If Saudi Arabia doesn’t become a major player in world football in the next decade it certainly won’t be for a lack of buying.
Since the summer of 2022, the Saudi Pro League and its leading clubs have spent upwards of €700m in transfer fees alone and when the eye-watering wages are factored in too, it’s an expenditure that far surpasses the billion mark.
With the Saudi transfer window open for another five weeks, and household names being bought seemingly on a daily basis, the final total will very likely be unprecedented and astonishing.
But of course, that won’t be the end of it. It is only the beginning.
To state that players are being purchased daily incidentally is barely an exaggeration.
Yesterday, Al-Hilal, the most successful club in Asia, agreed to part with a whopping €90m to lure Neymar from his lucrative tenure in Paris and just today it has been reported that Manchester City have agreed to sell their out-of-favour centre-back Aymeric Laporte to Al-Nassr.
Should the Spanish international accept what will no doubt be a highly generous package and head east he will become the latest in a roll-call of established stars who have similarly joined the Saudi Pro League revolution in recent months, an exodus so great it has become hard to keep track of.
Even just focusing on players with a Premier League connection prompts a long list that includes Jordan Henderson, Fabinho and Roberto Firmino from Liverpool, former Reds winger Sadio Mane, Ruben Neves, Riyad Mahrez, Allan Saint-Maximin, along with N’Golo Kante, Kalidou Koulibaly and Edouard Mendy all from Chelsea.
At the start of 2023, Cristiano Ronaldo kicked off proceedings, joining Al Nassr from Manchester United for a reputed €200m a year. Let’s not overlook either a colossal €100m signing on fee for a 38-year-old still holding back the years and defying the football odds.
Such ravenous recruitment, at no expense spared, has inevitably caused ructions within the game, with widespread concerns about where all this will lead, and what the end game will ultimately look like, but before we get to that - and indeed attempt to determine whether Saudi Arabia’s extravagant and far-reaching project will succeed - it’s important to acknowledge that their interests do not begin and end with football. Understanding this goes a long way to explaining everything.
With oil slowly running out in the region, a national strategy termed Vision 2030 was devised by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to better diversify the country’s economy and among their key objectives was to gain a considerable foothold in the leisure and tourism markets, with sport an obvious industry to target.
So it was that Aramco - a state-owned oil company - became a global partner for Formula One, additionally announcing a partnership with the International Cricket Council late last year.
So it was that golf has been all-but-consumed by LIV Golf, the landscape of the sport dramatically altered as a consequence. Huge WWE events have been held in Riyadh while significant investments have been made too in tennis and basketball.
But it was football that was always the crown jewel, the whale. Which is why PIF - Saudi’s Public Investment Fund that has resources that exceed €600 billion - partly bankrolled Todd Boehly’s purchase of Chelsea, via their investment in Clearlake Capital.
It’s why a majority stake was secured in Newcastle United in the autumn of 2021 while this December, after resilient campaigning, the country was chosen to host the FIFA Club World Cup.
Elsewhere, there have been all manner of financial encroachments into the sport, with one particularly intriguing example concerning the sponsoring of Atletico Madrid by the state-owned Riyadh Air. The company is not scheduled to have their first plane in the air for another two years.
All of these seismic manoeuvres are designed to greatly increase Saudi Arabia’s presence and standing on the global stage but of course what would hugely help in this regard would be to have a competitive league of their own to be rightfully proud of. Hence in June, four leading clubs were bought out by PIF, and the footballing world has not been the same ever since.
To what extent this broad, lavish, and it has to be said, hugely ambitious, project succeeds largely depends on what your definition of success is.
Cynics of Saudi Arabia so overtly flexing their financial might tend to find solace in the failure of China’s Super League a few years ago, a costly endeavour that enticed superstars to Asia only for it all to end in bankruptcies and squalid scandal.
But whereas the Chinese government soon baulked at the vast fortunes being vacuumed up by agents and over-the-hill players, PIF by comparison is a bottomless pit, one that can initially swallow the exorbitant cost of initially bringing over Neymar, Ronaldo and co to establish the Pro League, before switching attention to growing it organically.
In that sense, the Saudi Pro League will almost inevitably go from strength to strength.
Furthermore, it would be an extremely foolish man to back against luxuriously funded clubs in the sports betting from dominating the AFC Champions League for the foreseeable future.
Again, success in this regard feels inexorable.
But to what degree Saudi’s rise is globally accepted, becoming popular even, with people tuning in to Pro League games from overseas to see ludicrously-paid superstars take on ludicrously paid superstars. For this, there may be an awfully long wait.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
