The new kings of MMA and boxing: Saudi Arabia’s path to sporting dominance

This post was originally published on Karim Zidan’s Sports Politika Substack.

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Discussing the Saudi Arabian strategy in MMA and Boxing

Over the past eight years, Saudi Arabia’s sports strategy has transformed from a simple reputation management tool to a comprehensive soft power plan encompassing regional diplomacy, economic diversification, global impact, and a continuous stream of entertainment for the nation’s youth.

Few understand the kingdom’s recent transformation like Stanis Elsborg, the senior analyst for Danish initiative Play the Game, who recently published a groundbreaking piece of research titled “The power players behind Saudi Arabia’s sports strategy.” His research, which mapped out the inner circle behind Saudi Arabia’s sports endeavour and revealed more than 300 Saudi sponsorships in sports, has been tremendously useful to my own work over the past few months. 

On this week’s episode of the Sports Politika podcast, Stanis delved into his research, as well as continued expansion of Saudi’s influence in sports. He also discussed the lessons learned from Qatar 2022 and what fans, journalists and activists can do to centre human rights ahead of the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia. 

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Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.

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