Riyadh Between the Lines

Saudi Arabia once seemed like a place where you’d be hard-pressed to find a patch of grass. Now, there are pitches of it all over the place. It’s part of the country’s effort to become a soccer capital—and bring in a lot of soccer capital— as the Saudis look to a future when oil revenue alone won’t be enough. Massive patches of grass drenched with desalinated sea water aren’t the only surprises in Saudi Arabia these days. There are also the cranes. A lot of them. “The first impression you get upon arriving in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, is not of heat, but of cranes. The city is forested with them, as if a sketch artist has roughed out a skyline and everyone else is now tasked with filling it in. The tinnitus hum of construction is everywhere. You can’t seem to drive three blocks without encountering signage teasing some new development—an impossibly tall skyscraper, a new entertainment district, an upscale housing complex illustrated with 3D mock-ups of smiling, uncovered people of all races and genders living in harmony.” GQ’s Oliver Franklin-Wallis: Can Saudi Arabia Buy Soccer? (And what else comes with that if they do?) “Critics have called its sports investment sportswashing: an attempt to use sports’ mass appeal to distract from the regime’s human rights abuses. MBS has dismissed those claims, saying, ‘If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of 1 percent, then I will continue doing sportswashing.’ Either way, soccer, with its unmatched global audience, is seen as the Saudis’ greatest prize. And so the regime has set out to transform the Pro League from a competitive backwater into a rival for England’s Premier League or Spain’s La Liga as one of the best in the world.”