The consumption hobby puts Saudi Arabian football on the global stage

Cristiano Ronaldo’s $200 million-a-year move to Saudi Arabia was dismissed by critics when it was announced in January as just another sporting stunt in a country with a dire human rights record.

However, it only marked the beginning of the consumption of football. After signing other late-career stars, including Karim Benzema from Real Madrid, Saudi clubs, several of which have recently moved into a $650 billion sovereign wealth fund, are now targeting top players and paying big transfer fees and buffers. wage packages to lure talent away from the European game.

The strategy has alarmed some in the football world. The Saudis have taken over golf, the big boxing matches and now they want to take over football!!! This sporting laundry has to stop, former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said on Twitter last month.

Saudi Arabia’s foray into the world’s most beloved sport has drawn comparisons to previous failed efforts to redraw the map of global soccer. Well-funded challenges have been and gone before, especially from China, where an expensive effort to get international stars into the domestic league quickly sank under the weight of economic reality. Some see another short-term bubble in the making, while others see an expensive rebranding campaign.

The normalization of Saudi Arabia is worrying. I search on Twitter and the first page is just about football, said Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, the umbrella group for fans in the region. We can’t just treat this as a football project.

But the view is very different in Riyadh, central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s economic and social reform agenda, which has seen the kingdom ease religious restrictions on public life while spending billions developing industries from electric vehicles and tourism to gaming. and sports.

In a soccer-mad country where the majority of its citizens are under 30, elevating the flagging league from a regional curiosity to one that would attract global attention seemed like a natural move, according to expatriate scholar Eman Alhusseini. at the Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“I think it’s too simplistic to look at Saudi Arabia’s investment in sports from the point of view of sports laundering,” he said. Saudi Arabia’s diversification plans, growing regional competition and national branding efforts are all contributing to the Kingdom’s foray into sports both at home and abroad.

Bringing in international stars has been one part of the league’s improvement plan, along with reforming the management of Saudi clubs. The $650 billion sovereign Public Investment Fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed and set to buy English Premier League side Newcastle United in 2021, turned its attention to its homeland last month, taking control of four of Saudi Arabia’s top clubs to boost its operations.

Like any football-loving nation, we want to build and enjoy the best possible league that is at the top of our football pyramid, inspires people and excites all fans,” Saudi Deputy Sports Minister Bader Alkadi told Financial. Times.

Alkadi rejected the allegations of sports-laundering, which came after the kingdom has been repeatedly criticized for its routine arrest of critics and mass executions of convicts, and several years after Saudi Arabian state agents murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

The new sport has been included in an experiment with golf, as the kingdom has set up a rival course to the US PGA Tour, fought it out in court and then agreed to a merger that has drawn objections from US lawmakers. Saudi Arabia has also invested in motor sports, horse racing and boxing and is negotiating potential tennis deals.

Critics have condemned the moves as an attempt to clean up the country’s image abroad.

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But Alkadi said such criticism typically comes from those who do not visit the country, see or welcome the progress… Since 2020 alone, the number of sports federations in Saudi Arabia has increased by more than 50 percent. In 2015, the sports and physical activity of the adult population was only 13 percent, and now it is 48 percent.

Saudi officials say the strategy also supports another of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to become a tourism hub. Although attempts to lure Lionel Messi, the Argentine soccer star considered by many to be the greatest of all time, failed, he still has a lucrative deal to promote travel to the Kingdom.

Partnering with tourism ambassadors like Messi is just one part of our strategy to show the world what we have to offer and that it is now easier than ever to visit, said Fahd Hamidaddin, head of the Saudi Tourism Authority.

Riyadh’s more assertive push to boost football at home began almost immediately after the World Cup in neighboring Qatar late last year, with Saudi Arabia’s surprise group-stage victory over eventual champions Argentina one of the tournament’s highlights.

The government of Saudi Arabia has now set its goal to bring the World Cup back to the region possibly as early as 2030 with a joint bid with Greece and Egypt.

It may also look at the club’s World Cup, which is due to be relaunched in a new format in 2025. Fifa hopes to make the competition a global rival to Europe’s Champions League, which generates billions of euros from broadcasts. offers every year.

In the renewed Fifa tournament, 32 teams will meet, including four from the Asian Football Confederation, where the Saudi Arabian teams compete. Al Hilal, one of the four Saudi Arabian teams to join the PIF recently, has already qualified after winning the Asian Champions League in 2021. Saudi Arabia will host the Club World Cup later this year in its current guise.

Christian Nourry, managing partner of consultancy Retexo Intelligence, which advises clubs on player signings, said the impact of Saudi Arabia’s spending on the European transfer market had already been significant, raising wage demands, delaying contract renewals and forcing clubs to trade players they thought they would trade. . stay.

Europe’s biggest teams are still trying to understand which players they might lose and how much money they need to spend to find either short-term or long-term solutions for departures they may not have expected, he said.

UEFA president Aleksander Eferin has been more dismissive, describing the current rush to bring players to Saudi Arabia as a mistake and likening it to an earlier doomed bid to make China a global football power.

For a brief period in the middle of the last decade, Chinese clubs paid huge transfer fees and agreed record wages to attract big-name contracts and famous coaches to the Chinese Super League.

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Continental investors also snapped up some of Europe’s biggest clubs, including both Inter Milan and AC Milan, and took stakes in the likes of Manchester City and Atltico Madrid.

But the big project quickly unraveled after many of the private companies driving the push ran out of money and Beijing withdrew its political support. The domestic league was left in disarray, and many of China’s overseas acquisitions were dismantled.

Riyadh’s sporting ambitions are unlikely to face similar financial constraints. The sovereign wealth fund is now planning to set up a sports investment company for its multi-billion dollar war chest to make further acquisitions.

Saudi Arabia is trying to catch up and use economic power to do it, said Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School. We have made Saudi Arabia try to do in a few years what has taken the English Premier League decades.

This article has been amended since publication to acknowledge that Al Hilal, not Al Ahli, have already qualified for the Club World Cup