Saudi Arabia Has Stopped Paying For Sport. Here Is Who Pays Next.

11 September 2026

Nobody rang a bell. Nobody made a speech. On Sunday, the 30th of August, the day LIV Golf was due to hand out $40 million at its team championship in Michigan, there was simply no golf. The event had been cancelled. The Louisiana event had already been removed from the calendar. Indianapolis went ahead in August with its purse halved, from $20 million to $10.1 million, which for a tour built on the promise that money was no object is quite the admission.

This is how it goes when the money leaves. Quietly. A gap in the schedule where a tournament used to be.

And it has been leaving all year. From golf, from football, from tennis, from motor racing, from the grandest ambitions of the grandest wealth fund on earth. Saudi Arabia spent the best part of a decade answering every question in sport that began with the words “who is going to pay”. Now that it has stopped answering, it leaves a more interesting question: who pays now?

Five Billion In, Three Million Back
On the 8th of September, LIV Golf filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a court in New Jersey. The clearest lesson in what happens when a plan hasn’t worked, and the road to that courtroom began in April.

On the 16th of April, Bret Baier of Fox News reported that the Public Investment Fund would bankroll LIV to the end of the season and no further. Scott O’Neil, LIV’s chief executive, responded that the season would continue “uninterrupted and at full throttle”, which is a bit like a football manager getting a vote of confidence from the board. Within a fortnight, PIF had confirmed it. The long-term investment LIV needed, the fund said, “is no longer consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy”.

You can see why. PIF had put more than $5 billion into LIV since 2022. The tour’s cumulative losses had passed $1.1 billion. In 2024, it lost $461.8 million outside the United States alone. And its broadcast income for that year, the money television paid to show the thing, was $2.7 million.

Five billion dollars spent. Less than three million back. No rights market on the planet, no streaming deal, no clever windowing strategy, closes a gap like that. The Saudis still like golf. But sovereign wealth funds are like billionaires: they hate losing money.

Now the players who took the guaranteed money are discovering what guaranteed meant. Brooks Koepka was released from his contract and is back on the PGA Tour. Two contractors sued for unpaid bills. Then came the bankruptcy filing, and with it the creditors’ list. Fourteen players sit among LIV’s 30 largest unsecured creditors. Jon Rahm heads the list, owed $7.47 million for this year alone and, Front Office Sports reports, more than $100 million in guarantees still to run on the contract that brought him across. The filing asks the court for permission to reject player contracts altogether, which is the polite legal term for telling Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith to negotiate again from a much lower number. The contractors and event suppliers are further down the list, and they will get cents on the dollar.

PIF’s parting gift was a secured loan of about $495 million, arranged in June to get the tour through its final season, plus around $50 million to keep the lights on during the bankruptcy. Secured is the important word. When the money is shared out, the Saudis are at the front of the queue, and the players are at the back. Meanwhile, Scott O’Neil, the CEO, is pitching a plan for a ten-event LIV with players offered equity in place of contracts, and London private equity firm BC Partners is lined up to finance the restructured tour when it emerges. “The first chapter of LIV required enormous ambition and investment,” O’Neil said in August. “This next chapter requires something quite different: commercial discipline.”

Commercial discipline. Four years and five billion dollars to arrive at the business model every other sport starts with.

Sport Has Disappeared From The 2030 Strategy
The collapse of LIV 1.0 has made headlines worldwide, but the signs were there from April. LIV was the last thing to go, and, perhaps, the least important.

On the 15th of April, the day before the Baier story, PIF published its plan for 2026 to 2030. The National, an English-language daily newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, reported it would keep 80 per cent of its money inside the kingdom and organise itself around six priorities: tourism and entertainment, urban development, manufacturing, industrials and logistics, clean energy and NEOM. Sport had been one of 13 strategic sectors in the previous plan. In this one, it is not mentioned at all. Deleted from a document that still finds room for a ski resort.

The following day, the fund agreed to sell 70 per cent of Al Hilal, the biggest club in Asia, to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding. The deal reportedly closed on the 2nd of September at SAR 840 million, around $224 million. Three summers after the state took control of the four biggest clubs, it was selling the best of them to a private buyer.

The Saudi transfer window does not close until the 12th of October, but the spending to date should worry every sporting director in the Premier League who was counting on a Riyadh cheque. Arab News put the league’s spending at $57 million in early August, averaging $3 million per club. The big cheques came from the club that is no longer state-owned: Al Hilal paid Aston Villa £51 million for Ollie Watkins on the 30th of August, weeks after paying $91 million for Crysencio Summerville. Private money is still buying. The state has stopped.

Semafor reports Saudi clubs have spent around $2 billion on transfers since 2023, level with Spain, on a fraction of Spain’s income. Al Nassr, the champions, owe more than SAR 800 million. The Saudi broadcaster Arriyadiyah reported that their transfers are frozen and they can only sign players using their commercial revenue, which in practice meant they signed nobody all summer. Al Ittihad had spent SAR 68 million by late July. Two years earlier at the same point it was SAR 374 million. Cristiano Ronaldo, 41, spent part of last season refusing to play in protest at the gap between clubs. He was brought in to sell the league to the world and its top playing talent. Today he is playing in a league that has stopped buying.

Premier League clubs, take note. For three summers, Riyadh was where you sent a 28-year-old on a big contract and came back with a cheque that balanced the books. That revenue stream has dried up, and many clubs’ accounts were built on it.

Elsewhere, the WTA Finals have left Riyadh a year early for Indian Wells. The 2029 Asian Winter Games at NEOM, a ski resort in the desert, are postponed with no new date. The bid for the 2035 Rugby World Cup has gone, though the 2034 football World Cup remains. The Jeddah Grand Prix was cancelled in March, along with Bahrain, and despite paddock talk of a September date, neither has been rearranged.

The war with Iran is the reason Jeddah was cancelled, and as that conflict has dragged on, with Saudi refineries, oil fields and air bases under regular attack, the kingdom’s priorities have changed with it. A country at war looks at its budget and the safety of its people before it looks at a sports tournament. Nobody marches over a cancelled golf event.

But the war only hastened the decision. It was increasingly clear before February that the original bet had failed. The strategy behind the original outlay was to encourage a young population off the sofa and a foreign one on to a plane. On neither count did the numbers ever justify the bill. What the money bought was attention. And attention, as any sovereign wealth fund will tell you, does not appear on a balance sheet.

Riyadh Season told the story in a single arena. The big boxing nights were staged for television in London and New York, which meant first bells in the small hours local time and rows of empty seats in the hall. The esports events, by contrast, filled the same arenas with young Saudis. Esports is entertainment with a sporting name, held indoors, with barely a heartbeat raised, and it was the one thing on the calendar the locals turned up for in numbers. If the aim was to get the population involved, the kingdom learned which product did that and which was a gift to foreign broadcasters. The new strategy reads like the lesson was noted.

None of this means Saudi Arabia has stopped investing in sport. It has not. But the investing looks noticeably different, and the kingdom’s defenders would say deliberately so. Sport has not left the strategy so much as been filed under a different heading: tourism and entertainment, the first of the six new pillars. That same summer, PIF spent $55 billion to buy the games company Electronic Arts, an entertainment company. Its sports arm, SURJ, took a $1 billion stake in DAZN in February 2025, two months after DAZN agreed to pay FIFA a billion dollars for the Club World Cup. That investment has made the cut because DAZN is a media business and media is entertainment. Al Hilal’s revenue last season was $338 million, the highest of any Saudi sports business, and it made a profit. The 2034 World Cup is still coming. On this view, Saudi Arabia has stopped renting attention and started buying assets that earn. Fine. That is also a confession that the first plan did not work.

Meanwhile, In Liverpool, A New Type Of Buyer Arrived
Nine days before that empty weekend in Michigan, Fenway Sports Group sold 38 per cent of Liverpool Football Club. Sky Sports put the valuation at around £6 billion and reported that the buyers hold an option to take control within 12 months at roughly $8 billion. The consortium is led by Amit Bhatia, a British Indian and son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who resigned from QPR to do the deal and will become Liverpool’s vice-chairman. The money behind him is Jeff Bezos, through his K5 Sports Fund, with Eduardo Saverin of Facebook alongside. Bezos does not join the board. He does not need to.

Now consider where Bezos found the money. On the 3rd of August, the same week he joined the consortium, he filed to sell about 15 million Amazon shares worth $4.07 billion, taking his sales over 12 months to roughly $9.7 billion, according to TheStreet. A month earlier, CNBC reported that Amazon borrowed $25 billion on the bond market to build data centres for artificial intelligence, on top of around $200 billion in capital spending this year.

So the man who built Amazon is selling Amazon stock, while Amazon borrows to build the future, and putting the proceeds into a football club founded in 1892. Would he call it a hedge? He would probably call it a passion. Whatever he calls it, the timing speaks for itself.

Two of the largest pools of capital on earth, in the same summer, reached opposite conclusions about sport. Riyadh looked at the numbers and could not make them work. Bezos looked at his own company and decided Anfield was the safer place for $4 billion. Both may be right. Sport, it turns out, is a fine place to keep money and a terrible place to make it.

One small complication for the regulators to check: Prime Video holds Champions League rights in this country, and Bezos is Amazon’s largest shareholder. The last broadcaster to try to own an English club was Sky at Manchester United in 1999, and the government blocked it. Amazon is a shop with a streaming service attached, not a news organisation, so this will probably pass through quietly. Probably.

India, With An American Chequebook
Is this the new trend in sports ownership? The Liverpool deal shows that American money hasn’t gone anywhere. The Conference Board, the American business research group whose forecasts Wall Street watches, said in August that the US economy is still growing. Growth is coming from business investment, with companies and their founders sitting on capital while ordinary households feel the pinch. Capital looking for a home is precisely the kind of money that ends up in sports teams. Knighthead, the American owners of Birmingham City, bought Birmingham Phoenix in the Hundred. Fenway Sports Group sold for a record sum but kept the keys. The US funds and the founders are still at the table.

What is new is who is sitting next to them, and India can afford the seat. Its government’s year-end review put GDP at $4.18 trillion, which overtook Japan for fourth place in the world, with Germany in its sights by the end of the decade. The money is finding its way into sport in India first. Houlihan Lokey, the American investment bank, values the IPL as a business at $20.6 billion. In March, a group including Kumar Mangalam Birla and the Times of India paid just under $1.8 billion for the IPL franchise Royal Challengers Bengaluru. In May, Lakshmi Mittal and Adar Poonawalla paid $1.65 billion for the Rajasthan Royals. Note the name. Mittal’s son-in-law is now sitting as vice-chairman of Liverpool. One family, one summer, a cricket team in Jaipur and a football club on Merseyside.

That is the shape of what seems to be coming next: an Indian lead, Indian family wealth behind them, and an American cheque doing the lifting. India arriving in English football on Silicon Valley’s arm. It will be no surprise if it is copied, and the cheque is only half of what the American brings. The Venky’s bought Blackburn in 2010 with plenty of money and no idea how a western football club worked, and the club went down within two years. American owners have spent two decades learning that market the hard way, at Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, and across the pyramid at Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Leeds, Ipswich, Birmingham, Wrexham and Reading, among many others. That knowledge is worth as much to an Indian buyer as the capital.

No partnership is required in cricket, because nobody understands the business of cricket better than the people who built the IPL. The sale of the Hundred’s eight teams raised £635 million, sums unheard of in English cricket, and four of the eight are Indian owned. Reliance and the Ambanis own MI London at the Oval. Sanjiv Goenka’s RPSG owns Manchester Super Giants at Old Trafford. Sun Group, owners of Sunrisers Hyderabad, own Sunrisers Leeds at Headingley, and GMR, owners of Delhi Capitals, hold 49 per cent of Southern Brave. Three of the four English teams were renamed in Indian colours in a single winter. Three of the UK’s Test grounds, The Oval, Old Trafford and Headingley, now carry the badges of Mumbai, Lucknow and Hyderabad. If you had suggested that in 2005, you would have been asked to leave the pavilion.

And here is the joke. The BCCI still bars its players from foreign T20 leagues. The Ambanis own a team at the Oval and cannot pick an Indian for it. The owners have arrived before the stars. That rule will struggle to survive contact with £635 million, and the day it falls, the Hundred becomes something the ECB never intended: an English window in the Indian season.

Football ownership is harder and more expensive, and Indian money has been circling it for 15 years without landing. Ambani was linked with Liverpool in 2010, the same year the Venky’s arrived at Ewood Park. The difference now is the scale of the capital and the presence of an American partner who knows the market and shares the risk.

The partnership has a financial reason, and it sits in Mumbai at the Reserve Bank of India. India makes it hard to take money out of the country. An individual may send abroad $250,000 a year under the Reserve Bank’s remittance scheme, which does not buy you a stake in a Championship club, let alone Liverpool. Companies can invest overseas up to four times their net worth, which is why the Hundred’s buyers were Reliance, RPSG, Sun Group and GMR, corporations with audited balance sheets, and why the Liverpool lead is Amit Bhatia, who is British and outside the rules altogether. Indian money reaches European sport through corporate vehicles, through the diaspora, or on the arm of a partner with dollars to hand. The Bhatia and Bezos structure is what those rules look like in practice, and it will be the template until the rules change.

Bhatia’s option on Liverpool runs to next August. If he takes it, an Indian will control one of the two most decorated clubs in English football, and the argument about who pays for sport will have an answer.

The Buyers Move On, But The Money Remains
For the last decade, every sports executive with rights or events to sell has looked towards the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. Boxing, golf, tennis, football, Formula One, esports: whatever the asset, whatever the price, a fund in Riyadh would take the meeting. Whole sports built their plans around that meeting. Now that buyer is closing its shutters, and it looks as though those executives will have to travel a little further east.

Golf has found out. The Saudi Pro League is finding out now. The others will follow, because the fund that walked away from LIV now wants to invest only in the 2034 World Cup, and what Riyadh wants from sport beyond that is the question hanging over every rights deal of the next ten years.

If the answer is no, the next money is already in view. American funds and founders are still buying, and increasingly they are pairing up with Indian industrial families who have done brilliantly in cricket but are entering football cautiously, with a partner. Still, there are the Gulf’s quieter neighbours in Doha and Abu Dhabi, who never left and never seem to need the headlines.

Sport has an uncanny knack for always finding someone to pay. What matters is what they want back. The Saudis wanted their own people active and engaged, and their country on the map as a destination for tourism and business like Dubai and Doha, but discovered the bill was too large. Bezos seems to be looking for somewhere safer than Amazon to keep his money while the AI investment gets sorted. The Ambanis and the Goenkas want the game they already own to have an English summer. Three buyers, three reasons, and only the Indian strategy has much to do with sport.

But here is the thing. If Saudi money is backing out, India has a queue of billionaires ready to walk in, and they are bringing American partners with them. The tail is still wagging. For sports that spent a decade wondering what they would do when Riyadh lost interest, that is very good news.