Re: Saudi Arabia’s Golf Ambitions

     Next month, some of the golf industry’s best-known course designers – Robert Trent Jones, Jr., David McLay Kidd, Greg Norman, and Gary Player – will serve as drawing cards for the inaugural Golf Saudi Summit, a key event in Saudi Arabia’s campaign to polish its public image and promote itself as one of the world’s hottest markets for golf development.
     As we all know, however, the story of golf development, no matter where it occurs, is always impacted by unpredictable, ever-changing economic, political, and social forces. Some markets skyrocket, as Vietnam has. Others – Cuba prominent among them – never achieve lift-off.
     Care to predict Saudi Arabia’s trajectory?
     The kingdom has seized onto golf in an effort to re-decorate itself for wary Western investors. With its eyes trained on an uncertain post-oil future, it’s funding what it calls “the grandest golf-course development program ever seen,” hosting men’s and women’s professional tournaments and, most ambitiously, laying a foundation for what it believes will be sustainable, home-grown golf operations.
     Mind you, this is a nation whose 34 million people are almost completely unfamiliar with golf. Saudi Arabia has only 220 native registered golfers, according to a Chinese news agency, and a total of just 6,000 golfers.
     Today, Saudi Arabia is home to a dozen nine- and 18-hole courses, a mere handful of them with grassed greens. Over the next decade, though, the Saudi Golf Federation aims to open 13 courses, and it’s assisting private-sector groups that wish to build others. All told, as many as 25 new courses could debut in the kingdom by 2030, according to Majed Al-Sorour, the federation’s CEO.
     Needless to say, building more than two courses a year is a tall order for a nascent golf market. In 2012, Croatia floated a plan to build 50 courses, and it hasn’t added even one of them to its small collection.
     My question is, Has Saudi Arabia likewise bitten off more than it can chew? Although it promotes itself as “the fastest-growing golf destination in the world,” it hasn’t opened a new course since early 2018, when – after more than a decade of delays – it lifted the veil on Royal Greens Golf & Country Club.
     Nor is the kingdom currently a hotbed of construction. The three ballyhooed “giga-projects” expected to take shape along the Red Sea – NEOM City, Amaala and Red Sea, all of which could have multiple courses – aren’t expected to debut until 2025 at the earliest. In an e-mail, Al-Sorour said that his requests for proposals at these mini-cities have elicited “tremendous responses,” but to date he hasn’t announced any contract signings. European Golf Design, the British firm responsible for Royal Greens and one other Saudi course, currently has no work in the kingdom, and although Kidd and Norman have commissions – the former at Red Sea, the latter at the proposed Diriyah Gate community in Riyadh – no construction schedules have been announced.
     And here’s the rub: Even if Saudi Arabia makes good on its construction goal, it’ll still be a mid-sized player in international golf operations, on par with Morocco, Poland, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.
     The kingdom has embraced golf’s respectability to deflect attention from its record of repression and focus the world’s attention on the social reforms it’s vowed to make. But golf’s commercial opportunities are built on a foundation of trust. Without question, Saudi Arabia has the money and the commitment necessary to create a creditable golf eco-system. What it doesn’t have is the confidence of corporate executives who don’t want to wake up some morning and discover that the kingdom has done something that sparks a boycott by their customers. Recent history indicates that it can happen anytime.
     Saudi Arabia has worked hard to prepare a blueprint for its future as a golf-friendly nation. Cementing an enduring relationship with golf may be harder.