Middle East sports go global with politics in tow.
By James M. Dorsey
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A potential sale
of storied soccer club Manchester United to a member of Qatar's ruling
family could take the Manchester derby to new heights.
The sale
also enhances the likelihood of England's Premier League, the world's
most-watched league, becoming a venue for Gulf state rivalries.
It is
unclear whether Jassim bin Hamad Al Than’, chairman of Qatar Islamic Bank and
son of a former prime minister, is personally interested in Manchester United
or his US$9.15 bid for the club is part of a Qatari effort to expand its
European franchise.
What is
clear is that the sale would mean that the Gulf's three primary players, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar would each own a Premier League
club.
A senior UAE
ruling family member bought Manchester City in 2008, while Saudi Arabia’s
Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquired Newcastle United in 2021. Elsewhere in
Europe, Qatar owns France’s Paris Saint-Germain.
Tensions
between the three Gulf states tend to spill onto soccer pitches. The UAE waged
a decade-long effort to deprive Qatar of its 2022 World Cup hosting rights that
reached a crescendo during the 3.5-year-long Emirates-Saudi Arabia-led economic
and diplomatic boycott of the Gulf state.
The Gulf
political sands have since shifted. Saudi Arabia quickly welcomed Qatar back
into the fold when the boycott was lifted in early 2021. The UAE and Bahrain,
which joined the boycott, took time to reestablish relations.
Long
obsessed with the threat to Gulf monarchies posed by the Muslim Brotherhood,
UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed was determined to force Qatar to end its
support for popular Arab revolts and political Islam. Qatar has loosened its
ties to the Brotherhood and other groups since the boycott's end.
In addition,
mounting competition with Saudi
Arabia and a souring of personal relations between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and
Mr. Bin Zayed have contributed to a warming of ties between the UAE and the
kingdom.
Saudi Arabia’s recent spectacular soccer player buying spree is the latest expression of Mr. Bin Salman’s determination to secure the
kingdom’s position as the Gulf’s top dog.
In addition,
Saudi Arabia has used the spree to bolster its standing as the leader of the Muslim world and beacon
of moderate, tolerant Islam, with Muslim players suggesting that religious affinity was one reason
they wanted to transfer to the kingdom.
The
acquisitions juxtapose the kingdom with Europe, whose culture wars fuel anti-migrant,
anti-Muslim, and anti-black sentiment.
The impact
of Gulf rivalries on the Premier League and European soccer may be subtle as
long as the various states manage their differences well.
Moreover,
fan attitudes will likely further shield the League from rivalries spilling
publicly onto the soccer pitch.
Supporters
of Gulf-owned clubs may, in the majority, not be concerned about their club
owners’ tarnished human rights records and may want to avoid being drawn into
regional rivalries.
In the
United States, politics has dogged the proposed merger between golf’s PGA Tour,
the longstanding organizer of the sport's flagship events, and LIV Golf, its
Saudi Public Investment Fund-backed US$405 million, 14-tournament league rival.
Like with
the Newcastle acquisition, Saudi Arabia has tried to downplay the role of the
Saudi state in the golf merger. In the US, senators investigating the merger
are challenging the Saudi effort.
The Fund’s
governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, initially refused to testify in court proceedings
in California that were shut down with the merger announcement. More recently,
Mr. Al-Rumayyan has sought to avoid appearing before the Senate investigation
committee.
The chairman
of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Richard
Blumenthal, has warned Mr. Al-Rumayyan that the committee "will be forced to consider other
legal methods to
compel PIF’s compliance” if he fails to appear in Congress on September 13 or
does not propose an alternative date.
The PIF asserts
that Mr. Al-Rumayyan has sovereign immunity. In addition, the fund argued that
as “a minister bound by the Kingdom’s laws regarding the confidentiality of
certain information,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan would be “an inappropriate witness” for a
public hearing on Saudi business investments and its efforts to leverage those
for international influence.
Saudi Arabia
fears that Mr. Al-Rumayyan could be questioned in Congress about his
involvement in Mr. Bin Salman’s 2017 power grab in which a large number of prominent
Saudi business people and ruling family members were detained at the Ritz
Carlton Hotel in Riyadh and forced to hand over significant portions of their
assets, including the transfer of companies to the investment fund.
Sky Prime
Aviation Services, a Riyadh-based charter jet company, was among the assets transferred.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary
executions, Agnes Callamard, reported that one of the company’s planes flew to
Istanbul members of the squad that killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
There is no
suggestion that Mr. Al-Rumayyan had any knowledge or personal involvement in
the matter.
“PIF cannot
have it both ways: if it wants to engage with the United States commercially,
it must be subject to United States law and oversight,” Mr. Blumenthal said.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and podcast, The
Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
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