Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company, the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain, and TRAIL, a European private equity investment platform, have announced a cooperation agreement to explore investment opportunities across sports, gaming and esports.
A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned pool of money that a government invests on behalf of its country. Under the agreement, the two organisations will look for and assess businesses they could invest in together. They will also share their knowledge of the sector with one another and look at ways to help the companies they select to grow.
The agreement, however, does not commit either side to buying a specific firm. Instead, it sets up a framework for the two to look for businesses worth backing and to assess them together. In practice, that could mean jointly investing in an esports tournament organiser, a sports technology start-up or a game studio, with each partner putting in money and sharing the risk.
The agreement builds on an existing relationship between the two. Mumtalakat already works with TRAIL and with its SLAM investment platform, which focuses on sport, luxury, arts and music. A further part of the agreement concerns the Gulf region. The partners will explore ways to link international sports and gaming companies with Bahrain and the wider Gulf, including setting up commercial partnerships and expanding those companies’ operations across the region.
Sovereign wealth funds putting money into gaming and esports is not new in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the world’s largest state-owned investment funds, has been one of the most active. Through its subsidiary Savvy Games Group, it bought MOONTON Games, the developer behind Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, in a deal reported at around $6 billion. PIF was also part of a consortium that completed a roughly $55 billion buyout of video game publisher Electronic Arts, one of the largest deals of its kind in the industry.
