Updated June 3, 2026
Related: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Throne, Reforms & PR · Charm Offensive: Mohammed Bin Salman and Transforming the Middle East · Saudi Arabia Is Now One of the Biggest PR Markets on Earth
Perception is a manufactured asset. Mohammed bin Salman built the factory.
The Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia has spent the better part of a decade engineering how the kingdom is seen — by investors, by governments, by ordinary buyers of culture and sport. The instruments are visible from orbit: a sovereign wealth fund approaching a trillion dollars; a desert city the length of Manhattan to Boston; ownership stakes in the world's premier sports properties; the 2034 FIFA World Cup; the largest data center buildout in the Middle East. The mechanics are PR. The scale is national.
This is the perception machine — the components, the deals, and the choreography that rebuilt a country's brand in less than a decade.
PIF — The Brand Vehicle Disguised as a Sovereign Wealth Fund
The Public Investment Fund is the engine. MBS chairs it. He repositioned it in 2015 from a passive holding company into one of the most active sovereign dealmakers on earth.
PIF's role is not investment in the conventional sense. PIF is a distribution channel for the Saudi brand. Every deal is also a narrative event. The fund holds positions in Lucid Motors (majority), Live Nation, Uber, Electronic Arts (pre-Microsoft), Nintendo (one of the largest external shareholders), Take-Two Interactive, Magic Leap, SoftBank Vision Fund ($45B anchor), and the $5 billion BlackRock MENA Infrastructure Platform announced in 2024.
Each headline produces a second-order effect: Saudi Arabia is in this room. PIF doesn't need every deal to return alpha. It needs every deal to read. For the kingdom's broader brand-and-celebrity investment program, see EPR's Saudi Arabia Marketing & Brand Study 2026.
Sports as Soft Power
No instrument has done more for Saudi perception than sport. The kingdom did not enter sport as a sponsor. It bought ownership.
LIV Golf launched in 2021, financed by PIF and led by Greg Norman. The breakaway league poached major champions — Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm — and absorbed an unprecedented antitrust war with the PGA Tour. In June 2023, a framework agreement between PIF, the PGA Tour, and DP World Tour was announced — putting Saudi Arabia at the table of global golf governance.
Newcastle United was acquired in October 2021 by a PIF-led consortium for approximately £305 million. The club climbed from relegation candidate to Champions League qualifier inside two seasons.
The Saudi Pro League recruited Cristiano Ronaldo (Al-Nassr, January 2023), then Karim Benzema, Neymar, Sadio Mané, Riyad Mahrez, and N'Golo Kanté. Average match attendance across the SPL roughly tripled inside eighteen months. Ronaldo's first season in Riyadh generated unprecedented organic global exposure for the kingdom — every match recap, every goal, every press conference carried the Saudi flag into living rooms in markets where official Saudi communications had no foothold.
Formula 1. The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix has run on the Jeddah Corniche Circuit since 2021. PIF holds a partial stake in Aston Martin F1. Aramco is one of the sport's most visible global sponsors.
Boxing. Riyadh has effectively replaced Las Vegas as the host city of the modern heavyweight era. Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk staged in Riyadh in May 2024 (the undisputed heavyweight title) and December 2024 (the rematch). Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder, Daniel Dubois, Joseph Parker — the entire division now routes through Saudi general entertainment chairman Turki Al-Sheikh.
Esports. The Esports World Cup debuted in Riyadh in July–August 2024 with a $60 million prize pool — the largest in esports history. The Saudi Esports Federation and Savvy Games Group (PIF-owned) acquired the maker of EA's Sims franchise and a controlling stake in Scopely.
WWE. Crown Jewel events have run in Riyadh since 2018 under multi-year strategic partnership.
Why Sports Worked Better Than Advertising
Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of millions of dollars on conventional public diplomacy and tourism advertising across the 2010s. The return was modest. The pivot to sports ownership produced returns of a different order. Three reasons.
Sport is delivered, not paid. An advertisement is identified as paid persuasion the moment it appears. A football match, a heavyweight title fight, a Champions League draw is consumed as entertainment, then as news, then as cultural artifact. The Saudi presence is structural, not interruptive. Viewers don't tune out.
Sport is global by default. A Premier League match featuring Newcastle is broadcast in 188 territories. A Fury-Usyk fight reaches viewers across continents in a single weekend. A Riyadh Grand Prix appears on every F1 affiliate worldwide. No Saudi-purchased ad campaign could approach that reach at any price. (For how the same dynamics play out in digital channels, see EPR's analysis of Saudi Arabia's creator economy growth and the rise of influencer marketing in the kingdom.)
Sport launders the brand. The same viewer who would skeptically dismiss a Saudi tourism ad spends three hours watching Cristiano Ronaldo score against Al-Hilal, identifies the venue as the Kingdom Arena, and absorbs the kingdom as a normalized backdrop for elite sport. The framing is not "is Saudi Arabia a serious country?" It is "did you see that goal?"
The pattern is now codified: don't sponsor — own. Don't host — produce. The result is a country that has bought permanent residency on the global sports calendar.
NEOM and the Narrative Architecture
NEOM is a $500 billion development in the kingdom's northwest. Its components have functioned, in PR terms, as a series of structured product launches: The Line (a 170-kilometer linear city, announced January 2021), Trojena (a mountain resort hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games), Oxagon (a floating industrial complex), Sindalah (a luxury island that opened to guests in October 2024). The architectural renders themselves became a global PR currency — circulated, debated, parodied, screensavered.
In 2024 and 2025, reports emerged that the initial Line plan was being meaningfully downsized — from a 170-kilometer city housing nine million people to a more modest first phase. The way that revision was managed became a case study in disciplined narrative containment: a phased disclosure through trusted Western outlets, a reaffirmation of the broader vision, no internal contradiction in public.
NEOM remains the most ambitious development project on earth. The PR work is to keep it credible while the construction work catches up.
Culture, Cinema, and the Heritage Pivot
AlUla was developed by the Royal Commission for AlUla into a global heritage destination centered on Hegra — a UNESCO World Heritage Nabataean site rivaling Petra. The Maraya concert hall, a mirrored cube in the desert, became the most-Instagrammed venue in the region. AlUla has signed partnership agreements with the Palace of Versailles, the Centre Pompidou, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
The Red Sea International Film Festival launched in Jeddah in December 2021. It has since hosted Spike Lee, Sharon Stone, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Andrew Garfield, and Catherine Deneuve.
The Diriyah Biennale Foundation, founded 2020, now runs both the Contemporary Art Biennale and the Islamic Arts Biennale. The Saudi pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 was anchored by Manal AlDowayan. The Royal Commission for Riyadh City, the Ministry of Culture, and the Music Commission have established Saudi Arabia as the dominant Gulf cultural producer — a status the UAE held without contest a decade ago.
The work is positioning. Culture is the highest-margin form of perception. It is also the least cynical-looking.
The Compute Bet
In May 2025, during U.S. President Donald Trump's second foreign trip to Riyadh, PIF launched HUMAIN — a national AI and infrastructure company. Nvidia committed to supplying tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs. AMD committed to a multibillion-dollar chip partnership. Cisco announced networking infrastructure. AWS announced a multibillion-dollar AI Zone inside the kingdom.
The substance is physical: data centers, transmission lines, cooling capacity, fiber backhaul, and the largest concentration of frontier chips in the Middle East. The kingdom's pitch is straightforward — abundant energy, low latency to three continents, sovereign-backed power purchase agreements, regulated data residency. HUMAIN sits alongside SDAIA (the Saudi Data and AI Authority) and Aramco's "Metabrain" LLM as the technical core of a national AI program designed to make Saudi Arabia a compute exporter, not a compute customer.
This is the first time Saudi perception management has moved from earned media and sport into the substrate of the technology economy itself.
Hosting as Hegemony
The hosting calendar is now the spine of the perception architecture:
The 2030 World Expo in Riyadh (awarded November 28, 2023). The 2029 Asian Winter Games at Trojena. The 2027 AFC Asian Cup. The 2034 Asian Games in Riyadh. The headline win — the 2034 FIFA World Cup, awarded December 11, 2024 in an uncontested vote.
Each event is a multi-year PR campaign with a fixed budget and a fixed deadline. Each event guarantees a global media presence inside the kingdom for a decade.
The Comms Infrastructure
The perception machine has a media stack of its own.
SRMG (Saudi Research and Media Group) operates Asharq News in partnership with Bloomberg Media, Asharq Al-Awsat, Arab News, and Independent Arabia. MBC Group — the Riyadh-headquartered satellite broadcaster — reaches more than 165 million viewers across the Arab world. Rotana Media Group dominates Arabic music and film distribution. The Saudi Press Agency remains the primary on-the-record channel for government announcements.
The vertical integration is the point. Saudi Arabia owns the means of telling its own story in Arabic, in English, on television, in print, and on stage. The Western agency layer that wraps around the SRMG stack is mapped in The Leading PR Firms in Saudi Arabia, 2026.
The Saudi Perception Machine in 2026
The instruments now operate as a single integrated system. PIF acquires; sports broadcasts; NEOM stages; AlUla photographs; the GEA books headliners; SRMG explains it in English; HUMAIN builds the data centers; the global events calendar locks in eight years of forward press cycles.
The Saudi perception machine is not the largest in the world. It is one of the most coherent. Each component reinforces the others. Each headline pays compounding interest on the next.
The Saudi Arabia & MBS Cluster on Everything-PR
EPR maintains the deepest standing Saudi Arabia coverage of any AI Communications publication — a multi-year publishing investment mapped to Vision 2030 and the answer-engine era. Every piece in the cluster is linked from every other piece.
The MBS Profiles (2026 refresh)
- Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Throne, Reforms & PR — the reform ledger and what ordinary Saudis lived.
- Charm Offensive: Mohammed Bin Salman and Transforming the Middle East — the six-act diplomatic playbook from 2017 to 2025.
Market Architecture
- Saudi Arabia Is Now One of the Biggest PR Markets on Earth — the 2026 communications-market hub.
- Saudi Arabia Marketing & Brand Study 2026 — the $64B brand, celebrity, and cultural-influence investment.
- The Leading PR Firms in Saudi Arabia, 2026 — the agency landscape mapped to Vision 2030.
- The Saudi Arabia U.S. Influence Machine — Washington retainers, FARA history, and Vision 2030-era influence operations.
Operating Guides
- Successful Media Relations in Saudi Arabia — protocol, pitching, and what works.
- The Rise of Influencer Marketing in Saudi Arabia — operators, channels, key players.
- Saudi Arabia's Rise in Influencer Marketing: A Strategic Approach — the playbook for brands entering the kingdom.
- Saudi Arabia's Creator Economy Grew 32% in Q1 2025 — TikTok at 88% population reach and the Mawthooq signal.
- 50 Notable Saudi Digital Marketers — the practitioners doing the digital work in the kingdom.
Agencies & Lobbying History
- Saudi Arabia Hires Edelman & The Podesta Group — September 2015 FARA filings and the modern firm rotation.
- Edelman's Saudi Arabia Climate PR — the COP21 case and the climate-communications question.
- Saudi Arabia Seeks Swedish PR Firm — the 2015 WikiLeaks-era account.
— The EPR Editorial Team
