Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) has been pushing to host prominent sports and entertainment events in an attempt to whitewash his poor human rights record. This includes lavishing funds on recruiting football stars.
Sources familiar with the matter recently revealed that MBS seeks to buy Liverpool football player Fabinho Tavares for billions of riyals.
Al Ittihad are said to be the club set to make the approach and “it is anticipated a decision will move quickly one way or the other.”
Tavares won’t be the first high profile footballer to play professionally in Saudi Arabia. Striker Cristiano Ronaldo plays for Al Nassr, while there are rumors that Lionel Messi could play in Saudi Arabia. Experts described the deals as part of Saudi sportwashing policies.
Sources predicted that Karim Benzema is also set to join Saudi team Al Ittihad after his contract with Real Madrid expires.
The final part of Al-Hilal’s three-pronged plan is to land Jordi Alba and reunite him with Messi and Busquets. N’Golo Kante, Roberto Firmino, and Wilfried Zaha will also join Saudi clubs.
Sergio Busquets will 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).
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. The shadow cast by the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi has hung over MBS’s image.
However, human rights organisations have long accused Saudi Arabia of using sport to whitewash its poor human rights record.
In this regard, Amnesty International warned that Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has embarked on a program 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 program, 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.”
Saudi authorities have poured vast amounts of money into sporting ventures like Messi and Ronaldo’s friendly match in the Kingdom.
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.
