The IPL Mega Auction last week was unique in many ways. There were a staggering 1,574 registered players, and over Rs 600 crore was spent by 10 franchises over two days. In a fairy tale ending that not even Bollywood could have scripted, Rishabh Pant, a man unable to walk on his shattered knees barely a year ago, became the most expensive player ever at an IPL auction. And it all happened in the most unlikely of places—Jeddah.
The relationship between Saudi Arabia and India goes back millennia. In recent decades, it has gathered momentum, much of it is economics-based. Saudi is one of the biggest oil suppliers to India, which in turn is the fifth biggest investor in the kingdom. Close to five million Indians work in Saudi Arabia.
However, none of this explains why a country that has no obvious connection with the sport, whose five million expat Indians will not get actually to watch any live cricket, just hosted a mega auction of the world’s largest and most dominant cricket league. And therein lies an intriguing tale, one that involves cricket and yet transcends it.
Two years ago, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)—made the richest governing body in world cricket by IPL—sold the broadcast rights for five IPL seasons to global media giants for $6.2 billion. The sponsors the IPL brought in, included Visit Saudi, the kingdom’s tourism arm, and Aramco, the world’s largest oil company.
In 2022, Aramco signed a deal with the International Cricket Council (ICC) to sponsor all major men’s and women’s ICC events scheduled until the end of 2023. These included the Men’s T20 World Cup 2022 in Australia, the Women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa, the 2023 World Test Championship Final in the UK, and the Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 in India. The investment, the oil giant announced, “will connect Aramco with a global cricket audience of more than one billion cricket fans, as the Company expands its mission to deliver affordable, reliable and more sustainable energy to customers around the world.”
But that still begs the question—why host the IPL Mega Auction?
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IPL and Saudi money
It cannot signal the launch of a new cricket league in the kingdom, even setting aside the formal denial last week by Prince Saud bin Mishaal Al Saud, chairman of the Saudi Arabian Cricket Federation (SACF), on the sidelines of the auction. Moreover, the new ICC rule limiting franchises to a maximum of four foreign players makes such a league in Saudi Arabia a non-starter.
Cricket, it would then be safe to conclude, is not the main course in this buffet. At best, it is a convenient and attractive dish for serving the different agendas of the BCCI and the Saudi government.
The BCCI’s agenda is clear and understandable. It wants Saudi money. Not directly as an investment into the IPL, but at least for now in the form of sponsorship, both direct and indirect. One suspects the flow will turn from a trickle to a tide post the auction, now that the Saudi association with the sport has been showcased for the wider world.
Even if investments into the IPL franchises don’t happen, Saudi involvement can take other routes. The IPL franchises are buying into world cricket. What started as teams owning franchises in foreign T20 leagues has now expanded into ownership of English county cricket teams. There is no stopping that juggernaut. The opportunities for Saudi money to find its way into these and future investments will be plentiful.
For the kingdom, the stakes are way higher and cricket is just the latest weapon in its economic and political arsenal.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund held $925 billion in assets as of 2023—$51 billion of that had been invested in ‘sports properties’ after 2016. The 2021 takeover of Newcastle United was a high-profile investment, as was bringing in footballers such as Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo to adorn its league. Given the popularity of football in the kingdom, these investments make complete sense. As does the foray into golf in the wealthy nation, with the LIV Tour, an investment designed to challenge the dominance of the PGA.
It’s the money the kingdom spends on other sports that raises uncomfortable, and largely unanswered questions. Eye-popping sums have been invested in wrestling, esports, motorsports, chess, and snooker. Cricket is the latest to join that list.
Sportswashing of the Saudi kingdom
In 2023, the Saudi sovereign fund made profits of $36.8 billion on its $925 billion portfolio. It is unclear if some or any of that came from its investment in sports. Given the nature of the investments, it seems unlikely that profit was a key motive, for this is a part of “Vision 2030”, a multi-billion programme launched by Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, aimed at diversifying the country’s economy and rehabilitating its image.
Why does that image need rehabilitation?
Critics have long pointed to Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuse, including the 2018 murder of prominent Saudi journalist and The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul by Saudi agents. The kingdom’s investments in the field of sports can be seen as an attempt at spotswashing. It’s a government laundering its reputation by hosting major sports events that attract widespread, positive media attention while diverting it from less savoury topics.
BCCI is one of the world’s largest unregulated and untaxed financial behemoths. How much money it makes and, its sources of income are shrouded in mystery, as is how much it spends and on what. Strikingly similar is the case of its newest business partner. The extent of Saudi Arabia’s wealth is a matter of pure conjecture. It is based on what you believe its oil reserves to be. There is no way of verifying it. Nor is there clarity on what activities that wealth is spent on, only that sportswashing is one of them.
As the sport’s most profitable and economically powerful body, the sky is the limit for what the BCCI can expect in terms of Saudi money in the years to come. Getting deeply embedded in the world’s second-most-followed sport and gaining positive global visibility through a single partner is a dream come true for the kingdom.
Whatever the outside world may think, the coming together of the Saudis and the BCCI under the banner of the IPL is seen by these unlikely business partners as a match made in cricket’s Elysian fields.
Anindya Dutta is a sports columnist and author of ‘Wizards: The Story of Indian Spin Bowling’ and ‘Advantage India: The Story of Indian Tennis’. He tweets @Cric_Writer. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
