Forty Billion Dollars Without a Single Stadium: Pakistan and the Sports Investment Gap

AUGUST, ONE NUMBER, ONE GAP In August 2026 I sat in front of a screen in Melbourne reading the presentation from Pakistan's Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC). The number sat in the first line: forty billion US dollars. Beneath it, the list: the ML-1 railway running from Karachi to Peshawar, the K-IV water supply project for Karachi, oil, gas, telecommunications, agriculture, minerals. I read slowly. Then twice more. Not one line about sport. Forty billion dollars. I did the arithmetic in my head. That is more than thirty times the annual budget of the Pakistan Cricket Board. Enough to rebuild the entire stadium system of a country of more than 240 million people, and still have enough left to pay every professional athlete in the country for a decade. But the money chose another road — rails, water pipes, oil wells. It did not pass through a single grandstand. For a sports commentator, this is not purely an economic story. It is a sports story filed under the wrong label. And as always, the wrong label tells us more than the right one. CONTEXT: WHAT A COUNTRY CHOOSES TO INVEST IN SIFC was created in 2026 as a supra-ministerial body to unblock and promote foreign investment in Pakistan. The 40 billion dollar pipeline is the product of prolonged negotiation with international financial institutions: the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the World Bank, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The two projects most cited are ML-1 and K-IV. ML-1 is the roughly 1,733 km spine linking Karachi to Peshawar, a project repeatedly revised in both cost and design, each revision triggering fresh negotiations with creditors. K-IV is the large-scale water scheme meant to address Karachi's chronic shortages — a city of over 16 million where millions live with piped water for only a few hours a day. On oversight, the National Assembly Standing Committee on the Economic Affairs Division held hearings on progress. Members including Jamil Qureshi and Mirza Ikhtiar Baig repeatedly questioned feasibility, counterpart funding, and whether international pledges would actually be disbursed on time. The Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, the Ministry of Finance and Revenue, and Sindh provincial bodies — the Sindh Planning and Development Board and the Sindh Finance Department — were all involved. In that entire structure there is no Ministry of Sport. No national sports authority is named. Not one budget line for sports infrastructure, not even symbolically. CRICKET: THE SECOND RELIGION AND ITS NUMBERS If one sport defines Pakistan, it is cricket. Not football as in most of the world, not basketball as in the Philippines. Cricket. The sport Imran Khan — later Prime Minister — led to the 2026 World Cup title in Melbourne, on the very ground I now live near. I have heard that final retold many times by Pakistani-Australians in Broadmeadows, and each time their voices tremble as though it happened yesterday. In 2026, Pakistan won the Champions Trophy in London, beating India in the final. It was one of the rare moments when an entire country stopped arguing to celebrate together. The Pakistan Super League (PSL) launched in 2026 and soon became a stable-revenue T20 competition, drawing international stars. Karachi Kings, Lahore Qalandars, Islamabad United, Peshawar Zalmi, Quetta Gladiators and Multan Sultans built a miniature economy: broadcast rights, shirts, tickets, brands. Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, Mohammad Rizwan, Fakhar Zaman, Naseem Shah and Haris Rauf became national assets followed from Dubai to Toronto, London to Sydney. But here is what outsiders miss: Pakistan cricket's success comes almost none of it from public investment in infrastructure. It comes from a private market big enough to sustain itself and a national passion strong enough to compensate for scarcity. The three main grounds — National Stadium in Karachi, Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium — have served elite cricket for decades, upgraded mainly around international tournament cycles rather than a long-term infrastructure strategy. When Pakistan hosted the 2026 ICC Champions Trophy, it was the first time in nearly three decades the country staged a major global event at home. The pressure to upgrade venues, security and logistics was enormous. But it came late, after most capital had been drawn elsewhere. HOCKEY: FROM OLYMPIC GOLD TO DARKNESS Field hockey was once Pakistan's greatest Olympic pride. Gold in Rome 2026, Mexico City 2026 and Los Angeles 2026. World Cup titles in 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. For four decades Pakistan was a hockey superpower alongside India, the Netherlands, Australia and Germany. Today that team no longer qualifies for the Olympics with any regularity. The hockey base — artificial turf, training centres, junior leagues — has decayed badly. A sport that once put Pakistan on the world map now exists with almost no investment. I remember a specific conversation. In 2026, on a work trip, I sat with a former Pakistan hockey international in a Dubai cafe. He talked about the 1980s, when the team trained in Europe and matches were broadcast live while the whole country stopped to watch. Then he fell silent and said something I wrote down at once: 'We did not lose this sport because we lost matches. We lost it because nobody builds grounds for children any more.' That is the language of infrastructure, not emotion. And infrastructure only comes from budgets. SQUASH: HOW A DYNASTY ENDED No story captures Pakistan's sporting rise and fall better than squash. Jahangir Khan is regarded as the greatest squash player of all time. His unbeaten run stretched 555 matches over more than five years — a figure no one has touched in any individual combat sport. He won the British Open ten times in succession. His cousin Jansher Khan followed with eight world titles. For nearly two decades, Pakistan was the centre of global squash. Today no Pakistani player sits near the world's top. The squash courts of Karachi and Lahore — many of them architectural landmarks — are abandoned or repurposed. The youth development pipeline has collapsed. Squash does not need the capital cricket does. A squash court costs far less than an international cricket ground. But it needs something else: a long-term strategy, a competent governing body, and a stable budget line to feed successive generations. Three sports, three trajectories, one common factor: no strategic public capital. Cricket survives on the market. Hockey declines. Squash nearly vanishes. WHAT THE 40 BILLION DOES NOT SAY Back to the number. I spent weeks reading reports on the package. Oil. Gas. Rail. Telecom. Agriculture. Minerals. Irrigation. All sectors that can generate measurable GDP, service debt, and persuade creditors like ADB, AIIB and the World Bank to disburse. Sport lacks these properties — at least not in easily measurable form. A stadium does not produce direct budget returns within a decade. A youth development system is even harder to quantify. My experience tracking matches and Olympic cycles has taught me one thing: sport is always treated as the surplus of an economy — enjoyed when things are fine, cut first in a crisis. But in Pakistan the crisis has lasted long enough to become a permanent condition. And so sport never reaches the front of the queue. Is that reasonable? Technically, financially, yes. A country short of piped water, rail and power must prioritise those. I do not argue with that logic. What I argue with is the way it is presented as the only possible choice. Sport is not the opponent of railways. In many economies sport is social infrastructure with compound returns: it creates jobs, draws tourism, channels youth energy, and — most importantly — builds a national identity no irrigation project can replace. Look next door. India turned cricket into a multi-billion-dollar industry through the IPL, with an ecosystem spanning broadcast, commerce and youth development. Bangladesh invested systematically in cricket and now has a side that can trouble anyone at home. Sri Lanka, with barely over 20 million people, won the 2026 World Cup and was a cricket force for decades. Pakistan has more human resources than all three combined by population. What it lacks is the unquantifiable thing: a national strategy that places sport where it belongs. THE CRACK IS NOT ON THE FIELD I must be honest. When I began this piece I wanted to end with a simple appeal: Pakistan, fund sport. The more I read, the more that conclusion felt lazy. The deeper problem is how we classify things. The 40 billion dollar story is labelled economic news. Nobody objects. But when I read the sector list I see another truth: how a country classifies its budget is how it declares its real priorities. You do not need a government statement to know what it cares about. You only need the budget index, which lines are bold and which are skipped. This is not unique to Pakistan. It applies to Australia, where I live, where sport is heavily funded but largely on commercial and medal criteria, while community sport leans on lotteries and volunteers. It applies to Vietnam, where elite sport is funded selectively but infrastructure for children remains an open question. The crack of 2026 was not on the pitch, it was in how we see the world. I learned that in a Moscow hotel after the World Cup final, spending three days reviewing footage and realising I had seen what I wanted to see, not what happened. Applied here: when a story about rail, water pipes and oil is treated as having nothing to do with sport, we draw an artificial line between two fields that are one. A country does not choose between rail and stadium by number alone. It chooses by identity. And Pakistan's identity — the one cricket, hockey and squash built across generations — is clearly not recorded in the index. A transfer is not just a number, it is a mirror of an era's fever. This is not a player transfer, but the principle is identical: the 40 billion is a mirror. It reflects what Pakistani planners see when they look at their country. Sadly, in that mirror there are no spectator seats, no running tracks, no squash courts. THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE: PERHAPS SPORT SHOULD NOT BE IN THE PIPELINE Here I argue with myself. Suppose I am right and Pakistan should direct part of that 40 billion to sport. How much? One percent? Half a percent? Nobody has a clean answer. And if it were one percent — 400 million dollars — how should it be spent so it does not become an empty stadium, a symbol inaugurated then abandoned three years later? Sports projects in South Asia have a notable history: they build infrastructure well and operate it badly. A new ground, no development system. A new arena, no qualified coaches. That is a governance problem, not a money problem. And if it is governance, Pakistan's decision not to fund sport may not be a great error — it may be a way of avoiding waste. I asked what could be wrong in my own argument. Several things. First, sport needs money not only to build but to maintain — and with weak governance, money flows exactly where it should not: flashy projects, official junkets, one-off events that vanish. Pakistan cricket has an advantage hockey lacks: a private market large enough to monitor and self-operate. Not every sport has that. Second, when the stands are empty, we finally understand that noise is the heartbeat of football. The same applies here. A stadium with no crowd, no broadcast, no stable league has nothing to prove its worth. Pouring money into a ground without spectators is pouring money into silence. Third — and I think about this most — the question is not whether to fund sport, but the order: system first or infrastructure first. Pakistan has chosen both at small scale, producing an environment where talent still appears — Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi — but no system catches them once their time passes. I do not pretend one budget line can save Pakistani sport. Nor do I pretend its absence from a 40 billion pipeline is trivial. TAKEAWAY I am not writing for an answer. I am writing because whenever a nation's sport is cut from its index, we should record it — not to accuse, but to compare later. The question I leave you: if a country can present a 40 billion dollar investment plan with not one line for sport, how much space does sport truly occupy in its identity? And if the answer is very little, is that because sport really matters little — or because we are asking the wrong question? A young athlete in Karachi is training squash today on an old court, somewhere the light is poor and the roof leaks. If Pakistan added one line to its index for them, they might be the next Jahangir Khan. If not, they will become a name nobody knows. Sport is not railway infrastructure. But neither is it something that can be erased from the index without a trace. The trace lies in abandoned squash courts, grassed-over hockey fields, and a generation of talent growing up in silence. Forty billion dollars is a number. It is also a declaration — about who Pakistan, at this moment, chooses to be.