Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 FIFA World Cup

Saudi Arabia’s grandiose sporting expansion will continue by winning the right to host the main football tournament. The country, whose clubs spent almost $1 billion last summer on acquiring stars who played in Europe, remains the only candidate to host the 2034 World Cup.

The deadline set by the International Football Federation (FIFA) for submitting bids to host the 2034 World Cup expired on Tuesday, and at the same time the intrigue surrounding the competition died. The fact is that a few hours before the deadline, Football Australia announced that, “having taken all factors into account,” it decided to abandon its intention to fight for the most prestigious and large-scale sports competition along with the Olympic Games.

After Australia’s refusal, only one country remained in the race. This is Saudi Arabia, which was recently expressed support by the Congress of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and personally by its President Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa.

All this means that the election of the host country has become a formality.

Thus, with an interval of less than a month, FIFA managed to determine hosts of two world championships at once. With the 2030 tournament in early October, it embarked on a bold experiment, giving it to six countries and three continents at once: in Europe, matches will be played in Spain and Portugal, in Africa – in Morocco, and in South America – in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This decision by FIFA came across a wave of criticism from various football organizations, foreseeing that the amazing geography of the tournament would create enormous logistical problems for both the organizers and the 48 teams that made it to it.

It is not difficult to imagine that the parent structure will also be criticized for choosing Saudi Arabia, even if it had no alternative. Its world championship will be the second in a very short period of 12 years, hosted by a state located on the Arabian Peninsula with a dubious reputation from the point of view of Western public and political figures. They constantly point out that human rights are being violated in Saudi Arabia, as well as in Qatar, where the world championship took place at the end of last year. However, it still seems to be an order of magnitude safer bet than what FIFA made by gifting the World Cup to countries separated by the Atlantic Ocean and thousands of kilometers.

Fresh experience also speaks in its favor. The Qatari World Cup, despite all the concerns associated with it, did not involve any high-profile emergencies, and fans from Europe and North America who visited admitted that they felt quite comfortable during the trip. But another circumstance is even more important.

The 2034 World Cup can be seen as something of a completely natural culmination of the Saudi strategy. Vigorous expansion in sports has become a hallmark of the current leadership of Saudi Arabia, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.

The country, which had always been on the sidelines of sports life, at the turn of the last and current decades suddenly felt a thirst to take the lead in it, primarily by acquiring the right to host top sporting events. She has already received many of them. Saudi Arabia hosts the Formula 1 Grand Prix, major golf tournaments and boxing shows like the one in which heavyweights Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou fought last Saturday.

However, there is no sign that the Saudis are about to get bored with this new and extremely expensive hobby. On the contrary, all respected media resources have recently, when talking about Saudi ambitions, happily quoted the phrase uttered by Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, who said that if the pursuit of prestigious sporting events increases the country’s GDP “at least by 1%,” it will certainly continue .

Football, the most popular sport in Saudi Arabia, has a special place in this expansion. Here she did not want to limit herself to winning significant international competitions like the Club World Championship (it will be held in Jeddah in December), but shocked the world with an exceptionally aggressive invasion of the European market, which was still almost closed to her. Having lured five-time Ballon d’Or winner Cristiano Ronaldo back in the winter, during the summer transfer campaign of 2023 she added to him a whole squad of superstars who played in the leading leagues – such as Karim Benzema, Neymar, Sadio Mane, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, Marcelo Brozovic , Kalidou Koulibaly, Malcolm, Ruben Neves, who could not resist the generosity of the Saudi clubs. They spent a huge amount on newcomers over the summer – a total of more than €950 million, according to Transfermarkt calculations, second in this indicator only to the undisputed leader – the English Premier League.

Alexey Dospehov