Six Cars and a Grizzly Bear

FIFA coronated the Middle East’s largest nation, Saudi Arabia, with the ultimate achievement coming from its sports investment: the right to host soccer’s greatest competition. Saudi Arabia was the sole nation to bid to host the 2034 World Cup, continuing the pattern of a single ticket bidding to host the competition, one established in 2023 when the Spain-Portugal-Morocco joint bid for the 2030 World Cup won hosting rights. Saudi Arabia’s bid also confirms the theme of corruption that has defined FIFA in the 21st century. 

In an attempt to diversify its oil-driven economy, Saudi Arabia has made significant public investments in various international sports. Their government has constantly been associated with the practice of “sportswashing,” where governments use sports to improve their otherwise tarnished national reputations. In 2013, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund took up a 50 percent stake in Sheffield United, and they have not looked back since. They bought out one of the Premier League’s largest clubs in Newcastle United, signed away some of soccer’s largest talents on €100+ million contracts for their national soccer league, and have hosted lucrative tennis, golf, NASCAR, and wrestling tournaments.

The nation’s bid for the World Cup isn’t aligned with their generally for-profit goals; instead, they hope to use it as a stage to expand international influence. Saudi Arabia has already spent the last decade growing their geopolitical power outside of oil through sports. By now, every potential host knows that the World Cup loses money. FIFA has always touted that the World Cup grants tourism and business opportunities to nations who choose to host the competition. Yet conveniently, the causal relationship between gains from the World Cup and gains from other political projects and development is immeasurable. Leading up to 2022, hosts Qatar spent $220 billion on the World Cup, just slightly less than their GDP of $237 billion as measured in 2022. Though figures on Qatari growth are yet to be seen, the nation will be hard pressed to find that $220 billion turn into immediate returns over the next few years.

Comparatively, like Qatar, a World Cup opportunity could help Saudi Arabia redefine its image despite repeated human rights violations. The world needs no reminder that Saudi Arabia champions sociopolitical authoritarianism, with countless forced mass executions, torture, and restrictions on human rights freedoms. In Qatar, we have already seen how a primarily western-inspired competition like the World Cup can get messily mixed into the laws of Middle Eastern countries: the country placed bans on beer despite promises of its sale in their bid, and officials constantly got into altercations with media coverage crews. 

Perhaps the saddest part of this bid is the required rule changes that rushed Saudi Arabia to the podium. According to the New York Times, FIFA president Gianni Infentino bent FIFA procedures heavily to push the Saudi Arabian bid to success. Leading up to the vote, FIFA determined that both the 2030 and 2034 bids would be packaged into a single vote, where member states could either vote in favor of both bids or against both bids. In addition, host tickets were previously required to have seven stadiums with a capacity greater than 40,000. For the 2034 edition, FIFA lowered this requirement to four stadiums, which is conveniently the same number of stadiums presently in Saudi Arabia. The nation has pledged to build 11 more stadiums above this minimum capacity, which could induce a similar situation as 2022 World Cup Qatar, where migrant populations were abused, overworked, lied to, and underpaid en route to the construction of these stadiums. 

FIFA is no stranger to ruining countries that host the Cup. In 2007, Brazil was awarded the right to host World Cup 2014, a project that would place an even greater strain on the struggling Brazilian economy. Though one of the world’s largest nations, their GDP per capita sat at an extremely low $7,323 in 2007, a figure similar to that of the island nation of St. Lucia. The costs of the World Cup were overwhelmingly financed through public funds, and the Brazilian economy suffered tremendously as a result of corrupt politics raising costs even higher to satisfy private contracts. In 2015, British singer Declan McKenna released a track titled “Brazil,” poetically pointing out the pathetic products of World Cup 2014, with the host nation having “sold the Amazon / to show the country that you’re from / is where the world should want to be.” The parallels are striking—once again, a politically corrupt and unequal country’s citizenry must rise up to quench the insatiable thirst of FIFA, led by a new corrupt president who probably “lives down a river somewhere / with six cars and a grizzly bear.”