Former President Donald Trump’s social media post earlier in the week asking his supporters to give Anheuser-Busch a “second chance” came after Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White personally asked him to back the beer company, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC.

Anheuser-Busch last year suffered a major backlash over its Bud Light marketing promotion with a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney.

White, whose UFC is the leading mixed martial arts promotion company, reached out directly to Trump to encourage positive commentary about Anheuser-Busch, according to the person.

In his Truth Social post Tuesday, Trump appeared to be well-informed about detailed aspects of the beverage company’s operations.

He noted that the company spends $700 million a year “with our GREAT Farmers,” employs 65,000 Americans and has provided scholarships to families of fallen members of the military. Trump wrote, “Anheuser-Busch is a GREAT American brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance?”

UFC, which is owned by TKO Group Holdings, in October announced a partnership with Anheuser-Busch to make Bud Light the official beer partner of the mixed martial arts company, in a deal that was reported at the time to be worth $100 million.

In a press release announcing the deal, White said, “There are many reasons why I chose to go with Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, most importantly because I feel we are very aligned when it comes to our core values and what the UFC brand stands for.”

A spokesman for UFC declined to comment on White’s conversation with Trump. A spokesperson for Anheuser-Busch did not respond to a request for comment.

In his social media post on Tuesday, Trump threatened to release a list of companies — other than Anheuser-Busch — that he considers to be “woke.”

“Am building a list, and might just release it for the World to see,” Trump wrote. His followers, Trump suggested, should be “going after those companies that are looking to DESTROY AMERICA!”

Those comments came after Trump in a social media post on Sunday was much more critical of the company, saying: “the Bud Light ad will go down as the WORST AD in history.”

“In a matter of minutes 30 billion dollars worth of market cap simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Will they ever get it back? Who knows, but what a mess!” Trump wrote.

Trump, who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, attended UFC’s Dec. 16 event in Las Vegas, where he walked out into the audience with White and the musical artist Kid Rock.

Trump had attended two other UFC events previously in 2023 and had been at other of the promoter’s events in prior years.

The Utah Jazz is casting its net wide for international players. 

“We have scouts all over the world — almost every basketball country throughout the world,” Danny Ainge, the team’s CEO and governor, told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Friday.

The two-time champion of the National Basketball Association and former NBA All-Star highlighted having scouts in countries throughout South America, Europe and Asia, as well as every region in the U.S.

“It’s a worldwide sport, and we got to find them all,” he said.

His remarks come after the NBA announced in October that a record 125 international players — five of which were on the Utah Jazz — were on opening-night rosters for the 2023-24 season. Those players hailed from 40 countries and territories across six continents, with a record from Canada at 26 and France at 14.

All 30 NBA teams feature at least one international player this season.

International ticket sales also saw a 120% increase from last season, according to StubHub. Fans are traveling from a total of 92 countries to North American games, which is up from 68 countries last season.

Ainge joined the Utah Jazz as CEO in December 2021 after leading basketball operations for the Boston Celtics for 18 years.

Utah Jazz’s valuation currently sits at $3.09 billion, according to data from research firm Statista. This marks a 52.59% increase from last year and a 76.57% increase since the year Ainge joined the franchise.

PGA Tour and LIV Golf are working to extend their proposed merger deadline, which was originally set at Dec. 31, Commissioner Jay Monahan told players in a memo on Sunday.

“While we had initially set a deadline of December 31, 2023, to reach an agreement, we are working to extend our negotiations into next year based on the progress we have made to date,” according to the memo obtained by CNBC.

Monahan told players their goal for 2024 is to reach agreements with Strategic Sports Group (SSG), the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and DP World Tour, bringing them on board as minority co-investors in PGA Tour Enterprises.

The PGA Tour recently announced that it was in the final round of negotiations with a coalition of U.S. investors, called Strategic Sports Group. The SSG is led by Fenway Sports Group. Monahan said they have made “meaningful progress” and have provided SSG with the due diligence information they requested.

“These partnerships will allow us to unify, innovate and invest in the game for the benefit of players, fans and sponsors,” he said.

The competing golf leagues are expected to make a formal decision on the combination ahead of the Masters tournament in April, according to The Telegraph, which first reported the extension.

The delay is the latest update in a long and tumultuous saga between the PGA Tour and Saudi Public Investment Fund-backed LIV Golf that has divided players and could dramatically change professional golf if the merger is completed.

The two entities agreed in June to combine commercial operations, shocking the global golf community and raising questions around competition and human rights considerations. Under the structure of the agreement, PGA Tour would hold a permanent controlling interest in the new entity’s board of directors and PIF would be a noncontrolling minority investor.

If the proposed merger is completed, PIF is prepared to invest $1 billion into the new commercial business. The agreement also includes the DP World Tour, also known as the PGA European Tour.

The deal is subject to likely antitrust scrutiny from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department.

Before the agreement, PGA Tour and LIV were locked in heated litigation as LIV Golf lured Tour players away, offering big contracts. LIV Golf most recently signed world No. 3 player Jon Rahm to a contract worth a reported $300 million.

Last month, the Tour told players it would begin offering direct equity ownership in the new company after it reaches a deal with investors.

In late November, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit that he was meeting with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of LIV Golf and PIF governor, to continue discussions.

“When this gets finalized, the PGA Tour is going to be in a position where the athletes are owners in their sport and you’ve got not only the PIF, but you’ve likely got another co-investor with significant experience in business, in sport and [in] brand that’s going to help take the PGA Tour to another level,” Monahan said at the time.

Correction: The story has been updated to accurately reflect the name of Jay Monahan, which was misspelled due to an editing error.

Training of elite athletes dates as far back as the Ancient Olympic Games, when so-called gymnastes advised runners, chariot racers, wrestlers and boxers on technique, nutrition and strength conditioning.

Fast forward to today’s Olympians prepping for next summer’s Paris Games. Their trainers and coaches adhere to the same Olympic motto — faster, higher, stronger — yet have the added benefit of millennia of ever-advancing technology, which now has been super-charged with artificial intelligence.

Trainers and coaches at U.S. Soccer, one of the 47 National Governing Bodies overseen by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, are using AI technology to instantaneously identify and track player movements and ball positions. A suite of software tools allows them to study a variety of human performance metrics, such as body position, velocity, speed and timing in real time on the field of play.

“Utilizing advances in AI and computer vision, we’ve been able to track and study personalized analytics from a variety of sports to determine the strengths and deficiencies in an athlete’s movement and help them make data-informed training and competition plans that can help them improve their performance, as well as their own health,” said Mike Levine, director of performance innovation business operations at the USOPC, based in Colorado Springs, also the home of a high-tech Olympic training center.

While the USOPC and NGBs employ in-house experts in bleeding-edge technology development, data analytics and sports sciences and medicine, big tech companies lend their AI know-how as well. USA Surfing staff, for instance, has teamed up with Microsoft engineers to figure out how best to ride waves. They take digital videos of surfers in action and use AI to analyze data on body movement, surfboards and waves to determine what they did well and what could be improved.

“This work saves coaches and staff hundreds of hours of video tagging, facilitates the accumulation of more and higher-quality data and affords analysts and coaches significantly more time to analyze the data and implement learnings into real-life training and performance,” Levine said.

Creating 3-D models of athletes’ bodies with Intel technology

These are manifestations of computer vision systems, which use AI technology to replicate the capabilities of the human brain responsible for object recognition and classification. A commercial application, called 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT), was developed by Intel‘s Olympic Technology Group a few years ago and is now being utilized by trainers in numerous sports. 3DAT incorporates sensor-less motion capture and digital video to create three-dimensional models of an athlete’s entire body, from head to toes, which trainers use to tweak and improve performance.

“We’re able to see ways athletes move and detect things not possible with just the human eye,” said Jonathan Lee, who as senior director of sports technology at Intel helped develop 3DAT and is now chief product officer at London-based sports tech company ai.io, which recently acquired the system from Intel.

3DAT has been adopted by Exos, a coaching company in Scottsdale, Arizona, that trains college football players for the National Football League’s annual scouting combine, an evaluation ahead of the league’s yearly draft. “Exos uses 3DAT to analyze the 40-yard dash and help players get faster,” Lee said. Digital video cameras, mounted on timing gates incrementally positioned along the course, capture data on how a runner comes off the line, his acceleration and velocity, and his body’s angle of attack.

The data instantaneously constructs a personalized skeletal model of each player for immediate review. Before a player’s next sprint, a trainer might say, “You need to be more upright or lean forward, and give him tips on how to achieve that,” Lee said.

The NFL-Amazon digital player and concussion-risk tracking

The NFL itself is harnessing AI and computer vision to enhance its Digital Athlete program, developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services beginning in 2019. The Digital Athlete provides a complete view of each NFL players’ experience by analyzing data from his training and game activity, which is captured by sensors and tags in equipment and hours of video from cameras in stadiums. Computer vision and machine learning systems track speed, collisions, blocks and tackles. This data is shared with clubs and allows teams to precisely understand what players need to stay healthy, recover quickly and perform at their best.

“AI and machine learning are the backbone of the program,” said Jennifer Langton, NFL senior vice president of health and safety innovation. “We’re able to analyze a substantial amount of data and automatically generate insights into which players might benefit from altering either training or recovery routines, a process that used to be so manual and cumbersome.”

The AI was taught to identify trauma by repeated exposure to and digestion of digital video images of helmets from all angles, Langton said, and then to cross-reference visual information from statistical data to determine what player was wearing what helmet. “With enough practice, the AI becomes exponentially faster and more reliable than humans at accurately identifying and classifying head collisions throughout a game and the season,” she said, allowing trainers and coaches to see which players are due to reduce their workloads and which have room for a more intensive workout.

The Digital Athlete program was rolled out as a pilot with four NFL teams last year and this season is available to all 32 franchises via a dedicated online portal. “The portal provides teams with a daily training load and risk-mitigation information, as well as league-wide injury trends and benchmarks they hadn’t had before,” Langton said, adding that the NFL will assess the data at the end of the season to evaluate tangible results of the program.

‘The next big thing’: Twin hearts of elite athletes

Another AI-enabled technology that’s making its way into elite athlete training is the digital twin, a virtual replica of a physical object, process or system that can be used to simulate, predict and improve real-world scenarios. Tata Consultancy Services, headquartered in Mumbai, recently announced a partnership with French tech developer Dassault Systèmes to produce a digital twin heart, mimicking the flesh-and-blood one of Des Linden, a two-time Olympic marathoner and winner of the 2018 Boston Marathon (sponsored by TCS, along with the races in New York, Chicago and London).

Linden’s avatar organ — created using AI-analyzed data from CT scans and MRIs — can simulate her heart rate, blood flow and oxygen levels, providing instant feedback that can be interpreted to adjust her training and competition. “We want to understand what is a safe zone for Des’ trainer to put her through,” said Dr. Srinivasan Jayaraman, a principal scientist at TCS. Instead of having her run on a treadmill or outdoors, “We can run simulations using her digital twin heart to vary different cardiovascular parameters and fine-tune her training.”

Linden is no stranger to sports tech, from online message boards back in her high school days for remotely comparing times with other runners to today’s state-of-the-art running shoes that world-class marathoners have broken records wearing. “The digital twin heart is going to be the next big thing,” she said. “Being able to map out [my training] and see the gains and drawbacks ahead of time will allow me to work smarter, not harder.”

That’s what Linden, aided by her digital twin heart, will be doing to train for the 2024 Olympic marathon trials in February. Qualifying for her third Team USA slot “will be a tough task,” said the 40-year-old runner, “but I’ll take a crack at it.”

AI and sports training diets

Although there’s no news yet of a digital twin of the human digestive system, AI is involved in planning Olympic athletes’ diet and nutrition. Alicia Glass, a senior sports dietician for the USOPC, designs meal plans for about 300 athletes with USA Track and Field and USA Swimming, a labor-intensive, hand-written task that’s been simplified with an AI-powered app called Notemeal. “They collected data from 37 dieticians from professional sports teams and organizations and used those data sets to generate individualized meal plans,” she said. “The value-add is that it’s a network of sports dieticians working with the best of the best athletes in the world.”

Glass still relies on her professional skills to understand the events each athlete competes in, their training regimens and goals, as well as their genetics, lean body mass and metabolic rate. Even athletes who train and compete in the same events require totally individualized meal plans, she said. “Notemeal makes that process a lot easier,” she said.

The athletes access Notemeal with a smartphone app. “I hit a toggle on my phone, and they get a text saying a meal has been created for you,” Glass said, adding that the app also applies AI to design personalized shopping lists and recipes.

Glass won’t claim that high-tech dietary planning will win medals next summer in Paris, but “many athletes would admit it helps improve their lifestyle because they’re more aware” of their personal fueling needs.

Linden says there is no turning back from the increasing role of technology in the lives of elite athletes. “Let’s just personalize the heck out of training and make sure we’re getting the maximum gains without setbacks from overworking,” she said.

Dan Hornberger has been a fan of the National Football League’s Philadelphia Eagles for as long as he can remember. As an adult, his office has team memorabilia lining the walls.

Last year, the devout supporter went to five home games, about an hour-and-a-half drive from his house. This year, however, Hornberger’s only on track to attend two games as costs soar.

“I’m a huge fan,” Hornberger, 40, said. “Ultimately, what it comes down to is just outright refusal on my part to pay those kinds of prices.”

Sports prices have surged this fall, according to federal data. That’s made game tickets the latest victim of “funflation,” a term used by economists to explain the increasing price tags of live events as consumers hanker for the experiences they lost during the pandemic.

Admission prices for sporting events jumped 25.1% in October 2023 from the same month a year prior, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index data. The category saw the highest annualized inflation rate out of the few hundred that make up the inflation gauge.

CPI as a whole rose a relatively modest 3.2% on an annualized basis. The index tracks the prices of a broad basket of items including milk, jewelry and airline fares.

“We’ve seen this through the entire leisure and hospitality sector,” said Victor Matheson, a professor and sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross. “People are getting back to things that they enjoy doing and are willing to pay a bunch.”

Part of the reason consumers may be seeing higher ticket prices for their favorite sports teams is because of the increasing use of dynamic pricing models, Matheson said. These structures allow ticket-selling platforms to fetch more or less per ticket, depending on demand for the event at any given moment.

There’s also an alignment of attention-grabbing sporting events taking place this fall. Beyond the typical major-league seasons, the Formula One race in Las Vegas last week and the announcement of soccer legend Lionel Messi’s move to the Inter Miami team this summer have boosted enthusiast spending.

But a large reason for the eye-popping 25.1% jump is because of how low prices were a year ago, Matheson said. Teams slashed ticket values in 2022 in a bid to win back fans who had grown accustomed to watching at home.

Sports ticket prices were 14.2% higher in October than in November 2019, a smaller gain than the entire index’s 19.6% increase, a CNBC analysis of CPI data shows. Much of the upward pressure on admission costs has come this year, underscoring the role of funflation as consumers shift their attention from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concerts to NFL and Major League Baseball games.

“We’re seeing a gigantic bounce back in prices,” Matheson said. 

NFL and National Hockey League sales have approximately doubled in 2023 compared with the prior year, according to ticket platform StubHub. NBA sales were up nearly 60% at the start of the season compared with the last, while college football has seen an increase of around 50%.

To be sure, not every sport this year has seen the same price growth. StubHub said ticket prices across the top 10 sporting events were 15% higher in 2022 than they were in 2023.

Matheson said tamer inflation overall should help cool sector-specific growth. A return to a more normalized entertainment spending routine following the post-pandemic experience boom can also help quell demand and prices, he added.

Rodney Paul, director of the sports analytics program at Syracuse University, said interest in attending games should be somewhat stable even if the economy worsens. That’s because a sizable portion of the consumer base is well-off enough to afford pro-sports tickets — which he said is essentially a luxury item — and should be able to better weather a downturn given their financial status.

But Paul said a meaningful change to the state of the economy could push fans who are less financially stable to cut back on extraneous expenses, in turn hurting demand. Cash-strapped consumers may justify spending more than they’d like to this year by reminding themselves they didn’t splurge as much or at all on game tickets during the pandemic, Matheson said.

Part of the financial stress comes from the resale market for tickets, some sports enthusiasts say. The rising price of parking and food inside of the stadium also have to be factored in to the financial calculation of fans such as Hornberger and Sara Weddington.

Weddington was able to save enough enough to attend a Kansas City Chiefs game last season, but she said it feels out of the question this year as prices have climbed. The long-time resident of the Kansas City area said she feels for people who have never gotten to see a game before recent cost increases.

“To have such a monumental part of the community be so out of reach for a lot of people is really upsetting,” the 23-year-old said. “Not being able to go to a game is like going to a candy store and not being able to get any candy.”

Still, Paul of Syracuse University said sports have taken on a new meaning in the post-pandemic world. As people increasingly work from home, he said there’s a larger need for in-person social spaces — and those who can afford it are more willing to shell out.

“There’s a real craving for that kind of feeling of togetherness that the sports world brings,” he said. It’s “a really exciting experience that maybe is even more exciting now because people had lost it in the past.”

— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just had surgery as a result of an injury to his ACL that occurred during mixed-martial arts training.

The Facebook co-founder revealed his injury on Friday via an Instagram post in which he said that he “tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery to replace it.”

“I was training for a competitive MMA fight early next year, but now that’s delayed a bit,” Zuckerberg said. “Still looking forward to doing it after I recover.”

“Thanks to everyone for the love and support,” he added.

Zuckerberg included several photos of himself at an undisclosed hospital that shows the executive prior to his surgery and then after the procedure with his wife Priscilla Chan comforting him during his recovery.

The Meta CEO has taken an interest in MMA and competitive fighting in recent years and has been training in a variety of martial arts, including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

In May, he revealed in a Facebook post that competed in his first jiu-jitsu tournament in which he won a gold and silver medal.

Zuckerberg’s recent injury to his ACL comes after a brief verbal exchange between the Meta executive and Tesla chief Elon Musk who were floating a possible cage match.

The fight never took place, however, with Zuckerberg saying during the summer via a post on Threads that “we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on.”

Zuckerberg said that while Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White offered to make the match between the two executives “a legit competition for charity,” Musk never confirmed a date.

“If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

Watch: Jim Cramer says this beer stock can go higher after the company’s promising Investor Day

Adidas on Tuesday hiked its full-year guidance and posted stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings, aided by sales of its Yeezy inventory.

The German sportswear giant, in surprise preliminary estimates release, projected a full-year operating loss of 100 million euros ($106 million), a significant improvement on its previous forecast of a 450 million euro loss, and expects revenues to decline at a low-single-digit rate for 2023.

Third-quarter operating profit came in at 409 million euros, down from 564 million for the same quarter in 2022.

Adidas shares climbed 4% during early trade in Europe on Wednesday.

“While the company’s performance in the quarter was again positively impacted by the sale of parts of its remaining Yeezy inventory, the underlying adidas business also developed better than expected,” Adidas said in its earnings report.

The company terminated its partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, in October 2022 after the rapper made a series of offensive and antisemitic remarks. It has since been working to sell off its remaining inventory of his trademark Yeezy sneakers.

“Including the positive impact from the two Yeezy drops in Q2 and Q3, the potential write-off of the remaining Yeezy inventory of now around € 300 million (previously: € 400 million) and one-off costs related to the strategic review of up to € 200 million (unchanged), adidas now expects to report an operating loss of around € 100 million in 2023 (previously: loss of € 450 million),” the company said.

Saudi Arabia are signing some of world soccer’s most high profile players this summer — but why is this happening and does this spending power pose a threat to big European clubs?

In 2023 alone, Cristiano Ronaldo moved to the Middle Eastern nation on a free transfer, with Ballon D’Or winner Karim Benzema turning down another season at Real Madrid to join him in the country.

That is by no means the end of it with as many as four Chelsea players set to leave the Premier League side for the Saudi Pro League, with Sergio Ramos, Bernardo Silva and Heung-Min Son reportedly facing similar offers.

Sky Sports News chief reporter Kaveh Solhekol analyses this transfer market trend…

Why are Saudi Arabia spending huge sums on foreign players all of a sudden?

Saudi Arabia is looking to expand its economy through other industries in order to help guarantee its financial future.

The country is reliant on selling money through oil — that is not going to last forever and they need to diversify their economy. They do this via the PIF — the country’s sovereign wealth investment fund.

Sport is one particular area they are looking to grow in the country and that includes their soccer league. They want to build their own leisure and entertainment industry and tap into the massive amount of interest there is among the Saudi Arabian population — of which 70% is under 40 — in football.

Soccer is hugely popular in Saudi Arabia — they were the best supported team at the Qatar World Cup last year let’s not forget and their team beat eventual champions Argentina in the group stages — and they also see it as a way of increasing tourism to the country.

The rulers of Saudi Arabia have seen all this interest and they’ve thought: “instead of other people making money from our population’s interest in sport, let’s make it ourselves and keep the money within our borders.” It wants to put Saudi Arabia on the map and raise its profile.

What else is Saudi Arabia hoping to achieve?

Amnesty International Amnesty has accused Saudi Arabia of embarking on a program of “sportswashing to try to obscure its extremely poor human rights record.”

Human Rights Watch says “Saudi Arabia spends billions of dollars hosting major entertainment, cultural, and sporting events to deflect from the country’s poor human rights record.”

In its 2022 World Report Human Rights Watch concluded that some reforms had been announced in Saudi Arabia “but ongoing repression and contempt for basic rights are major barriers to progress.”

A United Nations investigation into the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi said his death “constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the state of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible.”

As well as being used for sportswashing, investing in soccer can also buy influence and prestige around the world and project soft power.

Saudi Arabia is expected to bid to host the World Cup in 2030 together with Greece and Egypt.

Is it a ‘flash in the pan’ — or a long-term aim?

Parallels are obviously being drawn with China and the birth of the Super League in 2004, when suddenly Brazil star Oscar and West Ham’s Marko Arnautovic moved to the Far East.

What happened in China was their Super League was a direct order from the president. He said that he wanted China to host the World Cup, have a good national team and a domestic league.

But then the ruling Communist Party in China had a change of heart, they didn’t like how this large amount of money was flowing out of China and into Europe and foreigners’ pockets. They decided to end this and loads of different rules were put in place to control how many foreign players you could have in the Chinese Super League.

Like then, Saudi Arabia’s aim is long-term. But Saudi Arabia have more money. And there is the sense they are more serious about it.

So this is the beginning of a process and not something that is going to go away quickly. Sky Sports News has been told that, within the next five years, Saudi Arabia want 100 of the best foreign players playing in its league.

Cristiano Ronaldo is the first to go there, and they tried to get Lionel Messi with a monumental $400 million-a-year offer that he turned down to move to MLS instead. But that has not deterred Saudi Arabian clubs, with Ruben Neves on the verge of joining Al Hilal and four Chelsea players including Kalidou Koulibaly and Hakim Ziyech in talks to switch to the state as well.

So will the Saudi Arabian clubs target Erling Haaland? Or Harry Kane? No player has been ruled out in terms of trying to bring them to the Arabian peninsula

Mohammed Hamdi, an expert in soccer in the Middle East and a former director of Al Jazira FC in Abu Dhabi, told Sky Sports News he believes the country would have no problems attracting top talent.

“They have the infrastructure,” he said. “They have the country. They can host [a World Cup]. We saw already that in Qatar it was an amazing event.

“This is a long-term vision where you can attract TV contracts, media, sponsorship and more visitors to the country.

“It’s not only players at a certain player or basically finalizing their careers. You can see there are young players ready to take the step into the Saudi league.”

Has Saudi Arabia distorted the transfer market forever?

We have seen this summer, for the first time, that with every single transfer you have to mention the Saudi clubs. Players who you think are not able to be bought, such as Heung-Min Son at Tottenham, there is serious interest in them. Spurs have said that Son is not for sale.

Saudi Arabia has the money to sign any player they want — as long as the player wants to move there.

A lot of players at the very peak of their careers will say no — but I think that has changed a little bit with Wolves’ Neves. He is somebody who Liverpool, Barcelona and Manchester United are interested in, he is only 26 years old, and at the peak of his career, he has decided to go. Obviously a lot of that is down to money.

So it has changed the transfer market as clubs have serious competition from Saudi Arabia — a very lucrative market has opened up.

Are Chelsea using Saudi Arabia to get round their Financial Fair Play issues after spending £600 million?

This is something that has been brought up a lot in the last couple of days. Chelsea have spent £600 million over the last couple of transfer windows and they need to balance the books and sell some players. Out of the blue, suddenly the Saudis have come along and said: “We’ll have some of your players and we have £100 million to give you.” People from the outside are looking at it and finding it a little strange — suddenly Chelsea have this way of balancing the books.

People have also said that the PIF of Saudi Arabia — who owns the four Saudi Arabia clubs looking to buy the Chelsea players — have made an investment into a Clearlake Capital, a private equity fund who are majority shareholders at Chelsea. People have tried to see if there is something strange going on there.

But from what Sky Sports News have been told, this has nothing to do with it. The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia invest in lots of private equity funds all over the world and Clearlake has investments in 400 different companies. Chelsea would say there is absolutely no conflict of interest in there whatsoever.

Formula 1’s top teams Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes all believe they are at risk of penalties for going over the sport’s budget cap this season, with Christian Horner calling for the FIA to act quickly to avoid an “accounting world championship.”

All F1 teams have a cost cap of $140 million (£119 million) for 2022 — with the limit intended to improve competition — but a dramatic rise in inflation and freight costs has put teams’ budgets under unexpected strains.

That has led to Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes, the sport’s biggest and currently most competitive teams, all stressing that the budget cap to be increased due to the “force majeure” circumstances.

However, there is opposition on the grid — such as from Alfa Romeo and Alpine, who see no reason to up the cap.

“At the time we all agreed to those reductions, nobody could have predicted what was going on in the world and how that is driving inflation in every household globally,” Red Bull team principal Horner told Sky Sports F1.

“We’re seeing it in Formula 1, we’re seeing it with logistics, we’re seeing it with energy costs. That to me is something the FIA need to take into account.

“They have the ability through force majeure to apply an inflationary effect because we don’t have enough levers to get down to the cap. I think that’s the same for probably seven of the teams in Formula 1.

“We’ve still got six months left this year, inflation still looks like it’s rising rather than diminishing, and hopefully the FIA will act shortly.”

Agreeing with his rival team boss, Ferrari’s Mattia Binotto added: “I think that there will be no way for us to stay below. So, I’m pretty sure that at some stage we will go over.

“In the regulations, there is a threshold, which is a 5%. If you do not exceed the 5% on the top of what’s the budget cap threshold, it will be considered a minor breach. And what’s a minor breach in case of force majeure? What will the stewards and the FIA decide on that, in terms of penalties?

“No idea — but I don’t think there is any way for us — and for many teams — simply to stay within, and even laying-off people, I don’t think that’s a good and right choice.”

Horner also stressed that Red Bull “were going to end up with more people in our financial department than we have in the drawing office” and added: “What we don’t want to see is that Formula 1 becomes an accounting world championship, rather than a technical or sporting one.”

Mercedes are also siding with their rivals on the grid.

“The cost cap was introduced for specific purposes, to allow the small teams to spend the same amount as the big ones,” explained Toto Wolff. “There shouldn’t be a bargaining every year to lift the cost cap up.

“But I think we’re facing an exceptional situation in that we have a real inflation that is north of 7% at the moment. Our energy prices in Brackley have tripled, our freight costs have tripled.

“I think that is something that needs to be considered because we want to avoid any circumstance, reorganizing restructuring the big teams again in a way that would be really damaging for us as a team and as an industry.

“This is a force majeure situation, having a raging war in the Ukraine and the consequences that it had on energy prices is not something anybody could have foreseen.

“There needs to be some sort of compromise for the teams that are against an inflationary adjustment and the teams that are for it.”

‘This is not a case of force majeure’ | Why other teams disagree

Two of the teams that are against an adjustment are Alpine and Alfa Romeo.

“Most teams do their budgets in November, December timeframe, for the following year and we are no different,” stressed Alpine’s Otmar Szafnauer. “And at that time, inflation was already at 7%+. RPI in England was 7.1%, 7.2%.

“We took that into consideration when we did our budgets and laid out all the development work that we were going to do. And we’re still within it.

“Where there’s a will there’s a way and we set a budget cap and we should stick to it.”

Alfa Romeo’s Fred Vasseur, meanwhile, said that teams can just stop developing their cars sooner, reducing costs.

“We are in this situation and sooner or later we will have to stop the development of the car because we will be at the limit of our budget. And I think everybody can do the same.

“It’s absolutely not a case of force majeure, because inflation is not a case of force majeure.”

Horner, however, said wanting the budget increased was “not about new parts.”

“We haven’t introduced that many components, particularly compared to a standard season,” he continued. “Of course what we’re trying to do is be very selective in the parts that we’re producing.

“It’s a very very different tactic and a very different way.

“I think what we do need is clarity, and clarity quickly. Because, quite simply, it’s not right to be held to ransom by a couple of teams that aren’t perhaps effective — because that was never the design of the budget cap.

“The budget cap was there to limit the top teams from a spending frenzy.”