2. Literature review

2.1 Soft power and its measurement problem

The obligatory starting point is Joseph Nye, who coined the term soft power in the early 1990s and consolidated it in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Nye, 2004): the ability to obtain desired outcomes through attraction, rather than through coercion (hard power, the military and sanctions) or payment. Nye's less cited contribution, and the one decisive for this paper's argument, appears in a later article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: soft power needs to be separated into resource and outcome. Whether an asset is attractive can be gauged through opinion polling; whether that attraction produces the desired policy outcomes "has to be judged case by case" (Nye, 2008, p. 100). The distinction seems technical, but it carries an enormous practical implication: buying a football club is acquiring a resource. Nothing guarantees, and nothing in the design of the purchase itself allows one to infer, that the resource converts into genuine admiration on the part of those watching.

It is this gap between resource and outcome that the literature on sport and soft power has tried to fill, doing so through an increasingly harsh self-critique within the field itself. Grix & Lee (2013) documented how states the authors call "emerging" (Brazil, China, South Africa, Russia, Qatar) used sports mega-events to show the world they already belonged to the group of established powers: that was the logic behind Beijing 2008, Sochi 2014, and Qatar's 2022 bid. The argument is compelling and widely cited, but the same authors, three years later, published the self-critique that reoriented the entire field: in "Of Mechanisms and Myths," Grix & Brannagan (2016) show that the soft power and mega-events literature systematically confuses strategies and resources with outcomes; the causal mechanism that would convert a sporting event into actual attraction is under-theorized, and much of the claimed "success" of soft power is, in the authors' own words, unverified myth. It is the same distinction as Nye's, rediscovered empirically: everyone measures the money spent; no one can measure the admiration bought.

Along the same lines, but with their own conceptual twist, Brannagan & Giulianotti (2015) coined, while studying the case of Qatar and the 2022 World Cup, the term soft disempowerment: the very showcase that projects a state's image symmetrically expands the scrutiny over it. Qatar bought visibility and received, in the same package, a decade of international reporting on the deaths of migrant workers on stadium construction sites. The mechanism is not hypothetical: it is observable in any press archive between 2010 and 2022. The direct consequence for this paper is clear: if the soft disempowerment mechanism is real and replicable, and if Saudi investment keeps growing despite it (and not because of it), then the hypothesis that external image is the dominant goal of the investment loses force with every year the pattern repeats without retreat.

The broader theoretical framework in which these debates sit was named by Simon Chadwick and collaborators the geopolitical economy of sport: states, sovereign funds, and corporations treating elite sport as an arena where power, capital, and reputation circulate simultaneously (Chadwick, Widdop & Goldman, 2023). Stuart Murray (2018) systematized the more general instrument this investment fits into, sports diplomacy: the deliberate and continuous use of sport by state and non-state actors to advance foreign policy, image, and ties between peoples. Neither of these two frameworks, however, was conceived specifically with the Saudi case in mind, which differs from the Gulf precedents in at least one structural dimension: Saudi Arabia has a young population and a domestic entertainment market at a scale that neither Qatar nor the Emirates possess. It is this gap, between a general theoretical framework and a case with its own demographic trait, that this paper tries to fill.

2.2 Sport as a state instrument: from the Qatari and Emirati cases to the Saudi case

The empirical literature on Gulf state investment in sport predates the Saudi case by almost a decade. Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City in 2008; Qatar bought Paris Saint-Germain in 2011 and won the bid for the 2022 World Cup that same year. Reiche (2015) analyzed the Qatari case specifically as a simultaneous instrument of domestic and foreign policy, arguing that the sporting investment served three functions at once: building national identity internally, medium term economic diversification, and projecting image outward, a triple function that anticipates, by a decade's head start, the structure of hypotheses this paper proposes for the Saudi case. James Dorsey, in one of the few substantial books devoted to the intersection of football and politics in the Middle East (Dorsey, 2016), documented how investment in sport in the Gulf has always been read, within the region, both as external projection and as a tool of domestic control and legitimation, a point frequently lost in Western coverage that only sees the external axis.

The Saudi case itself still lacks the same systematic academic attention that the Qatari case received between 2015 and 2022, partly because the bulk of Saudi investment postdates 2021 and the literature takes time to process current events. What exists so far is mostly quality investigative journalism (the coverage by Play the Game, the Danish institute that maintains the most cited tally of aggregate Saudi investment in sport) and economic policy analyses that treat sport as a side item within the broader Vision 2030 project, not as the central object of analysis. This is precisely the gap this paper tries to fill: no work as of this publication's date has assembled, in a single verified fact bank, the complete Saudi sports portfolio (football, golf, F1, boxing, e-sports, tennis, rally, and imported mega-events such as the Iberian Super Cups) in order to test it systematically against competing hypotheses. A personal aside is worth allowing here: until a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Real Madrid and Barcelona deciding the Spanish Super Cup in the middle of the Saudi desert, but that is exactly what has been happening, without fanfare, since 2020.

2.3 The political economy of the Gulf rentier state

The third leg of the review comes from an older and better established field: the political economy of the oil producing Gulf states. The founding concept is the rentier state, formulated by Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani (Beblawi & Luciani, 1987), studying precisely these monarchies: a state that does not live off taxes collected from its citizens, but off external income (oil sold to the rest of the world), which inverts the classic social contract. In the liberal democratic model, the citizen pays tax and demands representation; in the rentier state, the government collects little and, in exchange, the citizen demands little, with loyalty bought at the source through public employment, subsidies, and free or cheap services. The arrangement is stable as long as the income keeps coming in; if it dries up, the pact cracks.

Steffen Hertog (2010), in Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats, detailed how the Saudi state apparatus specifically distributes this income through a network of intermediaries tied to the royal family, an institutional design that helps explain why sports investment is carried out by a small, overlapping network of individuals (the same sovereign fund governor appears as chairman of a football club in England and as a central figure in multiple other assets), rather than by a market of independent investors. Matthew Gray (2011) updated the concept for the 21st century with the idea of late rentierism: Gulf states that, aware that the oil era has an expiration date, use current income to actively build new sources of income and legitimacy before the old one runs out, instead of simply redistributing passively as in the classic 1970s model. It is this late, active, anticipatory rentierism that supplies this paper's theoretical framework: investment in sport is not a vanity expense of a regime with money to spare, it is a calculated bet on income and legitimacy diversification, with the Saudi demographic clock (most of the population born after the start of the abundant oil era) as background pressure.

One piece is still missing: how state money connects specifically to sports sponsorship, beyond the direct purchase of clubs. Krzyzaniak (2016) examined shirt and naming sponsorship as a soft power vehicle distinct from full ownership, an argument relevant to the Saudi case because much of the investment (Aramco in Formula 1 and FIFA, Sela at Newcastle, NEOM at McLaren) takes exactly this contractual form, cheaper and more reversible than outright acquisition of an asset. Peterson (2006), studying Qatar more than a decade before the peak of Qatari investment in sport, had already described the general "branding" mechanism that Gulf micro-states use to convert wealth into international recognition, anticipating the vocabulary that the soft power and mega-events literature would later consolidate. The most recent piece of the debate, a 2024 article by Grix, Brannagan et al. treating sports mega-events as a simultaneous instrument of diplomacy, soft power, and sportswashing, sums up the state of the art: the three concepts (sports diplomacy, soft power, and sportswashing) describe overlapping but distinct phenomena, and the literature still lacks a consistent criterion for deciding which one carries more weight in any given concrete case (Grix & Brannagan, 2024). It is precisely that criterion, applied to a concrete case with original data, that sections 3 through 7 of this paper try to supply.