Gulf Country Massive Energy Revenues Will Result In More Investment In Football In 2023
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With the massive energy surplus financing at its disposal, Gulf Cooperation Council countries will continue to shape the future of football. This will likely result in more acquisitions of football assets particularly in the highly indebted and underperforming football market sin Italy, France, and Spain.
Geopolitical tension caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine will continue to affect energy markets in 2023. Oil and gas prices will stay high transferring global wealth from consumers to energy exporting countries. Global Oil and natural gas companies such as Saudi Aramco, Qatar Energy, and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company have experienced record revenues since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. These state-owned companies will continue to outperform the market and bring in stellar revenues as new supply is constrained by bottlenecks and regulatory changes. The biggest winners of the crisis are the Gulf oil and gas producers’, which control 38 percent of global oil reserves and 24 percent of natural gas reserves. According to the IMF, in 2022 alone Middle East and Central Asia energy producers have generated $320 billion more in revenue due to the geopolitical crisis. The cumulative surplus is expected to reach $1,4 trillion over the next five years.
Saudi, Qatar, and UAE Will Change Football Global Landscape
The 6 GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, and Bahrain are going to be among the fastest growing economies in the world in 2022 with an expected average of 6,5%. Saudi Arabia, the largest GCC country, will grow at 8% in 2022, and next year, real GDP growth is expected to be a solid 5%. GCC countries have combined assets of $3,2 trillion amounting to 40% of SWFs global assets.
It is well known that since the 2008 financial crisis, Gulf countries changed investment strategy and started using their SWF to diversity their investment portfolio and start taking large equity positions in large companies across all sports segments, including football, golfing, sky, formula one, and other sports undervalued assets. This shift in strategies is motivated by their priority to diversify away from hydrocarbons, and made possible by their…
