Argentina national team World Cup Exhibition (Shlomo Weiss)
In Israel, the headlines surrounding Saudi money in sports were mainly about the crazy offers for Leo Messi and Karim Benzema, but the big story was in golf. After a tumultuous year, during which the industry was torn apart internally by the competing round set up by the Saudis, this week the "unification" was achieved. The PGA Tour and the European Tour capitulated, agreeing to a merger with the LIV Tour set up by the Saudis.
Throughout the year, the LIV was seen as a betrayal by the Americans, no less. One by one, top golfers abandoned the traditional tour, which built them, made them, gave them the stage, and simply defected to a parallel, competing framework for huge, disproportionate sums of money that broke the market. The rift was huge. There were personal dirt, slander, lawsuits and threats. It seemed unrecoverable. But here, it turns out that there is a magic band-aid that heals everything. Money. It is in everyone's interest. The connecting factor. The balm for everything.
There were some who refused billions. Woods (Photo: GettyImages)
Following the unification, the media rushed back to the emphatic statements of all those who condemned the Saudis and their "dirty money," and suddenly changed their minds. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monaghan went so far as to mention that Saudi money financed the September 11 terrorist attacks, but this week he sounded much more conciliatory about the country than the Gulf, claiming that "circumstances have changed and you have to look at the big picture, it's an important deal."
Yes, money. There is nothing new. It changes everything. People who criticized Saudi Arabia for its unacceptable norms demonstrated what their true norms are. All the criticism of human rights in Saudi Arabia, the executions, the murder of the journalist, the abuse of LGBT people, the regime's violence against its critics, everything has been forgotten and pushed aside with the EU. There are principles worth fighting for, but there is one principle above all. Everything has a price.
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The sums are so high that it is difficult to understand their intensity. Benzema (Photo by Getty Images, Yasser Bakhsh)
And the Saudis are willing to pay a lot. The state's investment in sports in recent years has been disproportionate. The sums are so large that it is difficult to digest them at all. They don't really get caught. A few billion for hosting in F1, a few billion for hosting boxing fights and super cups, the golf tour, a new cricket league, gaming tournaments, Newcastle, it's hard to follow. It's hard to remember if Benzema gets €100 million a year, or maybe it's €200. Ronaldo makes 400 million a year, something like that, or maybe it's for two years? And Messi, how many were really offered to him, who knows, say it was 1.2 billion euros for two years, maybe 1.5 billion, as if that's a tiny deviation, as if there is no difference of $300 million here, a sum that could rebuild Rosario's entire education system and change the fate of thousands.
What does it matter these amounts at all. Who knows how much the Qataris invested in the last World Cup, how much Abu Dhabi really invested in Manchester City, everything is so far-fetched and distant for the general public. People who live on a few thousand shekels, and suddenly have to criticize the footballers who leave for the big money, to judge the decision. Who can argue with a noble Omar, for example, who earns 6 times as much in the UAE, or 8 times, or 10 times what he would earn in Haifa? And Benzema, for example, can be assumed that he is already organized, that he earned tens of millions of dollars during his lifetime, that even in Madrid he lived well, but who can refuse such sums, how is it possible.
They will have to make do with 50 million a year. The Messi family (Photo by Getty Images, Marcelo Endelli)
So Leo Messi's rejection of the Saudi offer was nice news. True, it would have been better if Messi had made a statement that "I have decided to accept the offer from Al Hilal (or Al Ittihad, who differentiates) and I intend to invest half of the amount I will earn in these two years, half a billion dollars, in building a huge and innovative hospital for the residents of Rosario my city, this is the right thing to do, the only option that comes to mind after such a huge offer, the proper use of Saudi money." But he was actually saying something else.
He was not made a great righteous man or a man of principle, but Messi rejected hundreds of millions of euros in order not to live in Saudi Arabia, but in the United States. (Or was it Antonella who decided? After all, only this might be too unusual in Saudi Arabia.) Of course, even in the United States, he will earn a lot of money. And yes, he already receives quite a bit of money from the Saudi Tourism Ministry and promotes the country, so this is not a warrior for justice. We will not go into the question of whether he should have waited for Barcelona or preferred to play in a serious league and why he decided to "retire" to an easy and marginal league. Still, it's clear that this was a decision made for the family. He knows Riad. Know the terms. The golden cages. The culture, with all its components. And the bottom line is, as a family man, as a father of three, he preferred to live in Miami, in America, in a Western environment. It's peace and security, worth more than money.
- sport
Tags
- Lionel Messi
- Saudi Arabia