A new professional basketball league is in the works courtesy of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Earlier this month it was reported that the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF) would be investing in the endeavor, joining other financial backers including long-time LeBron James business manager Maverick Carter, Skype cofounder Geoff Prentice, VC firm Quiet Capital, and even the government of Singapore.

The new proposed league would be comprised of six men’s teams and six women’s teams, playing in a total of eight host cities around the world, with teams spending two weeks in each location. It could be an attractive option for players given the lack of burdensome travel, moderated game schedules, and potentially even meaningful equity offers from the teams themselves. It may also offer a contrast to the day-to-day athlete experience in the National Basketball Association (NBA) — a league in which many players admit to being chronically exhausted. And while it’s unlikely that this new league would be able to meaningfully challenge the NBA’s position atop the sport, it may, in the short term, provide a more attractive option to athletes on the league’s fringes, potentially even poaching some of its middle-ranking athletes.

This new development shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. In the last decade, Saudi Arabia has made inroads in everything from global football to the WWE, to golf, mixed martial arts, boxing, and basketball. They’ve managed to change the face of golf by proposing a merger of the PGA tour with the PIF-owned LIV Golf in 2023. Al-Nassr Football Club, sitting currently in fourth place in the Saudi Pro League, employs the highest-paid and most famous athlete in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo. And for the moment, Riyadh has usurped Las Vegas as the go-to location for premier boxing events. Financially, the Saudi fund is in a league of its own: the PIF holds over $5 trillion in estimated assets, and $900 billion already under management in ventures related to the fund’s recent sports push.

This incursion into the wide world of sports from a relatively speaking global-cultural pariah is a primary focus of Vision 2030 — the brainchild of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, or MBS as he is colloquially known. The regime’s hope is to pivot Saudi Arabia away from oil reliance and into a new era of promoting other economic sectors such as entertainment, tourism, and, naturally, sports. Functionally, Vision 2030 appears to be a projection of soft power by the MBS regime, as the country vies for cultural and economic dominance across the region, while aiming to bolster its position on the global stage, challenging Western primacy in sports and entertainment.

One potential benefit of Saudi involvement is that it is a body blow to the monopoly-heavy sports industry. Leagues and promotions used to occupying pole position and using this fact to exercise unfair influence over the labor market may face competition. More generally, the influx of Saudi money into sports could be seen as the cultural counterpart to what, in the geopolitical arena, has been described as multipolarity. The United States holds no birthright to being the sole purveyor of sports entertainment, nor should it.

But this brand of globalized capitalist idealism only stretches so far. As many have observed, it is obvious that Saudi Arabia is engaging in sportswashing, a time-honored practice of using the cover of sports to deflect attention away from nefarious conduct. As commentators like Karim Zidan have pointed out, critics of the United States and the West’s sports industries are right to take issue with their complacency but these criticisms often justify a blindness to the realities of doing business with Saudi’s authoritarian regime.

In November 2019, amid a contractual dispute with the WWE, Riyadh refused to allow a plane carrying hundreds of performers and staff to leave the country, a move that some described as a “power play” and others as “kidnapping.” Before a Senate hearing ahead of the potential merger of LIV and PGA, representatives of the leagues admitted that they had to sign a non-disparagement clause, a worrying sign for conservatives who claim to decry the cultural hegemony of liberal-dominated sports.

Clearly, an American-dominated sports entertainment industry is no more laudable than a Saudi one. But the shift to a norm in which the main principle guiding the movement of players and fans is who can offer the largest sums of money is no step forward. Sports remain, for better or worse, one of the few domains in which we would hope motivations exist beyond the mercenary drive of absolute economic maximization, especially when that particular brand of financial optimization requires looking the other way when journalists are murdered.

The close ties between teams and the communities in which they are based have also served to generalize this ethos, for example in the Middle East where soccer fans were part of the social base of Egypt’s Arab Spring. But as money — held by increasingly anonymous elites — comes to dominate sports, it’s easy to find oneself wondering whether whatever gains may accrue to athletes will come at the expense of a further hollowing out of the industry.