Just what Saudi Arabia expects from buying into the global sports market, and whether its intentions are honorable, isn’t entirely clear. One prominent theory amounts to a sinister take on the 1990s Animaniacs cartoon that featured the whacky characters Pinky and The Brain, whose unwavering purpose was “to take over the world.”

That fun bit of television escape, appropriate for all ages, featured a couple of genetically enhanced laboratory mice: The Brain was the relentless schemer, Pinky his dullard sidekick, and their goal of universal domination—all Brain’s doing, really—never got off the ground.

But what about Saudi Arabia and the Persian Golf War? (“Golf,” not “Gulf,” but more on the latter later.) When the oil-rich kingdom, through its sovereign wealth fund, began luring top pros from the established Western-based PGA in 2021 with obscene amounts of money, the accusation of “sportswashing” immediately was raised. In creating the rival LIV golf tour and populating it with some of the sport’s biggest names, the Saudis were accused of purchasing celebrity spokesmen to fumigate a dismal human-rights record, the crown prince’s apparent role in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom’s funding of terrorism leading up to 9/11.

For almost two years, the PGA mightily and noisily resisted the Saudi’s involvement, ostensibly on moral grounds, precipitating dueling lawsuits. Then, shockingly, they buried the hatchet and negotiated a chumocracy this month—a deal prompted, Slate’s Alex Kirshner wrote, by the unsettling reality that the PGA now “gets to be friends instead of adversaries with an investor who has more cash and lawyers than God.”

That the PGA now appears to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia coincides with the Saudis’ recent, aggressive push to use sports to gain international prestige. Seemingly inexhaustible Saudi money has been thrown at the World Wrestling Entertainment operation, boxing purses, horse and Formula I racing and the English Premier League team Newcastle United, not to mention a project to poach several of world’s bold-face soccer names for Saudi Arabia’s professional league. Already Cristiano Renaldo of Portugal and France’s Karim Benzema, most recent recipient of the Ballon d’Or as the sport’s best player, have been signed.

Amid significant outrage that the Saudis are using good-old fun-and-games as an odious tradeoff to turn attention from the grisly Khashoggi event, the kingdom’s officials are contending instead that sports is a vehicle to promote diversity in its economy—because oil will not be there forever. Could this just be another step toward a more modern society that in recent years has at last allowed women to drive their own cars and join the workforce?

Of course the whole deal is tangled in geopolitics and the shifting evaluations of U.S. alliances.

Historically—though soccer, cricket and basketball have a place in Saudi Arabian culture—the kingdom hardly has been a sports power. It did not participate in the Olympics until 1972 and would have been tossed out of the organization in 2012 had it not lifted its ban on female athletes. It has yet to win a gold medal.

The Saudis’ first soccer World Cup was the 1994 U.S.-based tournament, four years after the kingdom had provided billions of dollars and a launching place for the American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf War precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When the Saudi team arrived that May for the pre-Cup training near Atlantic City, N.J., there was talk that it would be greeted by U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf, who had been commander of the Gulf War coalition. That didn’t happen, but all was tranquil between the allies at the time..

Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar was living parttime in Vail, Colo., and Saudi King Fahd had contributed to several U.S. colleges. It was King Fahd, in another example of his kingdom’s international relations, who had arranged with Argentine president Carlos Menem to hire Argentine brothers Jorge and Eduardo Solari to coach the Saudi’s ’94 Cup team.

Neither of the brothers spoke Arabic, but a trio of multi-lingual assistants—a Lebanese-born Brazilian, a Palestinian based in Spain and a Saudi sports-medicine official who was schooled in America—fixed that. And the Saudis, then considered the worst of the Cup’s 24 participating nations, conjured upset victories over Morocco and Belgium for a surprising advance into the knockout round—an advance the kingdom has not equaled in five successive tournaments. The Solari brothers had schooled the Saudi players in a sort of Argentine/Brazilian style—short touch passes with an emphasis on creativity.

Demonstrating that sometimes soccer is just soccer. Sports is just sports.

But there is plenty of chin-stroking now over the Saudis swallowing up sporting real estate and, especially, the LIV/PGA partnership, about which The Athletic’s Brody Miller declaration that “Money won. It always has. Maybe it always will….stripping away the norms of professional sports and laying it bare as a money-making enterprise above all else.”

Might that purchasing power remind of those goofy Animaniacs episodes that always ended the same way?

Pinky: “What are we going to do tomorrow, Brain?”

The Brain: “The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”