We are five minutes into the last big Saudi Pro League match before the competition takes a month off for the Arabian Gulf Cup — a biennial competition between eight national sides — when the broadcast editor’s attention is starting to wander from the pitch to the posh seats.
Oh, look, it’s Spike Lee and Will Smith. And Vin Diesel. Wait, is that Michael Douglas?
Meanwhile, the 55,000 fans in Jeddah’s King Abdullah Sports City stadium have not stopped chanting and dancing. They are perhaps the real stars here, having just put on the best tifo display this world-weary journalist has ever witnessed.
But the product on the grass is… well, a bit underwhelming.
Yes, 2022 Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema is down there leading a table-topping Al Ittihad side that includes ex-Premier League champions Fabinho and N’Golo Kante in midfield and former PSV, Spurs and Ajax attacker Steven Bergwijn on the left flank.
Fans show off their colours before the Al Ittihad vs Al Nassr game in Jeddah (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
And they are playing better than their visitors from Riyadh, Al Nassr, who are led by a guy called Cristiano Ronaldo. They started the game in third and have ex-Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte and Sadio Mane, one of the greatest players to emerge from Africa, in their ranks.
This production has more than enough A-list talent, even if a few have not done their best work for a while. It is the supporting cast that feels a little underpowered. Each side has three Saudi players, as well as three or four less stellar imports, and five more Saudi players come on as substitutes.
OK, you can get stinkers in the Premier League, and this game did improve in the second half, but if this was the best the Saudi Pro League has to offer in 2024, its stated aim of being a top-10 league in the world by 2030 — Ronaldo, never one to hide his light under a bushel, thinks it is already in the top five — looks a long way off.
GO DEEPER
Might Saudi Arabia actually be a good choice for a men’s World Cup?
After the game, which the hosts won 2-1 thanks to goals from Benzema and Berwijn, the latter being a late beauty that put a gloss on what had gone before, everyone seemed happy enough to join the traffic jam back to Jeddah. And Ronaldo scored Al Nassr’s goal — a crisp, first-time finish with his right foot — so the Hollywood set did not waste their evenings.
The Al Ittihad manager, former France player and manager Laurent Blanc, said nice things about Al Nassr but also had a gentle moan about having to shut up shop for a month while Saudi Arabia tries to win its first Arabian Gulf Cup for 20 years.
But while it may not make much sense to a man who has won European and world titles with France, it is one of the main reasons he, Benzema, Ronaldo and the rest are earning huge, tax-free livings in the Saudi Pro League.
Because their employer, the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman is using to turbocharge his plan to transform the kingdom, also wants Saudi Arabia to reach the last 16 of the 2034 World Cup it is staging. This means getting the 11 Saudi players who featured in Friday’s main event much closer to the standard of their foreign team-mates or, more accurately, the next generation of Saudi players up to that mark.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema are now rivals in the Saudi Pro League (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
Again, on recent evidence, that would appear to be what is known in elite performance as a stretch target.
If you talk to Saudi football fans about their men’s national team (the women’s team is only two years old, so there is not much to say about them yet), they appear to agree on three things: Saeed Al-Owairan’s goal against Belgium at the 1994 World Cup is the greatest moment in Saudi sporting history, Salem Al-Dawsari’s strike to beat Argentina at the 2022 World Cup is a close second and Roberto Mancini was a disastrous choice to manage the team and should have been sacked long before his exit was mutually agreed in October.
On the face of it, the Italian’s results were not that bad. After that stunning victory over eventual champions Argentina (Saudis were given a national holiday to celebrate), the team lost their next two games to exit a World Cup at the group stage for the fifth time in six appearances. But they then won only one of three games at the 2023 Arabian Gulf Cup, followed by defeats in friendlies to Venezuela and Bolivia.
The losses continued under Mancini in the autumn of 2023 until a win in a World Cup qualifier against Pakistan started an eight-game unbeaten run that lasted until South Korea knocked them out of the Asia Cup on penalties. His side then won three, drew three and lost two of their next eight games, all qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup.
The last two of those, a 2-0 defeat to Japan and a 0-0 draw with Bahrain, both at home, were the final straw. Unfortunately, the team has since drawn 0-0 with Australia and lost 2-0 in Indonesia, leaving them fourth in their qualifying group, with only the top two earning automatic World Cup berths.
However, they are only one point behind Australia in second place, with four games to play. Even if they finish third or fourth in the group, they still advance to another round of qualifying with another three World Cup tickets up for grabs. So, all is not lost.
But this is still a big comedown from that “Where is Messi?” moment in Qatar. They left that tournament ranked 49th in the world by FIFA; they are now 59th, three places below their historical average, and drifting.
It was six months after the 2022 World Cup that the Saudi Pro League, which most of the planet had ignored for 40 years, announced that PIF was taking over its four biggest teams: Al Ittihad, Al Nassr, Jeddah’s Al Ahli and Riyadh’s Al Hilal, in what it described as a “privatisation”. It also said that four more clubs would be handed over to state-backed companies in a move it claimed would professionalise the 18-team league, improve its governance, attract investment and “enhance clubs’ competitiveness”.
Having manoeuvred its tanks onto the global game’s lawn, PIF then proceeded to fire almost $1billion at the 2023 summer transfer window. By the time the smoke cleared, Benzema, Riyad Mahrez, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Ruben Neves, Neymar and many more were on their way to the kingdom to join Ronaldo, an earlier big-ticket signing.
This was fantasy football as government policy. MBS, as the crown prince is better known, is working off a strategic plan for the country called Vision 2030. Turning the SPL into a serious rival of the English Premier League is as much part of that plan as Riyadh’s new metro, the new airline he is equipping with Boeings, the fantastical city he wants to build on the northern Red Sea coast and everything else he is trying in a bid to create jobs for his rapidly growing and young population.
The 39-year-old prince is doing this because he knows he has to wean Saudi Arabia off its almost total reliance on oil. If he fails, he and the rest of his enormous family will be turfed out of their gilded palaces. He is a pragmatist, not a progressive.
Mohammed bin Salman has big ambitions for Saudi Arabia (Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
Of course, if not only wanting to do something good because it is the right thing to do was his worst crime, the rest of us would not care so much about his plans for Saudi football, tourism and the rest.
But MBS is also the man who is widely believed to have ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and definitely sanctioned Saudi’s brutal intervention in Yemen’s civil war in 2015. Saudi Arabia also still mistreats its large population of migrant workers, criminalises homosexuality, executes hundreds of offenders every year, many for relatively minor offences, severely limits women’s rights and imprisons those who voice what many in the West would consider to be mild protests.
As long as all that is the case, it is very difficult to see how the rest of the world gets comfortable enough to really care about the SPL or view the players who have gone to the kingdom as anything other than mercenaries.
That would certainly appear to be the message European viewers are sending to the league, as the SPL has needed to pay UK-based streaming platform DAZN to create club-specific channels so that Ronaldo fans can watch his games, while basically giving away the live rights to other overseas outlets.
Despite that, Saudi football officials were keen to promote the SPL success story last week at the World Football Summit Asia 2024, a two-day conference in Riyadh.
“Our focus is on building a competitive league for the love of the people in Saudi and then exporting that league to the rest of the world,” explained SPL chief executive Omar Mugharbel.
He then listed all the ways the league has grown since the 2023 revolution, highlighting the 230 per cent growth its social media channels have enjoyed. He did not mention the anaemic TV ratings it is getting in Europe. According to a report in sports newspaper L’Equipe, only 4,000 French viewers watched Ronaldo’s Al Nassr beat mid-table Damac two weeks ago.
Mugharbel also had nothing to say about the fact that very few Saudis are coming through the turnstiles unless one of the “PIF Four” are in action, and even then the crowds do not scream “sustainable business model”.
Al Riyadh and Al Ettifaq line up in front of empty stands in 2023 (Adam Nurkiewicz/Getty Images)
Only 390 came to see former Manchester United defender Chris Smalling’s new team Al Fayha beat Al Riyadh in September. There were 405 in the crowd when Al Wehda, ex-United striker Odion Ighalo’s team, played Al Okhdoud last week.
According to German stats website Transfermarkt, the average gate in the league this campaign is 7,880, slightly down on last season’s 8,158 and considerably lower than 2022-23’s 9,701. Jeddah’s big two, Al Ittihad and Al Ahli, lead the way with average attendances of 34,366 and 23,502, but there are four teams being watched by fewer than 2,000 fans. Poor Al Wehda’s average crowd, if that is the right word, is 656.
For context, English football’s third tier, League One, has an average attendance of almost 10,000.
Speaking to people around the edge of the World Football Summit (people who did not want to speak on the record in order to protect their chance of keeping or gaining well-paid jobs), The Athletic was told there are concerns about the two-tier nature of the league that has been baked in by the huge state investments in some, but not all, clubs.
One unintended consequence of this, which the Saudi Football Federation must be alarmed by, is that the average age of Saudi-qualified players in the league has gone up, as the teams without their full quotas of 10 overseas stars, two of whom must be under-21s, are doubling down on the most experienced players they have and not taking risks with younger talent.
However, everyone The Athletic spoke to remained confident that gates would grow as the quality of Saudi players improved and the four other state-backed teams got better.
Promoted Al Qadsiah are the best example of this, as they are owned by Saudi Arabia’s biggest company, oil giant Aramco, and they are now third in the table. They have former Real Madrid star Nacho at the back, well-travelled Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang up front and ex-Rangers CEO James Bisgrove in the boardroom. The latter was a panellist at the conference and talked a very good game about new stadium plans, player development and commercial growth.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has made a big impression at Al Qadisiyah (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
However, a few hours after that speech, the league received another reality check after a benchmarking exercise. Al Nassr decided to rest Ronaldo for their home match in the Asian Champions League against Qatar’s Al Sadd and lost 2-1, while Al Ahli needed two (very good) Ivan Toney penalties to salvage a 2-2 home draw against Esteghlal, the 10th-best team in Iran.
Omar Chaudhuri is the chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, a London-based consultancy that uses data to rank clubs, leagues, players, sports and so on.
“Our model’s view of the SPL hasn’t shifted too much in the last 12 months — it is still ranked around the 60th-best domestic league in the world based on the average team in the league,” Chaudhuri told The Athletic. “It is 56th, near the level of Italy’s Serie C or the top division in Slovenia.
“There are signs of improvement, particularly from some clubs outside last season’s top four or five, reflected in more consistent Champions League results this year. Al Qadsiah are much better than the teams that went down, who did have a big negative effect on the league’s overall quality.
“Al Ittihad are rated as a good League One or bottom-end Championship team, and Al Nassr a top-half Championship team with Premier League ambitions. So, their match is a bit like Plymouth Argyle vs Watford.
“This can be hard to get your head around given the quality of the top players, but the weaker players in the starting XI not only reduce the quality of their teams through their own ability but also because they struggle to help get the best out of the stars.”
The best SPL team, according to Chaudhuri, are Al Hilal, who went unbeaten last season but lost 3-2 at unfancied Al Khaleej last month. It was a shock to them but exactly what the league needs if it is to encourage more people to watch the actual games as opposed to swiping through the clips on their phones. The secret of Al Hilal’s success over the last 18 months is that their gifts from PIF were Mitrovic and Neves, two imports still at the peak of their powers, and their Saudi contingent is the strongest.
Aleksandar Mitrovic has lifted Al Hilal since his move there in 2023 (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
To be fair, other analytics firms have the SPL ranked slightly higher. For example, the website Global Football Rankings has the league at 31st, just behind the French second division, and TransferRoom, which ranks teams based on player ratings, believes it is the 17th strongest, one behind Major League Soccer, which gives Lionel Messi vs Ronaldo enthusiasts something to ponder.
Where does this all leave the league and Saudi hopes of going deep in their own World Cup?
Perhaps the best recent clues have been provided by two of the foreign bosses who have been recruited by the big clubs. Speaking at the Leaders in Sport conference in London in October, Esteve Calzada — previously an executive at City Football Group, the multi-club network with Manchester City at its centre — made it clear that his new team, Al Hilal, are focusing on developing their Saudi staff, on and off the pitch, and working out how to give their domestic fans more of what they want.
Ex-Benfica chief Domingos Soares de Oliveira, now running Al Ittihad, told last month’s International Sports Summit that his priority had been getting the training facilities and support staff up to top European club standards, which they had achieved. The next focus would be on the 1,000 youngsters they have in their development squads. He pointed out that Saudi Arabia’s 2034 World Cup team will be young teenagers now in the academies of the SPL’s best teams.
This would appear to chime with the priorities the SPL outlined at the start of the current season. In a press release, it talked about “supporting existing contracts”, making “strategic acquisitions” and ensuring that any new signings are made for “technical needs, supported for success and fairly valued”.
It also noted that its “player acquisition centre of excellence” programme, the central unit that is meant to help all 18 teams find the playing partners of their dreams, has recruited 97 players but also managed to lower the average age of these new signings from 29 to 27.5 years of age. This season’s focus, it said, would be on buying more under-21s.
So, it would appear that the big splurge to prime the pump is over, for now, and the SPL is focusing on getting younger, less reliant on MBS’s handouts and ready for the big push in 2034.
That sounds like a good idea for Saudi Arabia but not a strategy for making the rest of us watch the SPL or care who is winning. Or maybe the powers that be have realised that was always going to be a stretch too far.
Perhaps aiming for something a little more realistic, a sustainable league that Saudis enjoy, would not be such a bad result.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)
