan and the tour were going to sue LIV Golf into oblivion and salt the earth with Phil Mickelson’s press clippings. And now they’re all … best friends?
And it isn’t just golf that’s currently being disrupted by millions of barrels of oil money. Consider:
- Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup after reportedly bribing FIFA executive committee members to support its dubious bid.
- The soccer club Manchester City, which won an incredible treble this season—finishing as champions of the English Premier League, the FA Cup, and the UEFA Champions League—is owned by a sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.
- Paris Saint-Germain, a club that until recently was the home of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Neymar—three of the most valuable and expensive stars in world soccer—is owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar.
- Manchester United, arguably the most valuable club in all of soccer, is controlled by the dismal American billionaires of the Glazer family; they’re now in talks to sell the club to a member of the Qatari royal family.
- Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, another wealth fund, bought yet another storied English Premier League club, Newcastle United, last year.
- Saudi Arabia has spent titanic sums to bring some of the biggest players in soccer to its own third-rate domestic league (and that might be putting it kindly); those players include the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, Karim Benzema, and possibly the most famous athlete on earth, Cristiano Ronaldo, whose contract is reportedly worth more than $200 million per year.
All of this is understandably, and justifiably, unsettling to fans in parts of the world that are not the Middle East. After all, these sovereign wealth funds and billionaire sheikhs are attached to repressive and intolerant regimes. These are governments that criminalize homosexuality, curtail the rights of women, prohibit free expression, and in some cases run on what could be considered borderline slave labor. And the oceans of money they can pour on global sports institutions seem to put them beyond the reach of existing rules and norms. The Qataris, it’s alleged, were able to buy FIFA. The Saudis, it’s alleged, were able to buy the PGA—at least partly because, after all the patriotic saber rattling, the PGA simply couldn’t afford to contend with the world’s largest oil producer in court.
To many people, all this feels new, and fast, and scary. After all, where does it end? Does an emirate buy the Yankees? Do the Saudis—who reportedly intend to host the 2030 men’s World Cup, and it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone will be able to stop them—throw their money around until they control all professional sports everywhere? We’ve been talking about this situation—I’m including myself in this—as if it were wholly unprecedented, throwing around new words (“sportswashing”) to characterize the PR sleight of hand the oil states are thought to be trying to accomplish. We’ve been talking as if we’re somewhere we’ve never been before.
The more I think about it, though, the more I think that it’s helpful to see LIV Golf and Manchester City and Ronaldo at Al Nassr not as shocking new developments, but as deeply, depressingly familiar ones. The tradition of terrible sports owners is not new, after all. It’s almost as old as sports. Rich and powerful people have always recognized the value of distraction as a tool for keeping large populations under control. Distraction can look like a fringe political issue (“gender fluid illegals”!). Distraction can also look like a major golf tournament or a championship soccer team.
Fascist dictators have used sports to legitimize their rule (Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics). Communist regimes have used sports to lend an aura of success to their crumbling dynasties (East Germany at the 1976 Olympics). Capitalist oligarchs have used sports to divert attention from the predatory and exploitative sources of their wealth (Donald Sterling, Roman Abramovich, and about 10,000 other American and European examples).
Rich and powerful people—especially rich and powerful men—love sports for many of the same reasons as everyone else. Sports are dramatic. They’re exciting. They’re tribal. They’re stirrers of powerful emotions. Rich and powerful men probably also like to spend time in contexts where winning and losing are emphasized because rich and powerful men probably like to be reminded that they are the winners of life. And sports make winning and losing look meritocratic. In sports, broadly speaking, the winners deserve it. I’m sure that if I were a billionaire, whether I were a sheikh or a tech bro, I’d love metaphors that told me that I, the champion of money, deserved it too.
But what rich and powerful people mostly get when they invest in sports is a big, shiny, colorful distraction to divert everyone else. They get the “One Shining Moment” version of the ATN chyron: While you pay attention to the action on the field and have strong feelings about it, they get to go on oppressing, exploiting, and enriching themselves. And if you notice the rich guys at all, you won’t notice all the oppressing and exploiting. You’ll think, “Wow, that guy crawling out the window with bags of money in both hands is the force behind the Lake Huron Snow Petrels! He must be a really dynamic and altruistic individual to bring so much joy to the community!”
As far as I can tell, these dynamics transcend national and cultural barriers. American billionaires exploit them. Russian billionaires exploit them. A former prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, who died last week at the age of 86, exploited them for many years as a media tycoon who was also a politician and the owner of the storied Italian soccer team A.C. Milan.
So yes, there are many alarming things about the Gulf States’ decision to build a Monopoly hotel on global athletics. But then, there are many alarming things about the world in which we live, and I think it might be more useful to view the LIV ascendancy as a continuation of a long and depressing history rather than as some revolutionary new event. Shitty rich guys have always wanted to own pro sports teams. The business of sports is bigger and more global than it’s ever been. Is it really that much of a surprise that the shittiest and richest guys on the planet are trying to get in on the action?
There are two reasons, basically, why I think it’s helpful to come at the problem this way. The first and less important reason is that it demystifies everyone’s motives. I don’t know about you, but I have at times seen the Saudis and the Qataris as a sort of mysterious and unreadable force. What are they doing? In fact, I think what they’re doing is pretty straightforward. They’re just being shitty rich guys. They’re the used-car tycoon in a 10-gallon hat lording over a local baseball team, just sized way the hell up. They’re the smirking, pink good ol’ boys who run the NCAA, with the large exception that they’re willing to pay their players. These guys all like sports. They all have big egos. They all want people to think they’re powerful and cool. They all want people to look at their ads, and pay attention to the spectacle they’re able to provide, and ignore the dark deeds that happen behind the scenes. It’s shitty rich guy 101. That’s all it is.
The second and more important reason to look at things this way is that I think it clarifies who the real enemy is. Once you introduce nationalism into the conversation, it gets very hard to see events through any other framework but nationalism. Regular people in the United States and Europe feel anxious because foreigners are buying up our cultural properties. Regular people in Saudi Arabia and Qatar feel defensive because foreigners are criticizing their cultures. Both these attitudes strike me as mistaken—and not just mistaken, but mistaken in a way that helps the shitty rich guys out. Mistaken in a way that makes their lives easier, which is the last thing any of us should want to do.
Maybe it’s naive of me, but I think the regular people are really all on the same side here. After all, regular people are the ones who are suffering under the shitty rich guys’ control, in small and large and sometimes life-destroying ways. Regular people are the ones who get trapped into paying exploitative rent to the NBA owner who controls their city block. Regular people are the ones who get trapped into seeing their love lives outlawed by the Premier League owner who controls their country. Regular people are the ones who get cheated, who get held down, who get—if the shitty rich guys have maneuvered their way into controlling a police apparatus—thrown in jail and executed.
The number of terrible American sports owners is legion. That’s not the issue (though every one of them should be called out and criticized). The number of terrible Middle Eastern sports owners is growing. That’s also not the issue (though every one of them should also be called out and criticized). The issue is that regular people are trapped in a system where everything we do serves to increase the shitty rich guys’ hold on power, and the games we love are being co-opted into that all-consuming system. When you fill up your car’s gas tank, you could be helping Saudi Arabia buy another sports league. But you still deserve to watch golf if you’re a golf fan. And you still have to get to work.
Sports are a useful distraction for the worst people in the world, but nationalism is like an ATN chyron that’s burned into your TV screen because no one remembered to change the channel. It keeps you permanently mad about something that’s ultimately beside the point. As long as we see this as a new story of Saudi Arabia versus America and Europe rather than the age-old story of shitty rich guys versus everyone else, we won’t be able to focus on what the shitty rich guys are actually doing. Which is exactly what they want.
Because of a copy desk error, an earlier version of this piece misstated that (a) Khaldoon al-Mubarak owns Manchester City and (b) al-Mubarak “is in charge of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.” Al-Mubarak is the team’s chairman, not owner, and is managing director and group chief executive officer of Mubadala, which is just one of a number of Abu Dhabi wealth funds.
