Saudi Arabia’s 2034 FIFA World Cup will require fifteen stadiums across five cities. Between 2021 and 2023, the Kingdom invested over $6 billion in more than 900 sports sponsorship agreements. Qatar continues post-2022 legacy planning. Bahrain’s Mumtalakat and Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings have taken full ownership of McLaren. Abu Dhabi’s City Football Group operates ten clubs across five continents.

Concrete and capital are not the Gulf’s bottleneck. The region is building a multi-billion-dollar sports economy. The Sports Sector Strategic Plan 2033 targets an increase in sport’s GDP contribution from AED 10.17 billion to AED 18.3 billion within a decade. Over 400 sporting events and roughly 100 elite training camps already run through the emirate each year. The infrastructure exists.

In June 2024, the Global Institute of Sport arrived — the postgraduate arm of UCFB, a college of the University of East London that began at Burnley FC’s Turf Moor in 2011 — launched a Dubai........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)