This article was first published today in our bespoke Sports newsletter The Fixture. You can sign up in seconds to receive it straight to your inbox every weekday here.
The future of sport looks terrifying right now. On Monday of this week tech giant Apple unveiled its new virtual reality headset the Apple Vision Pro which is scheduled to be available next year for the not inconsiderable sum of $3500 or thereabouts. This is the most valuable company in the world making its play for not just its slice of the sports pie that everyone else is eyeing greedily but the whole cake and a few pastries on the side, too. The Vision Pro will give owners a full immersive experience giving them access to multiview broadcasts, up-close replays and gaming displays. There was a time when immersive experience meant actually going to the game but not any longer it seems.
To make it all work, of course, Apple will need content and already there is talk of possible bids for a Premier League package to add to the exclusive rights it holds to Major League Soccer and select Major League Baseball games. The company is also weighing up a bid for NBA broadcasts, an auction that could reach $75 billion.
On the same day as Apple's announcement, it emerged that reigning Ballon d'Or winner Karim Benzema had signed a two-year deal with Saudi Arabian club Al-Ittihad for £200m per season having voided the final year of his contract at Real Madrid.
The following morning N'golo Kante, the Chelsea midfielder and France World Cup winner, was reported to be joining his international team-mate at Al-Ittihad for £100m per season and while the Saudis ultimately missed out on Lionel Messi there was a back-page grabber still to come.
For if those announcements made the sporting world sit up and take notice, they were nothing compared to the collective gasps heard around the globe as Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, made the shock revelation that his Tour was merging with the LIV Golf Tour that it had been in an acrimonious dispute with – a conflict which has bordered on war over the past 18 months – to create a world golf tour
Monahan has faced accusations of selling out and hypocrisy in the days since his announcement, not wholly unfairly given his “over my dead body” approach since LIV appeared on the scene early last year.
Rory McIlroy, one of the biggest critics of the Saudi-backed Tour, admitted he felt like a sacrificial lamb for standing up for the PGA during that time and said that he still hated LIV, adding that the players who defected should not be welcomed with open arms. But there was also an acceptance of the Saudis' inevitability by the Northern Irishman.
“Whether you like it or not, the PIF and the Saudis want to spend money in the game of golf,” said the world No.3 with a figurative, if not quite literal, shrug of the shoulders. “They want to do this and they weren’t going to stop. So how can we get that money into the game, but use it the right way?”
This is, of course, the sports washing machine on full spin. There is a general acceptance now that you can smell something that's badly off but that you are just going to have to hold your nose anyway. The Saudis are now positioning themselves for a run at a future World Cup, they have their eyes on tennis and other sports, too. This has been part of an orchestrated strategy by Mohammed Bin-Salman aimed at realising his Vision 2030 financial dream of a Saudi Arabia no longer reliant on diminishing oil revenues. Nothing will stand in its way.
For the individual appalled by human rights abuses in Saudi and the state's connection to the September 11 terror attacks, there is little that can be done, of course. The worrying dimension to the PGA/LIV merger is that it feels like the takeover of an entire sport. This should be a job for governments, there should be some form of intervention but alas they seem all too happy to sit back benignly (remember Boris Johnson helping to smooth the way for PIF to purchase Newcastle United?). Oh, how quickly the Roman Abramovich farrago at Chelsea was forgotten to allow that Saudi deal to progress.
Where there are vast wads of money involved, the aims of the super rich are inevitable.
A few years back The Fixture read a dystopian piece which speculated on the commercial takeover of sport which conjured up fictional football matches featuring the likes of – and we're paraphrasing slightly here – Coca-Cola Manchester United against Sony Juventus in the grand final of the World Super League live from Riyadh. It felt and read like far-fetched nonsense or at worst a development that would occur many decades in the future. Just a few years on, it seems a more realistic prospect than ever.
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