As part of his sportwashing policy, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) signed a deal with Senegal and Chelsea defender Kalidou Koulibaly in a transfer reported to be worth £34 million.
Recently, MBS has been pushing to host prominent sports and entertainment events in an attempt to whitewash his poor human rights record.
Sources familiar with the matter recently revealed that MBS seeks to buy seven football players for billions of riyals, saying that Lionel Messi was offered up to 600 million euros.
Meanwhile, Tottenham Hotspur star Hugo Loris, 36, receives a £300,000-a-week offer to join a Saudi Arabian club.
Sergio Busquets will also leave Barcelona to join a Saudi club this summer. The 34-year-old Busquets will earn €18m (£15.7m) per year in Saudi Arabia (around £300,000-a-week).
Under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, SMBS is rolling out ever more entertainment and sporting events, an apparent attempt to “sportswash” away its abusive rights reputation using large-scale events, in highly controlled environments, to show a progressive face of the kingdom.
Barely one year after Saudi state agents murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi officials are racing to lock in hosting contracts with other major sports federations.
Saudi authorities have poured vast amounts of money into sporting ventures like Messi and Ronaldo's friendly match in the Kingdom.
However, Saudi Arabia has been long known as the Kingdom of silence and repression, where human rights activists and opponents are prosecuted, forcibly disappeared, arbitrary detained, and tortured in hell-like prisons.
Jamal Khashoggi's and Abdul Rahim Al-Hwaiti's murder was a turning point for the Saudi international reputation.
In this regard, Amnesty International warned that Saudi Arabia under MBS's rule has embarked on a programme of “sportswashing” to try to obscure Saudi Arabia’s extremely poor human rights record.
Peter Frankental, Amnesty International UK’s Economics Affairs Programme Director, said” “Ronaldo’s big-money transfer to Al Nassr and Messi’s engagement by the Saudi authorities as a tourism ambassador are both part of Riyadh’s aggressive sportswashing programme, with the authorities seeking to exploit the celebrity appeal of elite sport to deflect attention from the country’s appalling human rights record.”
“On a single day last year, the Saudi authorities executed 81 people – many after grossly unfair trials – while heavy prison sentences are being handed down to human rights defenders and women’s rights activists, and there’s still been no justice for Jamal Khashoggi’s terrible murder.
“Footballers like Ronaldo and Messi have huge profiles and we’d like to see them resisting being used as the famous faces of sportswashing, including by speaking out about human rights issues in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”
Human rights organisations have long accused Saudi Arabia of using sport to whitewash this poor human rights record.
Much like with Formula One and professional golf, the world's biggest oil exporter has in recent years leveraged its immense wealth to assert itself on the eSports stage, hosting glitzy conferences and snapping up established tournament organisers.
Last January, the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund launched the Savvy Gaming Group, which acquired top eSports firms ESL Gaming and FACEIT in deals reportedly worth a total of $1.5 billion.
Other media reports earlier revealed that the Riyadh-based Public Investment Fund acquired more than $3 billion worth of stock in three U.S. video-game makers during the fourth quarter, according to a regulatory filing. They include Activision Blizzard Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.
