The 2026 Esports World Cup was supposed to be a difficult year for Saudi Arabia. In May, the Esports Foundation announced that its flagship event would move from Riyadh to Paris for the summer, citing the current regional situation. It was the first time the tournament had been held outside the Saudi capital since its launch in 2024. Most of the coverage that followed carried the same undertone: Saudi Arabia was giving something up.
The tournament closes on August 23. Team Falcons, the Saudi club backed by the same sovereign wealth structure that funds the tournament itself, has spent most of the summer at the top of the Club Championship standings. The French government paid roughly $290 million to host what remains, in every legal and financial sense, a Saudi-owned event. The prize pool climbed to a record $75 million, up from $71.5 million in Riyadh in 2025. Saudi sponsors, including the Ministry of Sports, Aramco, Qiddiya, stc Group, and Almaraba coffee, appeared on broadcasts reaching tens of millions of viewers across Twitch, YouTube, and Asian streaming platforms.
Then, on August 4, three weeks before the tournament closes, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund completed the largest leveraged buyout in history. It bought Electronic Arts for $55 billion.
In the Paris Arenas
More than 2,000 players from over 200 clubs are competing across 25 tournaments in 24 games at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles this summer. The Club Championship alone carries a $30 million purse, with $7 million reserved for the winning organisation. The Honor of Kings final on August 8 drew 787,657 concurrent viewers. The Rainbow Six Siege bracket peaked above 77,000. The League of Legends tournament produced the highest viewership of any LoL event in 2026 so far, with Karmine Corp defeating T1 in front of a home Paris crowd in one of the standout moments of the summer.
Team Falcons qualified for 20 of the 25 tournaments, more than any other club in the field. It won its first title of the summer when Jaime “Craime” Bustos, a 15-year-old Chilean player representing the club, took the Street Fighter 6 championship on August 2. Bustos, at 15, became the youngest champion in the tournament’s history. He defeated 30-year-old Japanese veteran Hibiki in the grand final for a $250,000 prize and a qualification for Capcom Cup 13. The win put Falcons back at the top of the Club Championship standings with 1,000 points. The club won the Championship in both 2024 and 2025 and is now favoured to make it three in a row.
Team Vitality, the Paris-based club that qualified for 16 events, sits behind Falcons in the standings. Team Liquid, competing under a mixed international roster, has claimed back-to-back chess titles for Magnus Carlsen, one of the earlier highlights of the tournament’s opening weeks.
The French government’s investment figures are worth reading against the tournament’s ownership structure. Paris paid approximately $290 million to host, on the projection that it would generate roughly $700 million in economic activity for the city. The Esports Foundation, which owns and operates the tournament, is a non-profit funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The intellectual property, the brand, the sponsorship revenue, and the strategic direction of the event all remain in Riyadh. Paris paid nearly a third of a billion dollars for the privilege of hosting a Saudi property for one year.
The Deal That Closed on August 4
While Bustos was working his way through the Street Fighter 6 bracket, a much larger Saudi gaming transaction was closing out its final regulatory approvals in California and Washington. On August 4, the PIF-led consortium that had first bid for Electronic Arts in September 2025 completed its $55 billion take-private acquisition of the company. The final ownership split was 93.4 percent PIF, 5.5 percent Silver Lake, and 1.1 percent Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner.
The deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history. It is the second-largest video game acquisition ever completed, behind Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision Blizzard deal in 2023. EA generated $7.5 billion in net revenue in its 2026 fiscal year. Its portfolio includes EA Sports FC, the football franchise previously known as FIFA and still the world’s best-selling football video game, alongside Madden NFL, Apex Legends, Battlefield, Need for Speed, The Sims, Dragon Age, and Plants vs. Zombies.
Andrew Wilson, the chief executive who negotiated the deal from the company side, remains in the role. The company’s headquarters will stay in Redwood City, California. The majority owner is now the same institution that funds the Esports World Cup, backs Team Falcons, and runs the wider Saudi gaming strategy through Savvy Games Group.
Turqi Alnowaiser, PIF’s deputy governor and head of international investments, put the reasoning briefly. “Having been a minority investor in the company for more than five years, we have a deep understanding of Electronic Arts’ unique platform, massive global sports and gaming franchises, and iconic IP.” The consortium, he said, is positioned to be a long-term partner to EA’s management team.
The Portfolio Behind the Purchase
The EA acquisition did not come from nowhere. In 2022, Saudi Arabia launched Savvy Games Group, a $37.8 billion investment programme designed to make the Kingdom a global hub for gaming and esports. Savvy has since acquired Scopely, the Californian mobile games publisher behind Monopoly Go, in a $4.9 billion deal completed in 2023. It has taken ownership of ESL FACEIT Group, the world’s largest esports tournament operator, in a $1.5 billion transaction that same year. It has invested in dozens of smaller studios across Europe, Asia, and North America. The Esports Foundation, which runs the Esports World Cup, was established by royal order in 2023 under the same broader strategy.
Saudi Arabia now owns, wholly or by majority: a major game publisher (EA), a leading mobile games company (Scopely), the largest global tournament operator (ESL FACEIT), the world’s biggest esports tournament (the Esports World Cup), and the most successful club competing in that tournament (Team Falcons). The revenue that flows through the global gaming industry, from publisher earnings to tournament rights to sponsorship to prize pools to club and player economics, increasingly runs through structures controlled from Riyadh.
The traditional national sports investment model assumes that the value of hosting is the value of the event. Countries bid to host the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Champions League final because the value proposition is delivered in the physical hosting itself. Move the event and the value moves with it. Gaming and esports run on different economics. Broadcasts are global from launch. Sponsorship rights are contractual, not geographic. Championship trophies travel with clubs, not host cities. Publisher revenue accrues quarter after quarter regardless of where any given tournament is staged. Saudi Arabia now owns enough of that industry that the physical events can happen anywhere.
Back to Riyadh in 2027
The Esports World Cup returns to Riyadh next year. WrestleMania 43 has also been confirmed for the Saudi capital in 2027, marking the first time WWE’s flagship event will be held outside North America. The 2027 calendar is being organised around the assumption that Riyadh will reclaim its position as the physical centre of the Kingdom’s entertainment and sports year.
The city those events return to will look different in industry terms. In 2025, Riyadh hosted the Esports World Cup as the venue for a tournament it owned. Next year, it will host the tournament as the venue for a tournament it owns, backed by a portfolio that includes Electronic Arts. Bustos, the Chilean 15-year-old, is contracted to Team Falcons through the next competitive season. Paris paid $290 million for a year.
Comments (0)