Episode 81 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast welcomes Joshua Robinson (@joshrobinson23), European sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the book The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports. (It’s a great book, and I’m not just saying that because he did the show. I’m not even a soccer fan, and I could hardly put it down.)

We hear from Josh in between his trips to the Gulf, just back from the boxing prize-fight at Diriyah Arena, the venue for the Diriyah Cup, the first professional tennis tournament in Saudi Arabia. We talk about how and why oil-rich states use athletic spectacles to “sportswash” their reputations, and what it means for the sporting organizations and athletes that help them do it. A few megastars–including Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer–have so far steered clear of Saudi money, but they are already in the minority, and Josh explains why it only gets easier for the big names to take the payday and avoid too many tough questions.

We also consider the effect on the fan experience, with what Josh calls the “Qatar-ification” of global sports–events produced in empty arenas for far-off audiences, in wholly unsuitable climates. It’s easy to ignore this stuff during exhibition season, but these are important issues that transcend sport. Exhos aren’t very interesting to me, but these types of questions are.

Thanks for listening — both to this episode and for all of 2019. This makes 40 episodes since the beginning of the year, and unless Aryna Sabalenka calls and demands to record an episode, it wraps up the Tennis Abstract Podcast for the year. (Hi Aryna!) See you in January for more tennis talk.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 50 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

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