Any link to some of those podcasts? I find the whole thing rather fascinating but Iâm fairly uneducated on it all.
They have built excellent relations with some massive football clubs. They are also normalising the idea of people living and working in their country.
Itâs exactly what they did in golf.
They well get a World Cup and uefa cup final.
A few epl games.
People will start to flock there just like Dubai.
No laying up is the best imo.
Just flick back.
They new full well the pga tour wouldnât last two years and would eventually have to bend to their terms.
Youâll have the top 20 in the world out there playing and Saudi air lines sponsoring a major.
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If they want to do that, football isnât going to help them. Theyâd have to build another Dubai to do that, and I donât think that would work anyway.
I didnât think their golf plan would work when all they had was 5 billion to play with and low behold 18 months later they nearly own the pga tour.
Isnât that their goal for Jeddah?
What have they actually achieved with the golf other than making Tim Finchem look like a king sized eejit?
They might get a few tournaments and they might get to sponsor a major.
So what? Whatâs it actually doing for their country?
They host boxing. So what? What did hosting boxing do for Zaire or the Philippines?
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Youâre not wrong there. Iâve been to Saudi Arabia and had to have dealings with quite a few of them in a previous life. Lazy, entitled cunts the lot of them. Horrible fucking people in the main. The way they treat the foreign workers from the likes of India and Nepal is reprehensible. An absolute shithole of a country and if they think that they are going to be a tourist destination of choice they are fucking deluded.
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I donât think anybody expects it to work overnight.
I doubt Dubai became a destination to rival any city in the world overnight.
Your deluded if you think they wonât.
Theyâll normalalise their country and people will forget.
Thatâs what theyâre trying to do with Neom.
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You mean the sheiks and royal families over there will hand back all of the money and power? They will in their holes.
While itâs relatively small I was reading a few weeks back their tourism industry had grown by nearly a 1/3rd since 2018.
Are Dubai and Abu Dhabi normal?
Does anybody bat eye lid if you say your travelling to Dubai??
Saudi Arabiaâs power and influence comes from one thing only - oil.
They will always have power and influence as long as oil is a valuable commodity.
All of this is dick waving. Buying up golf, buying Ronaldo and Neymar, hosting a World Cup or developing a moderate tourist industry is all fairly small beer.
Russia hosted the World Cup and the Winter Olympics inside the last decade and also has lots of oil and gas and it hasnât stopped them becoming a pariah state.
People also thought Putin was smart, he was no more than a dick waver drunk on absolute power.
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Iâm glad you moved on from your nonsensical point about the Saudis having a league that would try and compete with the epl Anyway.
That is what they are trying to do. If they werenât trying to do that there would be no point.
No itâs not.
They are building relations with the clubs in Europe.
Getting a foothold in the market.
Liverpool playing Newcastle in Saudi in a couple of years is a banker.
Thatâs what they really want because thatâll bring in the tourists.
How much help was Abu Dhabi buying Man City, to normalising that part of the world?
Iâd say the numbers of Irish moving over there grew exponentially from 2008 onwards in fairness.