Henry Tricks
speaker
59 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 9 Sep
Henry Tricks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Around five years ago, the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund led a wave of investment into sports around the world.
And now it appears to be in retreat.
the failure of live golf is perhaps the most high profile example but it also seems to be the case with some of its other international sports investments too the sovereign wealth fund recently published a strategy for the next five years and the word sports was mentioned only seven times in about 50 pages and six of those referred to esports which is gaming rather than the physical version
They had investments in many international sports.
Possibly the most high-profile one besides golf was football.
They invested in Newcastle United and also the Saudi government paid to attract major international soccer players such as Cristian Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia to play in its clubs.
And there was also investments in tennis, in boxing, in martial arts and in motor racing, Formula One.
So it was a really wide spectrum of sports.
So the main reason why they got involved in this in the first place was as a form of kind of projecting Saudi Arabia's soft power on the world.
We know, everyone knows that Saudi Arabia is rolling in petrodollars.
And this was a way of showing that actually it could diversify its economy a bit beyond oil into sports and also adjacent industries.
Activities like tourism.
So the idea was to attract tourists to Saudi Arabia in order to watch some of these mega competitions.
Now, of course, at the time, many people accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of
of sports washing, the phrase that they use to try and divert attention away from questions about its human rights record and that sort of thing.
And I think that partly misses the point.
There was a very strong effort to use sport as well to galvanize activism.
activity within Saudi Arabia to get the young people more active, to get them off the couch and out onto the playing fields.
And they're still trying to do that.
But despite the ambition, Saudi Arabia's interest in sports investment, especially on the international stage, appears to be waning.
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