Can Saudi Pro League disrupt football’s old power centre, the way India did with cricket?

It all started with the January 2023 signing of Cristiano Ronaldo by Al Nassr, the Riyadh-based club that dominates the Saudi league. (File)

The European football season is upon us. The major clubs have finished their pre-season tours, new signings have taken the field in their new colours, and fans are engaged in heated debate about the way their teams should line up. Erling Haaland has already scored, with his first touch of the first game of the English Premier League season.

In an ordinary year, this would be the talk of the footballing world.

This year, though, something else has happened that’s far bigger than yet another European season, something that has the potential to change the global map of club football as we have known it in the modern era.

Enter, the Saudi Pro League, currently on a path to truly disrupt the seriously tribal, set-in-stone world order of elite football, built up over decades in Europe.

Its big bang origin story is the January signing of Cristiano Ronaldo by Al Nassr, the Riyadh-based club that dominates the Saudi league. Ronaldo is always big news, but this opening gambit, if you look at it closely, was not as explosive as it seemed to be, if you disregard the eye-popping 20 crore GBP that Al Nassr paid Manchester United for the player.

Ronaldo may be a legend, but he is also 38 years old, and has been on the wane since his ill-fated 2021 move from Juventus to Manchester United. He has already had a stupendously long career, arguably the greatest ever forged by a forward in the history of football. By 2022, even a superhuman like the Portuguese forward was noticeably slower and less effective, and unable to sustain the frenetic pace of top-tier football. Even if he had not gotten into a spat with the Manchester United management, it was clear that Ronaldo’s career was winding down and he would not be receiving offers from the major European clubs. This, then, was the perfect time for a great retirement move—a big-money transfer to a small league trying to make a name for itself by bringing in instantly recognizable players edging past their sell-by date.

In this, the Saudi Pro League followed a template well-set around the world, starting with when the USA’s top-tier league (now, MLS, back then, the National American Soccer League or NASL) brought Pele out of retirement to sign for New York Cosmos. The ageing star was soon joined by a galaxy of other ageing stars—Franz Beckenbauer, Johann Cruyff, Eusebio and George Best, among others. Leagues everywhere have followed this model with varying success. The MLS continues to use the lure of ageing stars, with Inter Miami’s signing of Lionel Messi this year.

Smashing the template

But the Saudi Pro League then took a few giant leaps and smashed the template. Consider the players that have moved to the Arab nation since the Ronaldo signing: Riyad Mahrez, who was an essential part of Manchester City’s all-conquering, treble-winning squad last season; Liverpool’s crack forward Roberto Firmino, midfield marshal Fabinho and their captain (and the England vice-captain) Jordan Henderson, one of the great playmakers in the game right now; the indefatigable N’Golo Kante, the massively talented centreback Kalidou Koulibaly, and goalkeeper Edouard Mendy from Chelsea; Sadio Mane, one of the great forwards of this generation, from Bayern Munich; and the holder of the Ballon D’Or—yes, the man currently considered the best footballer in the world—Karim Benzema from Real Madrid (Benzema signed with Al-Ittihad).

None of these players are young, to be sure, but all except Benzema are in their early 30s, which is pretty much peak age for a footballer. The Saudi Pro League is not just looking at ageing stars to bolster the popularity of their league, but actively building teams with some of the finest players in the world. This is something no league outside of the Big Five—England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany—has ever attempted before.

Each of these moves was facilitated by enormous transfer fees to the clubs and wage deals with the players that the European giants would not be willing or able to match.

Ronaldo’s two-and-a-half-year contract is reportedly worth 200 million Euros a year, making him the highest paid footballer in history and currently the highest paid athlete in the world.

The Jeddah club Al Ahli paid City around 35 million Euros for Mahrez, and though the financial details have not been disclosed, the four-year contract for the 32-year-old Algerian reportedly features an astronomical wage.

“Riyad got an incredible offer and that’s why we couldn’t say don’t do it,” City manager Pep Guardiola said at a press conference, shedding light on the transfer of one of his most valued players. “Our thoughts were for him to stay (at City)…a few months ago when Cristiano was the only player to go, no one thought these many top players would play in the Saudi league. In the future there will be more and that’s why clubs need to be aware of what’s happening.”

For Guardiola, the great disruption is already well underway. “Saudi Arabia has changed the market,” he said.

Sports Clubs Investment

This massive push into global football has come straight from the top—Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a program called the Sports Clubs Investment and Privatisation Project earlier this year. The program has two main thrusts—approving investment from private companies in sports clubs and eventually transferring ownership of the clubs to these companies (Saudi football clubs are historically state-sponsored), and developing football at home through an institution called the Player Acquisition Centre of Excellence (PACE), which will determine all aspects of the game’s growth in the country, from the youth level to the senior international level.

PACE will be led by former Nigerian international Michael Emenalo, best known for being the technical director of Chelsea FC for over a decade. At Chelsea, Emenalo had completely overhauled the club’s scouting, academy, and transfer protocols, and is widely considered as the driving force behind some of Chelsea’s most influential signings: Kevin De Bruyne, Kante, Eden Hazard, Cesc Fabregas, Juan Mata and Thibaut Courtois.

“This strategy has been years in the making,” said Saudi Pro League interim CEO Saad Allazeez said at a press conference last month. “It goes far beyond and much deeper than the player transfers that are dominating headlines and focuses just as much on what happens off the pitch at the clubs. We are looking to the long-term and will be judged on that especially with helping the clubs become commercially successful with robust business models.”

The big-money transfers are indeed just one part of the enormous amount of money being poured into football in the country. To kick off the process of privatisation, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF)—controlled by bin Salman, it is one of the world’s wealthiest sovereign investment funds—took over the management of four clubs in the league, including Al Nassr, pumping in millions in each of these clubs, which in turn led to their ability to sign players like Ronaldo and Benzema.

The PIF also owns the English Premier League club Newcastle United since a 2021 buyout, and funds PACE, almost doubling the country’s budget for youth football development, as well as building scores of training centres and other sporting facilities at breakneck speed.

According to a Financial Times report, the Saudi PIF had pumped in more than USD 2 billion into sponsorship deals for domestic football last year.
In some aspects, Saudi Arabia is following a path forged by UAE and bitter regional rivals Qatar. The Abu Dhabi United Group is a private equity company owned by a member of the UAE royal family which owns Manchester City, and many other clubs around the world (including Mumbai FC in the Indian Super League) under the City umbrella. Qatar Sports Investments, also a royal family run, state-sponsored, yet private equity company, owns Paris Saint-Germain. If Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup, Saudi Arabia is preparing to bid for the 2030 edition.

Sportswashing allegations

All three countries face pitched criticism about using sports investments to suppress their poor human rights records, but this opposition makes little difference to their efforts to become global entities in the sporting world.
Bin Salman has not shied away from saying that their sporting investments is a way of moving the country away from its dependence on a single source of revenue—oil.

Where Saudi Arabia has moved ahead of Qatar and UAE is in the massive investment and thought it has put into domestic football.

In their very first move, the Saudi Pro League has managed to sign a barely believable number of top players—consider also Portuguese midfielder Ruben Neves, who is only 26, and would have been on the wishlist of many of Europe’s finest teams, being bought from Wolverhampton Wanderers by Al Hilal, or Croatian defensive midfielder Marcelo Brozovic, 30, who led Inter Milan to this year’s UEFA Champions League final, leaving for Al Nassr, despite receiving an offer from Barcelona.

“No one can compete with them,” said former Barcelona, Liverpool and Spain international Luis Garcia, during a show on ESPN. “The European leagues come under the UEFA financial regulations, which means that they cannot offer the same money that the Saudis do. They (the Saudis) are alone in doing what they want and they will break the market this way.”

The Saudi Pro League has already made a dent in the European hegemony of football, showing that they can attract top players who otherwise would have signed for a big European club, or continued to play an influential role in the major club they were already part of.

And the players are doing it by putting their careers on the line—on what basis will England pick Henderson, or Portugal select Neves for the national team, now that they play in a minor league which, no matter how fast they transform, cannot match the competitiveness of European football for at least a few years?

Saudi football’s next logical move would be to make inroads into another European monopoly—the cream of young footballing talent from South America and Africa is currently meticulously scouted out and picked off by European teams. Expect that to change soon.

Whether Saudi Arabia’s footballing ambitions will be realised will depend on just how competitive their league becomes. There are plenty of indications that they may succeed—football is the No. 1 sport in the country by a mile, and the Saudi national team has consistently remained one of the top five teams in Asia. They have not just showered money on star players, but also on building academies, funding youth football, attracting top coaches, support staff and administrators, and given charge of football development to someone with a legendary track record in doing just that.
Then there’s the seemingly unlimited wellspring of money.

The PIF-owned LIV Golf came out of nowhere and lured some of the top golfers in the world to quit the PGA and join them last year. They faced stiff opposition and lawsuits, and players joining them faced sanctions and threats from the PGA and the European Tour. They drew the western world’s “sportswashing” ire. This year, LIV Golf effectively swallowed both the PGA and the European Tour, as the three organizations announced a merger in June where their commercial rights will be brought together under a new entity funded by the PIF.

Money talks, and how.