Saudi Arabia's World Cup 2034 in doubt as Neom Stadium shelved amid regional turmoil

Saudi Arabia won the right to host the 2034 World Cup without competition, an unopposed bid that seemed to signal the kingdom's arrival as a major global sporting power. At the center of those plans stood Neom Stadium, a structure that was supposed to rise 350 meters above the desert floor as part of a vast new city called The Line—a 170-kilometer ribbon of development that embodied Saudi Arabia's ambitions to remake itself beyond oil. The stadium was to be unlike anything built before, with a roof formed from the city itself and views that stretched across the landscape. It would host a quarterfinal and several other matches. Now, according to reporting from Reuters, that stadium will not be built.

The decision to shelve Neom Stadium reflects something larger: a fundamental recalculation of priorities across the Saudi government. The kingdom's aggressive sports spending—the kind that brought Cristiano Ronaldo to its football league and poured billions into golf, tennis, snooker, and rugby—has contracted sharply. Saudi Arabia withdrew funding from LIV Golf, pulled back from hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games in Neom, and stepped away from other ambitious sporting commitments. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who governs the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which also owns Newcastle United, said earlier this year that the fund was reassessing its priorities amid regional conflict.

The timing matters. Saudi Arabia accepted its World Cup bid on October 4, 2023. Three days later came October 7th, and the region shifted into a different state. Since then, Israel and the United States have engaged in conflict with Iran, while Houthi attacks from Yemen have continued to strike Saudi territory. The oil market has been volatile. The economic calculus that made Neom seem feasible has changed. F. Gregory Gause III, a regional expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, described it as part of a broader fiscal reassessment driven by both the oil market's weakness before the current war and the damage the war itself is doing. "The draw-back from sports commitments is just part of a more general reassessment of priorities in the current, more straitened, situation," he told DW.

There are echoes here of Qatar's 2022 World Cup. Qatar's bid book promised twelve stadiums; only eight were used. The Arab Spring arrived shortly after Qatar won its bid, destabilizing the region politically and economically without directly striking the country. Now Saudi Arabia faces a similar backdrop of uncertainty. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of "Kingdom of Football: Saudi Arabia and the Remaking of World Soccer" and a fellow at Rice University, noted the parallel: Infantino announced Saudi Arabia as the sole bidder on October 4, 2023, and within seventy-two hours the region was, as he put it, "effectively in flames." The 2034 World Cup will unfold against considerable tension and real uncertainty about what the region will look like by then.

Yet the tournament itself is unlikely to be cancelled or dramatically downsized. Saudi Arabia's commitment to the World Cup appears to remain firm, driven by its global significance and by rivalry with Qatar. The two countries improved relations through an agreement in 2021, but they remain regional competitors, and Saudi Arabia will want to match or exceed what Qatar accomplished. The kingdom will likely build most stadiums from scratch, but the footprint may shrink. Experts expect more matches to concentrate in Riyadh and Jeddah, the two largest cities, rather than spreading across the kingdom to venues on the east coast like Al Khobar or Al Ahsa—places separated from Iran only by the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, which has become a strategic concern.

Saudi Arabia will host the Asian Cup in January, which Coates Ulrichsen described as an "early test of whether that is viable to have a weeks-long major tournament under these conditions." The kingdom successfully hosted the Gulf Cup football final this week with 60,000 people in full stadiums and no security incidents, a sign that large events remain possible. But with nearly eight years until the World Cup, the political and economic situation remains difficult to predict. The shelving of Neom Stadium and the broader pullback from sports investments raise questions about Saudi Arabia's commitment to the scale of the original vision. The World Cup will almost certainly happen. It will probably just look different from what was promised.