for an astonishing sum. Some people say $375 million a year, some say $642 million, and Messi recently blew off his day job at Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain to fulfil some Saudi sponsorship commitments and was suspended two weeks for it. There are more players on the shopping list to stock four teams at the top of the Saudi Pro League.
And now Saudi Arabia — through the PIF, effectively controlled by MBS — owns most of an entire global sport. Women’s golf may not be as natural an investment, paired with a country that didn’t let women drive cars until five years ago. So what do we make of this? You can argue that the PGA Tour is run by a coven of craven, hypocritical, spineless khaki pants made flesh, that commissioner Jay Monahan betrayed every golfer under his care, that the sport has been inextricably tarred. You can wonder whether a small cabal of executives might have struck this deal to avoid discovery in an antitrust lawsuit, which to be honest would be very American indeed. You’d probably be right on both, to a degree.
But the thing to learn here is the scale of money and the degree of moral flexibility in sports is different now. This isn’t Russian oligarchs, much less American ones. The United Arab Emirates bought Manchester City in the EPL and are laying waste to international soccer. We just saw a men’s World Cup in Qatar where
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