The Sovereign Wealth Fund Invasion: How Middle Eastern Oil Money is Buying Up Western Sports and Tech

The football world took a moment to process what had happened when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund completed its £305 million acquisition of Newcastle United in October 2021. In the streets surrounding St. James’ Park, the club’s supporters celebrated. The ethics of a state whose human rights record had been widely denounced suddenly owning one of England’s most illustrious clubs were questioned by critics. The architects of the deal had already moved on to the next one somewhere in Riyadh. It was never really about Newcastle.
This is the aspect of investments in Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that often gets overlooked in the cacophony of headlines. Every single acquisition appears to be a distinct choice, whether it is a football team, a tech company, or a golf tour merger. When combined, they create something far more intentional: the biggest state-driven attempt at economic diversification in contemporary history, carried out through checkbooks rather than policy papers, and occurring in every industry that affluent Western consumers closely monitor.
Over $3.2 trillion in assets are currently under the control of seven Gulf funds. Middle Eastern state-owned investors spent $56.3 billion on foreign investments in the first nine months of 2025, making up about 40% of all sovereign wealth fund flows worldwide. This occurred during a year when Brent crude averaged less than $70 per barrel, well below its recent highs. In other words, the money is no longer totally reliant on the price of oil. The money has increased to the point where it can continue at its current rate. Four of the six Gulf Cooperation Council nations are still in surplus, according to Diego López, managing director of Global SWF. The money keeps coming in. It must go somewhere.

The most visible aspect of these funds’ operations is likely their sports strategy, which receives the most attention. Football, golf, boxing, Formula 1, sailing, basketball, and esports all exhibit a consistent enough pattern to be easily recognized. Golf fans who had spent decades adhering to one competitive structure are now navigating another thanks to Saudi Arabia’s PIF, which supports LIV Golf and assisted in its contentious merger with the PGA Tour. PSG is owned by Qatar’s QIA, which also owns a 5% share in the parent company of the Washington Wizards and Capitals, beIN Sports, a media network that broadcasts to 43 countries in seven languages, and has a convoluted ownership structure that links it to a London-based entertainment agency that regularly sold Middle Eastern TV rights to English football. Manchester City won the Champions League after being purchased by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi in 2008. Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup, which required a $220 billion investment. These purchases are not made at random. They are audience acquisitions, purchasing simultaneous access to hundreds of millions of people’s attention.

The criticism of sportswashing is genuine and difficult to ignore. Despite documented reports of hazardous conditions for migrant workers during construction, 1.5 billion people watched the World Cup in Qatar. Newcastle United of Saudi Arabia finished in the top four of the Premier League at the end of the 2022–2023 campaign. At least when it comes to headlines, the reputational math is working. It is more difficult to determine whether it results in long-term geopolitical goodwill. It’s possible that detractors are correct and the soft power being bought is more resilient than it appears. It’s also possible that, regardless of how diversified the investments become, the entire strategy depends on the Gulf states continuing to produce spectacle, which calls for ongoing spending and oil revenues.
The longer-term reasoning is found in the tech bets. PIF has significant investments in Uber and Lucid Motors. QIA has made investments in SpaceX and Stripe. In addition to joining KKR in the $270 million purchase of CoolIt Systems, a Canadian company that specializes in liquid cooling technology for data centers, Mubadala is collaborating with Apollo to invest capital in credit markets and data infrastructure. Alat, a $100 billion fund supported by PIF, is focused on robotics, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. According to reports, Mubadala is in talks to buy Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion. Gulf state-owned investors contributed about $66 billion to digitalization and artificial intelligence alone in 2025. A $3 billion investment in Elon Musk’s xAI was announced by Humain, a new AI company based in Saudi Arabia. The funds are attempting to acquire the infrastructure that will power the next economy, rather than just investing in technology.
Not every wager has been profitable. The stock of Lucid Motors, which was once thought to be a possible rival to Tesla, dropped by about 60% in just one year. Before the bank fell into the hands of UBS, the Saudi National Bank lost over $1 billion in five months due to its poorly timed acquisition of Credit Suisse shares. After WeWork, FTX, and other high-profile bets collapsed, the SoftBank Vision Fund, which was supported by PIF and Mubadala among others, lost $18 billion by the middle of 2020 and went on to report losses exceeding $59 billion over the course of subsequent fiscal years. Ambitions worth trillions of dollars also lead to failures worth trillions of dollars.
Observing all of this build up gives the impression that the West is still learning what it means to have these funds so deeply ingrained in its most prominent industries. European regulators have begun to raise concerns; Spain retaliated when Saudi Telecom bought nearly 10% of Telefónica, the nation’s biggest carrier, and Madrid raised concerns about protecting strategic assets. The argument is becoming more intense. However, the deals continue to close. According to one analyst, Mubadala is “doing everything, everywhere, all at the same time.” Additionally, the question of how much leverage that buys in boardrooms, regulatory hearings, and political conversations becomes much less abstract as MENA state-owned assets approach a projected $8.8 trillion by 2030.