3. Theoretical framework and competing hypotheses
This paper's theoretical framework combines two pieces from the literature review: Gray's (2011) late rentierism, which treats the investment as an active diversification of income and legitimacy before oil loses value; and Nye's (2008) distinction between resource and outcome, which imposes a simple and uncomfortable methodological discipline: counting what was bought is factual; inferring why it was bought and what the purchase produced is interpretation, which needs to be tested against competing explanations, not merely asserted by the most cited one.
From this framework, three competing hypotheses emerge naturally from the reviewed literature, each with a distinct observable prediction about the investment pattern we should see in the data. Table 1 summarizes the three before each is developed in detail.
| Hypothesis | Central claim | Main observable prediction |
|---|---|---|
| H1 - domestic-rentier | The investment serves, first and foremost, domestic legitimacy and income diversification; the external audience is a side effect, not the goal. | Persistence of investment even under reputational crisis; strong weight on domestic consumption assets. |
| H2 - intra-Gulf emulation | The investment is above all a competitive response to the precedents of Abu Dhabi and Qatar. | Same sequence of vectors as the precedents, compressed into a much shorter timeframe. |
| H3 - sportswashing | The dominant goal is to improve the country's international reputation. | Concentration in assets of maximum external visibility; retreat expected under reputational criticism. |
H1 (domestic-rentier). Sporting investment serves, first and foremost, domestic legitimacy and internal economic diversification, with the external audience as a side effect, not as the primary goal. If H1 is the explanation with the greatest weight, the observable pattern should show: (a) significant concentration in direct domestic consumption assets (the local league, live entertainment within Saudi territory), not only in image export assets (European clubs); (b) persistence of investment without retreat under negative international pressure, because the public that legitimizes the spending is not the public that criticizes it; (c) explicit and declared integration with Vision 2030 as an economic policy document, not merely with international public relations communication; (d) a demographic asymmetry: the investment should be proportionally larger than that of Gulf neighbors with a smaller or older population.
H2 (intra-Gulf emulation and rivalry). The investment is above all a competitive response to the precedents of Abu Dhabi (2008) and Qatar (2011-2022): Saudi Arabia enters late, but copies the same script at a larger scale and greater speed, because rivalry among neighboring Gulf monarchies is, in itself, a driver of foreign policy. If H2 carries more weight, the observable pattern should show: (a) the same investment vectors used by Qatar and Abu Dhabi, in roughly the same sequence (European club, domestic league, mega-event, multi-sport diversification); (b) marked temporal compression (what the precedents did in ten or fifteen years, Saudi Arabia does in five); (c) financial scale superior to the precedents, comparable year by year.
H3 (sportswashing). The dominant goal is international reputation: reducing the country's association with human rights violations (the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, see Callamard, 2019; the war in Yemen; and restrictions on civil rights) through the sporting showcase. If H3 carries more weight, the observable pattern should show: (a) prioritization of assets with maximum external visibility (sponsorship in European leagues, mega-events with international audiences) over purely domestic consumption assets; (b) sensitivity of the investment to negative reputational events, with pauses, retreats, or changes in communication strategy after spikes in international criticism; (c) evidence, even if indirect, of improvement in international perception metrics (soft power indices, press coverage with a more favorable tone) that would justify the continued investment under this logic.
The three hypotheses are not mutually exclusive in practice: the same investment (the Ronaldo case itself) can be read, simultaneously, as domestic entertainment, a response to the Qatari precedent, and an attempt to improve the country's image. What this paper tests is not the presence or absence of each logic, but the relative weight of each one against the aggregate investment pattern over ten years, and especially against the behavior of the investment at the moments when the three hypotheses would make divergent predictions: precisely the moments of reputational crisis, in which H3 predicts retreat and H1 predicts continuity.