How Saudi Arabia under MBS is disrupting the football landscape

Set to host the 2027 AFC Asian Cup, Saudi Arabia has also bid for the hosting rights of the FIFA World Cup in 2030. Most notably, however, after previous forays of countries like Qatar and the UAE into club football, Saudi Arabia has now emerged as the biggest disruptive force – possibly ever – in the game.

Money talks … and scores

The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), chaired by MBS, has been the driving force behind Saudi Arabia’s foray into football. In 2021, the PIF acquired an 80 per cent stake in English club Newcastle United FC – immediately making the historic, yet often middling club, a major competitor in the Premier League and European football. The PIF is also part of the Ted Boehly-led consortium that bought London club Chelsea FC in 2022.

But over the past few months, Saudi Arabia’s focus has shifted to making its domestic club competition, the Saudi Pro League (SPL), a mainstay in club football.

The SPL made headlines last year after signing Cristiano Ronaldo on a two and a half year long contract worth well over $200 million. Other stars like Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante, Jordan Henderson, and Ruben Neves have followed him to the league this summer.

Notably, Saudi clubs, unlike their counterparts in Europe, are not bound by financial fair play rules which restrict a club’s spending power. This gives them the ability to hand out massive contracts without much regulatory concern.

For instance, according to some reports, Karim Benzema will earn as much as $100 million a year playing in the Saudi League – over $80 million more than what he earned at Real Madrid while being one of the club’s best paid players.

Even though Saudi’s professional league started in 1976, and is already considered to be among the better ones in Asia, this flurry of recent activity has been driven by the state’s intervention.

Roshn, the real estate division of PIF, became the sponsor of SPL in 2022. PIF also owns 75 per cent stakes in all of the four major clubs – Al Hilal, Al Nassr, Al Ittihad, and Al Ahli – in the country. Even clubs not owned by the PIF are either owned by other state bodies (like the state oil company Aramco owning Al-Qadsiah), or are indirectly influenced by the state, for financial support.

The predecessor: The Chinese Super League

Now, this is not the first time a state has attempted to attract top footballers to their domestic league by offering massive wages.

There was a brief period in the 2010s when the Chinese Super League (CSL) had European football seriously worried. Chinese President Xi Jinping personally drove the agenda to build a footballing culture in the country where the domestic league had long suffered from gambling and corruption issues. The state incentivised Chinese corporates to put money into football, buying foreign talent for CSL and even investing in European clubs (such as Italian giants Inter Milan).

Carlos Tevez, 33 at the time, became the highest earning footballer in the world with a reported wage of £ 600,000 per week (roughly $ 31 million a year). At its peak, the CSL managed to lure talents like Oscar, Jackson Martinez, and Alex Teixeira to China.

But the fall of CSL was as rapid as its rise. Simply bringing in past-their-prime or B-grade international stars failed to draw the attention of global fans to the CSL.

Beginning in 2017, China imposed rules limiting the number of foreign players in a team, imposed a 100 per cent tax on international transfers, and set up a strict salary cap. In some cases, foreign players’ wages were reduced to one-tenth of what they were originally being offered.

Today, many of the successful clubs of the glorious CSL era have either been dissolved or relegated, with the international talent migrating to the more lucrative environs of the Gulf.

Concerns of sports washing

Like China, Saudi’s newfound focus on football is driven by both economic and other reasons. A part of MBS’s signature Vision 2030 initiative, investing in sports – including football – as a way to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil as well as a tool of soft power, through which it can build international prestige.

However, this has raised concerns about “sports washing” – a tactic used by countries or corporations to “wash” the stains of their crimes through the affective power of sports.

For a country like Saudi Arabia, football can be a means to cleanse its reputation as a regressive and autocratic state, which persecutes dissenters and people of the LGBTQ+ community, treats women like second-class citizens, and allegedly commits war crimes in countries like Yemen.

While some of these problems are hardly unique to Saudi Arabia, the degree of state involvement in football raises serious questions about its real motivations.

Will the Saudis succeed when the Chinese did not?

The success of Saudi Arabia’s footballing ambitions hinges on the ability to create a truly competitive league, build financially sound club models, and foster a bottom-up football culture. Simply giving large contracts to ageing and injury-prone players is unsustainable, as China’s example very well shows.

However, unlike China, Saudi Arabia has been able to attract a crop of young players right away. Moreover, while China did boast of some big name players, the SPL has outdone the CSL in this regard, and by a lot. China never had a player with the stature of Ronaldo. Neither was it able to attract the sheer number of big talents like the SPL has.

But, moving forward, focusing on developing local clubs and academies will be essential to ensure a continuous supply of talent and build a self-sustaining football ecosystem.

A product of football’s commercialisation and growing asymmetries

Football clubs in many European and South American countries grew organically out of local communities. They have rich histories, often dating back to over a hundred years.

But the commercialisation of sport has created new opportunities as well as cemented great asymmetries in the game. Clubs fighting relegation in the English Premier League can today financially outdo some of Europe’s most historic clubs from other countries. Europe itself absorbs almost all the young talent from South America or Africa.

The SPL is simply trying to do to the Premier League and European football what they have done to the rest of the footballing world. Time will tell whether it will succeed or not.

(The author is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)