The grand Saudi Arabia takeover of cricket

There’s labyrinthian maze at the centre of which sit an Associate cricketer and country. It could fix a lot of cricket’s problems, but comes with strings attached.

You probably don't know who Neil Maxwell is. In fact, just by hearing the name Maxwell on a cricket video, you probably have another face that's coming up. This was a different old man.

Someone who struggled a lot playing cricket in the 90s, mostly in domestic cricket. He played for New South Wales, he played for Victoria, and then he went on to actually be a star for Fiji. But if you've heard of him recently, there's probably two reasons.

Either it's because he is Pat Cummins’ manager, and has been for pretty much the entirety of his career. Or, it's because you might remember him when he was the CEO of the Kings XI Punjab, or whatever the name of that team was at that time.

And those last two things are pretty interesting. But the other thing that Neil Maxwell did was he tried to set up Major League Cricket in the USA, or American T20 cricket, more than a decade before anyone else really even had the idea of something like that.

Like he's a really, really interesting, intelligent mover, but in the background of cricket, almost the opposite of the way he played the game.

In my career, I've kind of met almost every major decision maker in cricket at one stage or another, or at least have access to them. Neil Maxwell is someone I think about a lot, because he's clearly a dreamer and a visionary. And he's a random guy that, for 20 years, has basically been trying to do one thing.

Just get players paid more money and to grow the game.

In 2011, I interviewed him and he said that he wanted everyone in the world to play cricket. Not just because of some egalitarian ideals. He was basically thinking about this from a business perspective. The more nations who played cricket, the more cricketers he could find to hire for whatever job he was in at that stage.

Neil Maxwell has essentially spent 20 years on his vision. But it wasn't until Saudi Arabia came along that he could actually do anything about it.

Now Neil Maxwell's name is in the news again. This time through Chris Barrett at The Age. Because we found out that after 20 years of trying to move the needle on his own, Neil Maxwell finally has someone to give him the money. Saudi Arabia.

When I was at the last WTC final, I heard a great story. Essentially, there was a prince there from Saudi Arabia and he was interested enough in cricket to ask for a proper copy of the laws of the game.

He knew exactly what to ask for.

Now, this wasn't like an official ICC thing or anything. He was just there in London and he thought he'd watch some cricket while he was there. But the message relayed to me was quite clear.

They are really thinking about cricket. And we already knew that a little bit because Dan Brettig, also of The Age, had written that piece about Greg Norman and cricket. So let's just start with Greg Norman. He is known as ‘The Shark’, and during the 1980s he was the best golfer in the world until like the last day of the majors.

But The Shark is also an incredible entrepreneur. In fact, he's made a lot more money in his life from his shark logo and his business names.

He basically is very similar to someone like Donald Trump. He kind of puts his name and his brand on everything, doesn't do a lot of investments, but he's very canny. So Saudi Arabia got involved with The Shark and that led to something you might have heard of: LIV Golf.

Do you remember this thing a couple of years ago when the world of golf was absolutely changed because suddenly all the best golfers in the world were being offered hundreds of millions of dollars to move to Saudi Arabia and play their sport?

And of course they didn't stop with golf. For instance, we had The Shark, and then we have another canny sporting entrepreneur, Cristiano Ronaldo, who also went to Saudi Arabia when Saudi Arabia went big with football.

So the template was set. It's worth mentioning as well, that The Shark, for those who don't know, is an Australian golfer. And he's very close with a lot of former Australian cricketers. And he still hangs out a lot on the circuit. He actually played cricket himself.

The Shark had let slip a couple of times that cricket was something else that the Saudi Arabians were looking at. So we knew it was happening, and we knew they were doing multiple sports plus the F1 and everything else that's been going on.

This is where it gets more interesting. Why does Saudi Arabia want a golf tournament and football and stars to be involved?

The obvious reason leads us to sports washing.

That's because in 2018, Saudi Arabia was not the most popular country on earth because Jamal Khashoggi was at a Saudi consulate, and was assassinated. And that's the sort of thing that sticks. They didn't have a great reputation around the world already, so now they were even worse.

From 2018 through to now, they have been trying to get people to say nicer things about them, and they are willing to spend billions of dollars to do this.

And that is how we ended up with Greg Norman and Ronaldo.