Saudi Arabia quietly shelves futuristic NEOM Stadium, casting doubt over 2034 World Cup plans

Saudi Arabia has quietly shelved plans for the NEOM Stadium, one of the flagship venues listed in its successful bid to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, according to construction intelligence platform MEED Projects, which now classifies the project as “on hold”.

The 46,000-seat arena was conceived as a centrepiece of The Line, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s 170km mega city announced in 2021. Promotional material depicted a glass-and-mirror structure suspended 350 metres above the ground — a vision that has since collided with spiralling costs and logistical reality. According to a report published earlier this year, only 2.4km of foundation work has been completed on The Line itself.

FIFA awarded Saudi Arabia the 2034 tournament in December 2024, with NEOM listed among 15 proposed stadiums — only four of which had been built at the time of the bid. The Saudi 2034 website still describes the venue as “a living laboratory” and “a future global hub”, but Mirror Football reports that NEOM has not responded to a request for comment on the project’s status.

The financial scale of The Line’s difficulties is stark. A reported $50 billion (£37.8bn) has already been spent, while an internal dossier cited in earlier reporting suggested completing the project by 2080 would require $8.8 trillion (£6.6tn). That gap between ambition and resource has prompted a visible retreat from grand infrastructure commitments: the Mukaab, a giant cube-shaped skyscraper planned for Riyadh, was also recently suspended as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) reorients its spending priorities.

Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of PIF, said in April that no NEOM projects had been permanently cancelled and that the fund was simply making choices about where to direct capital. But the pattern of deferrals is widening. Saudi Arabia’s withdrawal of funding from LIV Golf in April added to the sense that the Kingdom’s appetite for open-ended, long-horizon spending is contracting.

The Saudi World Cup 2034 Hosting Higher Authority has maintained that “substantial delivery” of tournament infrastructure is underway, and the country still has nine years before the opening fixture. Whether a replacement venue can be identified or built for NEOM’s allocated matches — or whether FIFA will require a revised stadium plan — remains unclear. With hosting rights secured and the tournament central to Bin Salman’s strategy to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil, the pressure to resolve the shortfall is considerable.