WEEKEND COLUMNISTS You could argue that Abu Dhabi hosts a Formula One race every day of the year. Vast fleets of sports utility vehicles are forever tearing along the four-lane highways of the Gulf state. When I visited earlier this year, the local newspapers were full of whizzo new schemes to get locals to drive safely. However, traffic fines are weak deterrents in a place where the average citizen is worth perhaps $17m. Abu Dhabi’s 420,000 or so natives, who own 9 per cent of the world’s oil reserves, love burning petrol. One foreigner – born here, but forever a foreigner – told me that when he used to visit Emirati schoolmates, they would have three- or four-car garages just for their “main cars”. One car might be set aside strictly for supermarket trips.
No wonder that some local journalists asked if they could drive in tomorrow’s F1 race, the last of the season and the first held in Abu Dhabi. The race crowns the emirate’s takeover of global sport. Abu Dhabians have already made Manchester City the world’s richest football club, and stage endless international sporting events ranging from horseracing through golf to football’s world club cup in December. The question is why?
Abu Dhabi claims to be doing it for money. However, I suspect that what it truly craves is love.
In the shaded villa where the F1 race was being planned, someone explained Abu Dhabi’s sports “strategy” to me. When the oil runs out, the city wants to become a tourist destination for rich people. That’s why the racetrack at Yas passes through a hotel and past “superyachts” in the marina. The race is meant to be a tourist ad for Abu Dhabi. Sport must help keep the emirate rich forever.
Anyone familiar with the economics of hosting sport knows that this won’t work. Boosters always say that bringing a baseball team to town, or hosting the Olympics, will make a place rich. They pay tame economists to write bogus reports promising this is so. But by now, decades’ worth of serious academic studies have shown that this is wrong. It’s usually more lucrative to build a shopping mall or multiplex cinema than a stadium. Sport won’t make Abu Dhabi richer even if the authorities can persuade locals that they will have to buy tickets to see the F1 race, an awful novelty in a place where sports fans traditionally stroll in for free.
Rather, hosting sport typically provides a different benefit: evidence from happiness studies suggests that it makes the host nation happier. In part, Abu Dhabi is simply pursuing happiness. F1 and Manchester City are rich man’s toys. Hanging around the seven-star Emirates Palace hotel, where all that glitters really is gold, I realized how tiny sporting budgets must seem to Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. They buy football clubs in the same spirit that normal people might buy football shirts.
But as I went around Abu Dhabi, I came to suspect that the “investments” in sport were more than simple fancy. Abu Dhabi’s relationship with foreigners is for now nakedly cynical: the Emiratis give us money, and we service them while sniggering at their gauche extravagance. The Indian labourers, British accountants and American academics who swelter in the 40-degree heat, buying beer with their special licences, are there for cash alone. The world loves Abu Dhabi only for its money. The contract between the emirate and the rest of us is mostly as blatant as that. Mostly, the locals know it.
Here’s my unproven supposition based on a three-day visit: at bottom, hosting sport is Abu Dhabi’s semi-conscious bid for true love. The world loves sport, so if Abu Dhabi offers sport, perhaps the world will come to love Abu Dhabi, too. “We don’t want people to look at us like we are an oil well,” an Emirati woman told me. “It’s not just Emiratis – if someone said something about your country, you would love it if they said something good, and not just that you were rich.”
I come from Britain, so luckily the risk of foreigners saying it is just rich is currently slim.
