The situation
The client was concerned about the impact of geopolitical events, regional rivalries and insecurity in the Middle East on the viability of hosting competitions in some of the region’s countries.
These concerns were based primarily on the June 2017 diplomatic disputes within the Gulf Cooperation Council’s countries, diplomatic tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia and an unstable security environment in Iraq.
Control Risks’ approach
Control Risks first conducted a baseline assessment of the political situation which analysed the impact of current political and security factors on sporting events. Specifically, we undertook to help our client evaluate the viability of hosting home and away sporting competitions between participants from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE and the possibility of hosting competitions in Iraq from a security and safety perspective.
As the federation’s engagement in these countries developed, we continued to support the client by monitoring the security situation in these countries and the state of diplomatic relations between some of them.
The outcome
Besides providing the client with implementable one-off risk management recommendations, we prepared periodic update reports on our baseline assessment, including ad-hoc updates if there were any developments that materially changed our analysis of the political and security threats to the competitions. Our comprehensive approach enabled the client to safely host competitions in the locations of interest. Our work also enabled the client to implement robust risk management to avoid any disruption to its competitions.