The Saudi Playbook is Rewriting Sport: Exclusive Interview

Newcastle United Fans Against Sportswashing co-founder John Hird shares his thoughts on Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing campaigns.

In one of John Hird’s protests, they became surrounded outside St James’ Park by men in Saudi shirts, shouting them down and filming them. One elderly fan, not directly associated with the group, who just stood with the protesters, was aggressively confronted. The clip went viral. Even their own fans who didn’t support the protest said the confrontation went too far.

John Hird has been trying to keep that discomfort alive ever since. He calls it “worshipping the accomplished fact” — the Saudi deal happened, so people stopped questioning it.

Here’s the fact Hird keeps coming back to: Newcastle United’s chairman, Yasser al-Rumayyan, is a sitting minister in the Saudi government. He isn’t a businessman with government connections, he is the government, sitting in the directors’ box every other Saturday. He also chaired LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed tour that has reportedly burned through billions of dollars chasing legitimacy in a sport that never needed rescuing.

“It’s not us that’s brought politics in,” Hird says. “It’s when the Premier League and the government at the time allowed states to own football clubs.”

His group has worked directly with Saudi human rights defenders, including the family of Manahel al-Otaibi, a fitness instructor sentenced to eleven years in prison for posting a photo of herself without an abaya and for social media posts supporting women’s rights.

Manahel al-Otaibi has since been held in solitary confinement with a broken leg, and, according to her sister, was stabbed in the face by another prisoner. Her sister Fawzia, exiled in Edinburgh, was brought to Newcastle by Hird’s group to lobby the city council directly. They asked councillors to simply say her name publicly. The council refused.

Following on from the controversial LIV Golf withdrawal, Saudi Arabia’s declining reputation is no longer a surprise. What’s difficult to grasp is how they still get away with being wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing, and the al-Otaibi case is a small window into how that trick works every time.

Why Sport, and Why Now?

There were multiple layers involved in the withdrawal of the ‘Visit Saudi’ sponsorship campaign proposed ahead of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand.Football Australia

‘s James Johnson strongly opposed the campaign, stating it didn’t align with the tournament’s vision and expectations. Several players spoke out. The last straw may have come from human rights organisations, like Amnesty International Australia, applying further pressure. Eventually, FIFA withdrew from negotiations.

After confirming the deal hadn’t happened, FIFA president Gianni Infantino called the controversy ‘a storm in a teacup’ and argued there was nothing inherently wrong with FIFA accepting Saudi sponsorship. He explicitly said FIFA wanted to explore Saudi sponsorship in women’s and men’s football in the future.

To really understand the main motivations behind Saudi Arabia’s recent involvement in sports, we must look at what’s driving it. For decades, foreign investors viewed Saudi Arabia as a rigid, unpredictable, oil-dependent autocracy where doing business was bogged down by bureaucracy and extreme conservatism.

Over 60% of Saudi citizens are under the age of 30. Vision 2030 was officially launched on 25th April 2016 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The project has given a sense of national pride to a young, tech-savvy population, along with hope and the promise of an exciting future. Set against the wider Middle East and competition with the vibrant tourism economy of neighbouring UAE, it promises jobs, entertainment, nightlife, and a country moving into the 21st century, defusing potential internal unrest.

By making Vision 2030 a public, global strategy, Saudi Arabia has deliberately entangled its economic future with Western institutions. When Western corporations, sports leagues, FIFA, the Premier League, and governments sign deals that align with Vision 2030, they become stakeholders in Saudi Arabia’s success.

It inevitably becomes exponentially harder for Western leaders to criticise the regime’s human rights record or foreign policy when their own economic growth, green transitions and sports investments are explicitly tied to Saudi’s playbook.

The United Arab Emirates has Fly Emirates, Dubai and a polished global image. Qatar has BeIN Sports, Paris Saint-Germain, and hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup. For decades, Saudi Arabia watched its smaller Gulf neighbours successfully use sport and tourism to brand themselves as modern, global hubs while it remained closed off, hyper-conservative, and viewed strictly through the lens of oil and religious law.

Saudi Arabia realised its neighbours were diversifying their economies and building international soft-power shields before the oil ran out. If Saudi didn’t act, it risked being left behind as the sleepy, rigid giant of the region.

Fifty or a hundred years ago, oil was an infinite-seeming golden goose; no one cared about soft power because the West needed the energy and would look the other way. The global green transition is real, and the post-oil era has a hard deadline. Mohammed bin Salman introduced Vision 2030 precisely because Saudi Arabia knows it has a finite window to build a tech, tourism and entertainment economy from scratch before petroleum loses its absolute leverage. Sport isn’t a hobby; it’s the loudest megaphone money can buy to advertise a “new Saudi Arabia” to global tourists and investors.

The centrepiece of that ambition is NEOM, specifically The Line, a planned linear city stretching across the desert. Building it has meant clearing land occupied by Bedouin tribes; some residents who resisted relocation have been killed or jailed, according to reports on the project. NEOM’s scope has also quietly shrunk, from a city spanning hundreds of kilometres in early plans to a fraction of that now under construction. It’s tied to Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the 2034 World Cup, a deadline it now must build toward regardless of how NEOM itself is progressing.

Sportswashing is nothing new. It has been around since the early days of commercial sporting events. From the 1938 Berlin Olympics to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina to the 2022 Qatari World Cup, sportswashing runs on the same formula: propaganda and deceit that appeals to the better nature of sports fans who may be unaware of a state’s internal politics.

What’s at Stake for Australia?

On paper, the bilateral ledger between Canberra and Riyadh barely moves the needle, hovering around $2.8 billion in trade, mostly agricultural exports. By traditional economic metrics, Saudi Arabia is a modest partner for Australia.

Looking at the balance sheet misses the point entirely. State-backed capital isn’t flowing here for standard commerce; it’s buying a stake in a core Western democracy, embedding itself in critical sectors, and securing the kind of systemic leverage that transforms a regional petro-state into an indispensable global player.

We aren’t just seeing a drop in the ocean of bilateral trading funds between Australia and Saudi; we are also seeing parallels with the entire West as UK and Saudi trading accounts for only 0.8% of UK’s international trade. The real leverage lies in geopolitics and war preparation as Saudi is a key ally to the West, and shares many of its security infrastructure.

The Forgotten Promises

In October 2021, the Saudi PIF bought Premier League side Newcastle United, a club that hadn’t won a domestic title since 1927 and turned it into the one of the richest clubs in the world.

On the northeast coast of England, Newcastle United have been consistent Premier League participants for decades; their locals are proud of their working-class heritage, and despite the club’s lack of success, its fanbase remains one of the most passionate in Europe.

In 2023, following the formation of Newcastle United Fans Against Sportswashing, headlines began pouring in but with a clear divide between supporters who insisted on keeping politics out of the game and those who couldn’t stomach the ownership’s record.

“If we protested against Mike Ashley, correctly, because of his mismanagement of the club and his zero-hour contracts, then why can’t we protest against what the owners of Newcastle United are doing now?” Hird asks.

The strategy, as Hird sees it, relies on an active erasure of the human cost behind the billions. Newcastle is a city forged in the crucible of the trade union movement, with a long, fierce history of standing up for workers’ rights and labour dignity.

Yet under the current ownership, fans are asked to cheer for a regime backed by a systemic apparatus of forced labour, severe restrictions on union organising, and absolute state control.

While Qatar’s labour abuses were dragged into the global spotlight ahead of the 2022 World Cup exposing the mechanics of the Kafala sponsorship system that legally chained migrant workers to employers through fabricated debt bondage and passport confiscation, Saudi Arabia operates on a parallel but distinct scale. Both Gulf states have relied heavily on low-income South Asian workforces to build the mega-infrastructure of their national ambitions. But where Qatar faced a compressed, intense window of scrutiny tied to a single tournament, Saudi Arabia’s labour model is tied to the sprawling, trillion-dollar expanse of Vision 2030.

Even as Riyadh promotes digital contract reforms to modernise its employment framework, Amnesty International has repeatedly documented the same patterns, releasing investigations into systemic wage theft, illegal recruitment debts, and hazardous conditions across flagship Saudi infrastructure projects like the Riyadh Metro. Human Rights Watch has separately catalogued labour violations linked directly to state-backed giga-projects funded by Newcastle United’s owners — the Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Hird calls the recent LIV Golf collapse a “vanity project,” and sees the same pattern of missed promises in the PIF’s plans for Newcastle.

“Loads of promises, but nothing, nothing concrete, apart from this training ground which is still in the planning stage,” he says.

“No new ground after five years, apart from some flats in the early days, no investment in companies, nothing, absolutely nothing.”

The training ground upgrade, when it eventually materialised, came in well below what fans were led to expect, reported at roughly £180 million against far larger early promises.

The Man City Comparison

Hird draws a sharp contrast with Manchester City’s investment, and the success it has bought them. Abu Dhabi’s ownership group took over the club in 2008; it proved to the rest of the Gulf that a historic English institution could be converted into a state-of-the-art vehicle for global soft power.

They demonstrated that with bottomless capital, an elite footballing dynasty could be manufactured from the ground up, completely altering the financial landscape of European competition.

Nearly two decades later, that success is permanently asterisked by 115 Premier League charges for alleged financial rule breaking. The ongoing legal battle, fought with a wall of corporate lawyers, highlights a grim reality of modern sports governance: for state-backed owners with bottomless treasuries, regulatory fines and protracted litigation are merely the cost of doing business.

When a sovereign wealth fund can outspend domestic regulators, the foundational premise of fair competition begins to erode.

When Newcastle supporters look at City, many see a roadmap to domestic dominance. Critics see a model built on financial distortion and the quiet sanitisation of an autocratic regime’s record, sharing the exact same systemic reliance on migrant labour vulnerabilities seen across the Gulf.

The only real difference between Abu Dhabi’s pioneer blueprint and Riyadh’s playbook is scale; the latter is attempting to rewrite the entire global sporting calendar, leaving fans to question whether a game governed by competing nation-states can still be called a sport at all.

“The difference between companies and Saudi Arabia, is that a company has limited resources, but a state’s pockets are bottomless. In the end, a lot of people have got to understand, it could destroy the sport. Football will cease to be a sport if nation-states with their bottomless pockets and political agendas are allowed to dominate.” Hird says.

The Cracks Are Already Showing

The fragility of this approach is becoming impossible to ignore. When traditional sports administrators chase endless streams of sovereign wealth, they hitch their wagon to an experiment that can unravel just as quickly as it was funded.

LIV Golf has reportedly lost around $5 billion chasing legitimacy in a sport that didn’t need rescuing, with no clear return in sight. PIF’s official policy requires its investments to eventually turn a profit, and financial analysts have floated the possibility that PIF could sell Newcastle if the numbers don’t work, a strange position for a project sold as permanent global prestige.

When international tours and domestic events hosted in places like Australia get tied to the volatile balance sheets of autocratic petro-states, local sports infrastructure is left wide open to sudden geopolitical shocks.

For everyday fans and independent athletes, this turns local competition into collateral damage. When national governing bodies lower their standards for a quick financial injection, the core bond between a sport and its community snaps. With regulators too eager to chase state-backed bidders to offer any real protection, independent fan networks and grassroots advocates have become the last line of defence.

Hird points to an alternative most fans never hear about. In Germany and Sweden, football clubs operate under member-ownership rules known as 50+1 that prevent outside investors from taking majority control.

Whose Game Is It Anyway?

To say politics should be left out of football is a trap. That very statement is itself a political stance, it’s the symptom of sportswashing, not an escape from it.

Ultimately, the Saudi playbook is rewriting sport not through organic growth, but by turning historic cultural assets into tools for national image-building. This shift from normal commerce to political leverage forces a hard reckoning across the entire industry. When sovereign wealth funds treat Western sports leagues as disposable line items in a broader economic diversification plan, the basic premise of fair competition gets gutted from the inside out.