Pep Guardiola and his Manchester City side headed to Jeddah just hours after dropping a further two points in a faltering Premier League season that was interrupted by the small matter of an attempt to score for the first time in the history of the club to become world champions.
On the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, the club that has flown the Abu Dhabi flag in Great Britain for fifteen years will compete for the only major trophy missing from the Guardiola era. If English football has always treated the Club World Cup – or the Intercontinental Cup as it was known in an earlier guise – as an afterthought, that is anything but the case this week in the Gulf.
The Saudi ruling class, led by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Salman, has put sport at the center of their global campaign to change perceptions of this oil-rich, secretive authoritarian state. In Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, that process began in part with the takeover of City in 2008, and subsequently the City Football Group that emerged is now a network of twelve clubs around the world.
Guardiola’s City have been hurt by a run of just seven points from their last six league games, and the shadow of the Premier League’s 115 charges hangs heavy, but the coming days are not about the politics of domestic or even European football. Rather, it is about their part in the struggle between the super-rich absolute monarchies that control the Gulf’s billions in fossil fuels. Struggle for power, wealth and influence in diplomacy, business, football and, sometimes even, war.
The royal courts of Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are currently at odds over their position in Middle Eastern politics. They have supported various rebel factions in the war currently being fought between two competing powers just above the Red Sea in Sudan, East Africa. Both countries are seeking to diversify their oil-based economies in ways that are commercially sound and reputationally beneficial.
Among them is football. UAE Vice President Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed owns City – European champions and perhaps soon world champions. City are Abu Dhabi’s main sporting project and Mansour has also backed the Barclay family’s £1 billion bid to regain control of the Telegraph. Saudi has its Saudi Pro League, backed by investment of more than £1 billion, and Newcastle United, owned by the Public Investment Fund.
Should City get past Asian champions Urawa Red Diamonds on Tuesday and then play the final on Friday, they will leave Jeddah just as another show rolls into Saudi Arabia. On Saturday night, Antony Joshua will top a boxing card in Riyadh that will include his opponent, Swede Otto Wallin, as well as Deontay Wilder. This week the Soundstorm music festival took place in Riyadh, featuring Calvin Harris, Metallica, 50 Cent and Will Smith. LIV Golf was in Jeddah in October.
Boxing and golf have also played a key role in Saudi Arabia’s bid to project a modern face to the world as it sought to appease the conservative elements that form a significant part of its power base. At the same time, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE face difficult questions about human rights and seek to maintain a firm domestic grip on power while changing the global profile. This week sees a rare chance meeting between the two, although not quite in the way Saudi Arabia had hoped at the start of the Club World Cup.
Saudi champions Al-Ittihad, with Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante and Fabinho, lost the play-off to Egypt’s Al Ahly at the King Abdullah Stadium on Friday evening. It means that Al Ahly, the African champions, will play against Brazil’s Fluminense, winners of the Copa Libertadores, in the first semi-final on Tuesday evening.
This is Saudi’s first FIFA Club World Cup. Abu Dhabi hosted three of the previous six. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is now a firm ally of Saudi Arabia and has supported the kingdom that hosted the 2034 World Cup final. FIFA’s sleight of hand in awarding the 2030 tournament means that Saudi -Arabia will bid unopposed next year at 2034. Infantino held a Fifa Council meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Jeddah on Sunday to finalize qualification for the expanded 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, among other things.
Professor Simon Chadwick from Skema Business School in Paris, and an expert on the region and its sporting ambitions, says the prospect of Abu Dhabi’s flagship club becoming world champions in Saudi Arabia is significant. “Saudi Arabia had lost its way over the past 20 years and was profligate with its wealth,” he says. “The government interfered too much and was overtaken by local rivals. Abu Dhabi is important because many senior figures there think Abu Dhabi is the leader in the region.”
Chadwick points out that the fight for global credibility dominates Gulf politics. City’s main sponsor, Etihad Airways, is the only Gulf airline currently flying to Israel. In light of the war in Gaza that followed the October 7 terrorist attacks, Saudi Arabia backed away from normalizing ties with Israel. Abu Dhabi had already done that. Saudi Arabia has cut back on funding for its proxy war in Yemen, Chadwick says, in order to spend money on projects that change international perception, including sports, and football in particular.
“Saudi is trying to fight back and carve out a new place for itself in the world,” he says. “In reality, it’s still figuring things out. Abu Dhabi is taking a bit of an international backlash when it comes to sports washing. Saudi Arabia is facing a much bigger backlash for sportswashing.” Chadwick says that while Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi were aligned between 2017 and 2021 over the blockade of Qatar and the resulting diplomatic crisis, the situation has changed again.
“Saudi is on a charm offensive,” he says, “and the two countries are pitted against each other. Some believe that the most disruptive influence in Africa today is Abu Dhabi. There are fundamental differences between Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.”
At last year’s Qatar World Cup final, Bin-Salman was a standout in the VIP areas of stadiums, often sitting next to Infantino. Nevertheless, it was the Qataris’ show and they deserved the diplomatic advantage that came with global control. A hand that the country has played in recent months in the mediation between Israel and Hamas.
This week it is Saudi’s show, albeit on a much smaller scale. Nevertheless, it comes with the certainty that under Infantino’s FIFA they will reach the grand final – the FIFA World Cup final – in 2034. On Friday evening in Jeddah, the FIFA team and their Saudi hosts will most likely present the trophy to Will. Be Guardiola’s City, whose own Golf owners also need to burnish their reputations.