Saudi Arabia knows the day is coming when the world stops needing oil — and its Public Investment Fund is a bet placed by one generation on behalf of the next, spending the last decades of oil revenue on hotels, football leagues, and entire cities in the empty desert, so the grandchildren of today's leaders inherit a country worth having

In June 2026, Saudi Arabia published the latest annual report on Vision 2030, the plan to rebuild its economy before the world’s appetite for oil thins. The number that drew attention belonged to the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth vehicle at the centre of that plan. The fund closed 2025 with preliminary assets of about 910 billion dollars, as reported by Middle East Online, short of the 1.09 trillion dollar target it had set for the year. Non-oil GDP landed near 892 billion dollars, also a little under plan.

The shortfalls should be kept in proportion. A near-trillion-dollar sovereign fund and almost 900 billion dollars of non-oil activity, assembled by a country that a generation ago ran on little but crude, is a large thing to have built in under a decade.

What the fund is doing, stripped of the renderings, is placing a bet across time. It is spending revenue from an asset that almost everyone involved expects to matter less, and buying with the proceeds things meant to matter after it. Hotels. Football clubs. Cities laid out in empty desert. The wager is that the children and grandchildren of today’s leadership inherit a country that earns its living from something other than the ground.

What the fund actually holds

The PIF was founded in 1971, but it became the engine of the national project only after 2016, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman set out Vision 2030. Its assets have risen roughly fivefold since. Around four-fifths sit inside the kingdom, an unusual posture for a fund of its size. Norway’s larger sovereign fund, by contrast, holds nothing at home.

The overseas holdings are the visible part: stakes in Uber, the electric carmaker Lucid, the hospitality group Accor, London’s Selfridges, and the English football club Newcastle United. The domestic holdings are the point. This is where the so-called giga-projects sit, and where the generational wager runs largest.

Hotels, leagues, and cities in the sand

Tourism is one leg of the plan. The fund is behind a run of Red Sea resorts and luxury developments, part of an effort to turn a country that barely issued tourist visas a decade ago into a destination. The Sindalah luxury island opened in early 2026, at close to double its original cost, according to regional coverage.

Sport is the loudest leg. The PIF bought about 80 percent of Newcastle United in October 2021 for a reported 305 million pounds. Cristiano Ronaldo had already joined Al-Nassr in January 2023, on a free transfer after leaving Manchester United, a signing widely credited with opening the door. The state’s direct grip came later. In June 2023 the fund took ownership of four Pro League clubs, and the summer window that followed brought the wave of established names, Karim Benzema arriving at Al-Ittihad, with Neymar, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané among the others. Beyond football, the fund has poured a reported five billion dollars into the breakaway LIV Golf tour, signed a long-term Formula One deal, staged major boxing cards, and secured the 2034 men’s World Cup.

Critics call much of this sportswashing, the use of sport to soften an image marked by a contested human rights record. Amnesty International has pressed the Premier League on the assurances it accepted over Newcastle. Asked directly about the term, the crown prince said he did not care about it, and framed the spending as a straightforward economic play, citing sport’s rising share of GDP. The kingdom denies the underlying accusations. We report the exchange rather than settle it.

Then there are the cities. NEOM, a planned development in the north-west priced at around 500 billion dollars, was to include The Line, a mirrored linear city 170 kilometres long and 500 metres tall, designed for nine million residents with no cars and no street-level traffic.

The logic of a long horizon

A fund built for a single family’s quarterly returns could not carry losses on this scale. A fund built for a country across generations can, at least in principle, because the return it wants is not counted in a fiscal year. It is counted in jobs, in companies that did not exist before, and in an economy that still functions once the oil receipts thin.

By the fund’s own account, its activity had helped create around 1.1 million jobs and set up 93 new companies by 2024. In April 2025 it raised its 2030 assets target to about 2.67 trillion dollars, up sharply from the original figure, after beating the prior year’s goal.

A target is a stated plan, not a delivered result.

The distinction matters here more than usual, because the gap between announcement and construction has become the central fact of the story.

Where the bet has been trimmed

The clearest signal came from NEOM. The PIF suspended construction on The Line on 16 September 2025, with roughly 2.4 kilometres of foundations laid out of the planned 170, as documented by ArchDaily and other coverage of the strategic review. The fund had already written down about eight billion dollars on its giga-projects in August 2025. An internal audit leaked to the Wall Street Journal projected the full build at roughly 8.8 trillion dollars, with completion pushed toward 2080. The population target for the end of the decade was cut from well over a million to under 300,000.

Other parts of NEOM moved at different speeds. The Trojena mountain resort slowed after the 2029 Asian Winter Games it was meant to host were first postponed and then relocated to Almaty, Kazakhstan, with the host city contract signed in Milan in early February 2026. The green hydrogen plant at Oxagon, by contrast, was reported to be about 80 percent complete, and NEOM Port has reached an advanced operational stage as a Red Sea logistics hub.

The sports portfolio has been reassessed too. In 2026 the PIF said it would withdraw funding from LIV Golf after the 2026 season, according to Golf Channel, after years of losses. It sold a 70 percent stake in the Pro League club Al-Hilal to an entity owned by Saudi royalty. Falling oil prices and regional conflict were named by observers as pressures on the spending base. The fund’s governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, described the shifts as a continual reweighting of priorities.

In our reading, this is a reweighting rather than a retreat. Trimming a long wager is part of running one, and the renders were always going to meet physics and finance at some point. What has changed is that the reckoning now sits in annual reports and leaked audits rather than in promotional video.

What to watch

The near-term questions are specific. Whether the 2.4-kilometre first phase of The Line resumes construction at all. Whether the fund holds Newcastle United, which sources have described as a fixture, using language close to what preceded the LIV exit. Whether the giga-projects that survive are the ports and energy plants rather than the mirrored cities.

The fixed point in the calendar remains the 2034 World Cup, the deadline much of the plan is arranged around. The oil price, and the stability of the region it sits in, will decide how much of the original vision the next Saudi generation actually inherits, and how much of it stays a line of foundations awaiting a decision.