Fairbreak goes to Saudi – the ultimate compromise?

In November 2025, it was announced that Fairbreak, the private company set up by Shaun Martyn and former Australia women’s captain Lisa Sthalekar to promote inclusion, diversity and opportunity in sport, would be hosting their next cricket tournament in Saudi Arabia.

Fairbreak has gone through some changes in leadership since it last hosted a tournament in Hong Kong in 2023. Shaun Martyn has stepped down and Fairbreak is now led by Ramasamy Venkatesh, founder of Gencor Pacific (a health supplement / pharmaceutical company based in Hong Kong.)

This move to Saudi Arabia seems, on the face of it, a surprising one, given the company’s founding aims of inclusion and diversity. However, their failure to host a tournament since 2023 and the ever-decreasing windows of opportunity in cricket’s annual calendar has meant that this is a partnership most likely born out of convenience rather than a natural match up of partners who are fully aligned.

The unique aspect of the Fairbreak model is that it enables female cricketers from much smaller associate nations such as Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Rwanda, Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Argentina, the Philippines, to play competitive cricket alongside some of the best players in the world including Danni Wyatt-Hodge, Sophie Devine, Marizanne Kapp, Laura Wolvaardt, Heather Knight and Suzie Bates. This provided a unique, fun, quite charming, but still competitive environment in which the global game could be grown and developed. This model would continue, with Saudi Arabian players also getting the chance to play and be developed in this way.

Saudi Arabia – history and progress

The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932, and has been ruled by a series of absolute monarchs from the same family for the last 94 years. Its constitution and founding principles are those of Sharia Law and the teachings of Sunni Islam. Its current King is 89-year-old King Salman, however, the effective leader and primary decision maker of the country is his son, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.

Under Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership, there has been a certain amount of social change within the Kingdom. In 2017, women were allowed to drive. In 2018, they were permitted to own their own businesses without the oversight of a male guardian. And bin Salman has overseen Vision 2030 – a hugely ambitious set of policies which looks to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy through the development of tourism and futuristic building projects like “The Line” in Neom – a carless indoor eco-city. Part of this strategy has involved opening up Saudi Arabia to more international visitors, and sport has been a prominent tool in this process: the Saudi Arabian football league has recruited Cristiano Ronaldo. Saudi Arabia has won the bid to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup. It has hosted Formula 1 Grand Prix and international events in many different sports from the lucrative LIV golf to snooker and sailing and darts.

For many in the West, this seems a very small amount of reform to a society that could be characterised as repressive and totalitarian. Sport, some argue, is being used to legitimise a harsh and violent régime which denies basic human rights to its people.

System of government

Government in Saudi Arabia is controlled by Mohammed bin Salman, but in reality, day to day decisions and policy is made by a wider group of men who are all members of the extended royal family. Practices which in the West we would regard as nepotism and corruption are the normal way of operating. What makes this quite effective is that democratic processes such as consultation, planning and local accountability can be by-passed and major projects signed off regardless of their impact on ordinary people. For example, the building of Neom has involved the forced displacement of thousands of indigenous people, who had no say in its location and no right to object.

Human rights, religious freedoms and the death penalty

Western liberal values such as freedom of expression, freedom to protest, fair trials and freedom of religion are not part of the mainstream way of life in Saudi Arabia. Because the constitution is based on Sharia Law, it is very unlikely that even an absolute monarch could change this by, for example, legitimising same-sex relationships.

In the West, we take multi-culturalism for granted. People can choose how to live their life. Multiple religions can all co-exist and build their own places of worship. Even in cricket, players like Usman Khawaja can perform a sajda in front of the pavilion at the SCG and be applauded for it or Jemimah Rodrigues can thank Jesus and quote the Psalms in a World Cup semi-final. Sure – there were Australians and Indians who were not comfortable with these expressions, some of whom voiced criticism, but in the West, we exist in a space where criticism and disagreement are allowed as well as freedom of expression. That is our tradition, which has developed over the last 250 years and, one could argue, has accelerated over the last 60 years.

These freedoms do not exist in Saudi Arabia. There is no free press. There is no criticism allowed of the government or the royal family. Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist who wrote for The Washington Post and was very critical of the Saudi government. When visiting the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018 to obtain a marriage document he was murdered and dismembered with a bone saw. A CIA investigation concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had ordered and authorised the assassination. The subsequent UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report described the killing as a “premeditated extrajudicial execution”.

Loujain al-Hathloul is a Saudi human rights campaigner who argued that women should be allowed to drive in the Kingdom. When attempting to cross the border in her car using a UAE driving licence, she was arrested in 2014 and detained without trial for 73 days. In 2018 she was kidnapped in the UAE and forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia, where she was imprisoned and tortured by being beaten on her feet, given electric shocks, whipped, waterboarded and threatened with rape and murder. She was imprisoned without trial for two and a half years before being found guilty in December 2020 of crimes against the state and sentenced to 5 years and 8 months in prison. She has now been released from prison, but is subject to a 5-year travel ban.

Saudi Arabia executed 356 people in 2025.

For context, the USA – a country with 10 times the population of Saudi Arabia, executed 47 people in 2025. The execution rate in Saudi Arabia has doubled in the last two years. Most people are executed by beheading, although stoning is used for adulterers and the firing squad is occasionally used. Death is the punishment for a wide number of crimes. Murder does not automatically carry the death penalty as long as the murderer can come to a financial agreement with the family of the victim. Terrorism (both violent and non-violent) carries the death penalty. Non-violent terrorism can be simply a protest against the government. Apostasy and blasphemy are capital offences, as is witchcraft and sorcery. The majority of executions in 2025 were for drug-related offences. Executions have often been carried out in the public square, but there have been no public executions in the last five years (which some may interpret as another example of liberalisation under Mohammed bin Salman). A disproportionate number of people executed come from the Shia minority or are foreign nationals.

The role of women in Saudi society

The past decade has seen a transformation in the roles, rights and freedoms that women have in Saudi Arabian society. Women were first allowed to drive in 2017. In that same year, they were allowed into sports stadiums for the first time. In the area of education, women now make up 56% of University students in Saudi Arabia and their presence in the workforce has increased substantially in the last decade. Women can now buy and own property and businesses.

Female entrepreneurship has increased substantially in the last 10 years. All of this has been instigated by Mohammed bin Salman as part of the Vision 2030 project. It makes sense economically for Saudi Arabia, and it has made Saudi a more equal society. However, women in Saudi Arabia do not experience equality as we would define it in the West because of the existence of Male Guardianship (Nizam Al-Wilayah) rules. This means that women need to seek permission from a man to marry or divorce. A husband can divorce his wife immediately, but a woman has to ask permission. A woman needs to obey her husband in “a reasonable manner”, she cannot deny her husband sex without a “legitimate excuse”. Fathers only have authority to make decisions about what is best for their children – the mother has no legal say in this. Women in prison can only be released once their male guardian signs their release papers. 

Gone are the days when women needed their guardian’s permission to travel via the infamous Absher app, which was in use until 2019. Women who campaigned for change over the past 20 years must be truly astonished by how successful their campaigning has been and we must admit that this is mainly due to the willingness of Mohammed bin Salman to bring about radical reform of an ancient and very conservative system. However, it must also be pointed out that those like Loujain al-Hathloul who did campaign for change were persecuted for it and continue to be imprisoned and punished today. There is no doubt that protest and campaigning on any further reform will result in similar consequences. “Top men” will continue to make these decisions and citizens are required to accept them.

Sportswashing

The concept of “sportswashing”, which has developed over the last decade, is used to describe companies or nation states who seek to give themselves credibility and a more positive global image by investing in sport. This is sometimes done by buying internationally renowned sports teams such as Newcastle United (Saudi Arabia), Manchester City (UAE) or Paris St Germain (Qatar) and using the wealth of a nation state to make them successful. 

Another element of sportswashing involves hosting major sporting events in your own country, often winning the bid through an opaque bidding process. Examples of this would include The FIFA World Cups in Russia (2018), Qatar (2022), and Saudi Arabia (2034).

A further aspect of sportswashing involves buying the services of high profile, high value individuals who can be associated with a country or a league in order to promote that country’s interest through living there to play for a team or giving positive quotes about the country. Examples of this are the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, who joined the Saudi League, the golfer Dustin Johnson who joined the LIV golf tour, David Beckham, who helped Qatar promote the 2022 World Cup, and Lionel Messi, who received a traditional Qatari bisht from the Amir in order to raise the World Cup in 2022.

This form of sportswashing seeks to influence the views of a global audience, who learn to make the association between a controversial country or company with an individual of high prestige and reputation and have the thought, “they can’t be that bad if Messi / Beckham / Ronaldo thinks they’re OK”.

The effectiveness of sporting boycotts

It can be argued that sporting boycotts are very limited in their effectiveness. The obvious exception is the sporting boycott of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. This was exceptional because the target of the boycott was a minority group within a country for whom sport (and particularly rugby, cricket and some Olympic sports) were of very high value. To take these sports away could be done quite easily and without damaging those sports too much on a global level. Nobody watched the 1988 Olympics and thought the results were skewed because there were no South African athletes competing. Any other attempts to boycott major tournaments over the years has been a failure: many people talked about boycotting Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, Beijing in 2008, but nothing ever came of it.

The truth is that money talks. For a franchise tournament in women’s cricket, it will not take much investment to offer any individual a life-changing amount of money. In men’s golf it cost them $150m to buy the services of Dustin Johnson. The entirety of women’s cricket could be bought for a fraction of that amount. So the amounts of money being offered would be such that any thought of banning participants would have little effect, much as the banning of players who signed for Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the 1970s did not stop almost all the world’s top players from signing. What they were being offered was so much more than they were earning that the ban made no difference to them.

Western hypocrisy and inconsistency

The problem we have is that the moment we say that we cannot play in Saudi Arabia because it’s undemocratic and they are not good on human rights and in the past they have done some bad things, we then need to look at where in the world we will allow ourselves to play. We seem happy to play in and against Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan (albeit men’s cricket in ICC tournaments only), any country we get drawn against in a football World Cup (in 2026 Scotland are due to play both Morocco and Haiti – neither of which could be described as liberal democracies with perfect human rights records) or we will compete against a range of athletes from any country in the world in the Olympic Games. Many countries who have similar Islamic values to those in Saudi Arabia or which are not democratic are also countries we are happy to play against and we are happy to tour there. So why pick out Saudi Arabia? Is it because they are wealthy? Is it anti-Arab racism on our part? These are challenging questions we need to ask ourselves if we are going to boycott and ban nations.

Furthermore, it makes us look at our own values both now and historically – would England be able to play the England of 100 years ago by applying these rules to what is acceptable and what isn’t? The England of 1926 was a country where LGBTQ+ rights were not accepted, it was a country where the King claimed to be Emperor of India because his grandmother had given herself that title and our army had recently quelled an uprising in Ireland in quite brutal fashion and we had executed the ringleaders. In the England of 1926, women did not have equal voting rights with men, there were only five female MPs and women who were teachers, civil servants or worked in banking or insurance were required to give up their job when they got married so that they could be housewives. There is an argument that we have been on, and continue to be on a journey of developing an understanding of equality. Surely it is important that we allow other countries to go on that same journey rather than impose our own values and culture upon them?

Why cricket, why women’s cricket and why now?

The Saudis see cricket as a good sport to develop for a number of reasons. The rise of the Indian Premier League has been a huge money-spinner for India and is followed by people on both sides of the Arabian Sea. The ICC HQ in Dubai is only a four-hour drive from the Saudi border and one can imagine that the powerful men in ICC HQ will find that they have much in common with the powerful men in Riyadh. Football and golf are great sports to use to influence people in Europe and the USA, but in Asia, India is the big regional superpower and cricket is going to be the best way to build relationship and influence with them.

Women’s sport in particular is at an early stage of development, so investing in it now means that a country like Saudi Arabia could quickly climb the rankings in the world game, much as the Qatar men’s football team have done through huge investment programmes over the last decade. Cricket is also more compatible with traditional values – the clothing is more modest than many sports and there is little physical contact. For Saudi Arabia, hosting women’s sport is advantageous because it also goes against the Western pre-conception that Saudi society represses women and life is miserable for them.

Saudi Arabia has a seemingly limitless budget to spend on sports, so infrastructure can be quickly built, facilities and leagues established, coaches brought in, not just in cricket – the Saudis are investing in a wide range of sports from baseball to sailing, esports and MMA. A competition like Fairbreak will be a great window into the wider world of cricket for Saudis getting to know the game and will bring the eyes of the world onto Saudi Arabia if they can attract some of the highest profile players. There is a danger that cricket will miss out if it doesn’t take the opportunity being offered now in Saudi Arabia.

Fairbreak – aims and objectives (taken from fairbreak.net). So what do Fairbreak say about themselves and how does this fit with their Saudi Arabia partnership?

Ultimately Fairbreak is a business which is run by business people. They need to make money or they will go out of business. This lies at the heart of their decision making.

Conclusion – Is it right for Fairbreak to partner with Saudi Arabia? How would we advise players who were approached about signing up?

It’s complicated. I think most people will fall into one of five categories of opinion, which I have listed below. Maybe the best conclusion is to see which category fits you best. Personally I sit somewhere around category 2 with the hope of progressing the relationship to category 3 over time. For players I would advise extreme caution about signing up. It is true that the Saudi Arabia of today is not the Saudi Arabia of 10 years ago.

Progress has been made in many areas. It is also true that the Fairbreak of today is not the Fairbreak of three years ago and that many of its ideals have been compromised in order to make a profit. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are key areas I would like to see improvement on before I would be prepared to consider covering this tournament as a journalist.