Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund operated for a number of years under what was essentially an attention economy theory of sports investment: if enough money was invested in high-profile events, clubs, and tours, the visibility would result in something worthwhile, such as soft power, foreign investment interest, or a different international image. The scope and ambition of the expenditure were astounding.
Over $1 billion in damages were borne by LIV Golf alone. Bids for tournaments were submitted across several geographies and sports. Football players whose salaries would have put a strain on the finances of the majority of European clubs were imported by the Saudi Pro League. By all accounts, it was a remarkable use of funds to pursue a non-commercial return. The plan has now altered, and the change is significant enough to warrant close examination.
After the 2026 season, the PIF has said that it will stop funding LIV Golf, forcing the competing golf tour to look for outside investors or restructure without government support. This reckoning was inevitable for a tour that had amassed losses of almost US$1.1 billion, failed to get a US broadcast agreement that would have given it real reach, and spent years failing to pressure the PGA Tour into a merger on its terms.
The announcement that it is being discontinued rather than incorporated into the infrastructure play for the 2034 FIFA World Cup implies that the PIF has carefully examined what it paid for and received and determined that the computation is flawed. This decision seems to have been reached some time ago, and the 2026 ending was selected in part to enable a managed exit as opposed to a sudden one.
The layoffs are not limited to LIV. The bids for the Asian Winter Games in 2029 and the Rugby World Cup in 2035 have been discreetly withdrawn. Without any fanfare, the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters was canceled. More significantly, the PIF sold Kingdom Holding Company a 70% share in Al-Hilal, one of the leading teams in the Saudi Pro League, for about US$373 million.
Al-Hilal is hardly an unknown asset; for the past few years, it has been the focal point of Saudi football’s worldwide status and won the Club World Cup. Selling the majority ownership indicates that, rather than being viewed as a prestige platform with limitless resources, even the domestic league is now being assessed for return on capital.
The PIF is moving in a direction that is more resilient and more difficult to write off as simple retrenchment. The FIFA World Cup of 2034 is still on the horizon. The construction program it calls for, which includes new stadiums, transportation infrastructure, and hotel assets, is precisely the type of owned, long-term investment that produces regular domestic economic activity as opposed to one-time headlines.
An asset owned by the PIF in Saudi Arabia that makes money from an annual calendar event indefinitely is a specially constructed Formula One circuit close to Riyadh that is scheduled to begin in 2027. Similar factors keep Newcastle United in the portfolio: a Premier League team is a long-term asset rather than a sponsorship relationship that expires at the conclusion of the contract.
Whether the LIV Golf withdrawal has the kind of knock-on effect that compels other Saudi-backed sports properties to defend themselves more forcefully is still up in the air. It’s possible that the PIF’s 2026–2030 plan is really more strict than its predecessors, or that the World Cup building cycle generates pressures of its own that cause spending to shift back toward attention rather than return.
The sports world, which had been treating that era as permanent, is now adjusting to a different set of expectations from Riyadh, and it appears that the era of limitless checks for international sports exposure has finished.
