Washed up: Gulf States shake-up sports ties. Sky News Arabia future in question.
The list of canceled sports and entertainment projects keeps growing.
In Dubai, some 2,000 hotel rooms have been shuttered and Michelin star restaurants are running half-off deals. The tourists have disappeared and losses are running at $600 million a day. It’s been a horrible April; Middle-Eastern powerhouse economies have watched their efforts to create tourism hubs through sports go up in smoke. F1 Grand Prix events in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were canceled due to the Iranian attacks. The world’s richest nations are even reaching out to the US Treasury for help.
Despite the need to preserve cash, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar, are moving ahead with a $24 billion deal to gain almost half of the equity in the new Paramount-Warner entity giving them a “passive” investment in the prospective owners of global news giant CNN. The Paramount commitment aside, it’s clear there’s a huge effort to review partnerships at a moment of ongoing crisis.
The most visible player, the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, is one of the world’s largest wealth funds with more than $900 billion of assets under management.
PIF yanked funding from the Liv Golf tournament which by the end of 2026 will have received some $6 billion in backing, according to the Money in Sport newsletter. That money appears to be flushed with zero return leaving the big name golf tournament reaching out to consultants to figure out whether it can survive.
Back in 2023, PIF took ownership of four soccer clubs to unlock commercial opportunities. Now Al Ittihad, Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal and Al-ahli are part of a sales process. A 70 percent stake in Al-Hilal, which signed Cristiano Ronaldo to a new multi-year deal less than a year ago, was just sold to Prince Al Waleed’s Bin Talal’s Kingdom Holdings. The sale news has unsettled PIF’s underperforming soccer team Newcastle United which signed a German player who has failed to live up to his 69 million pound price tag.
The Women’s Tennis Association also decided not to continue to play its finals in Saudi Arabia after 2026. The BBC reported that the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters was cancelled and a plan to host the 2035 rugby World Cup was also canned while a plan to host an Asian Winter Games in Saudi Arabia was postponed back in January.
It’s unclear what pressures these major changes might create for global sports streamer DAZN which agreed a deal with Saudi Arabian SURJ Sports Investment last year to invest a billion dollars and grow a MENA region feed.
PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan said in an interview with news outlet Al Arabiya that its Vision 2030 fund has a new focus on growing its own domestic economy as part of new five year plan. It’s also emphasizing the need to see investment returns after an initial phase of prioritizing growth initiatives. Translation, we’re not going to keep investing without seeing something for our money. A promise to provide $200 million in funding to New York’s Met Opera in return for performing in an opera house on the fringes of Riyadh has been cancelled. PIF investors told The Met that they’re suffering because of the oil blockade and that they were only moving forward on projects that were “essential,” according to the NY Times.
Separately, a major news partnership looks like it’s under threat of extinction. Comcast’s Sky News and private equity venture RedBird IMI, funded by Abu Dhabi and run by former CNN president Jeff Zucker are backers of Sky News Arabia. Chris Blackhurst, the former editor of The Independent, describes the news channel as one of the “world’s most prominent Arabic-language outlets,” in a column in the Abu Dhabi-based media outlet The National. A Telegraph report suggested that Sky News is preparing to cut ties with Sky News Arabia over reporting on atrocities in Sudan. The deal runs into next year. Beyond the kerfuffle over impartial coverage, Comcast can’t be happy about being tied to a news venture backed by one of Paramount’s biggest shareholders RedBird Capital, now poised to acquire CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. We’ll leave the optics of Gulf States and their investments in global news channels for another day.
I’m scheduled to appear on the BBC’s Media Show to talk about these topics this week. You can read more on the big sovereign wealth funds’ entertainment investments and what they want in return at The Ankler. Join me on Thursday morning (E.T.) for Substack Live with producer Ben Odell for a discussion on how AI is transforming legacy media. Details to come.
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