Last summer, it seemed as if the future of football was shifting. Almost out of the blue, big-name players from top European Leagues began departing on masse. Their destination: Saudi Arabia.
Karim Benzema, Neymar Jr, N’golo Kante. Roberto Firminho, Riyadh Mahrez, Sadio Mane. The list went on. All following in the golden-laced footsteps of Cristiano Ronaldo, who had transferred to Al-Nassr just months before.
The majority of these were past the peak of their powers, those looking for a healthy retirement fund. Not concerned with the morality of where it came from. The outliers of players at their peak, such as Ruben Neves, opting for the switch raised a few eyebrows. Was this the realigning of football’s centre of power? One funded directly by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund: the Public Investment Fund (PIF).
€977 million was spent on transfer fees alone, second only to the Premier League at €1.29 billion over the same period. That is withstanding wages, a figure reportedly over €1 billion. Ronaldo himself earning €185 million a year.
A year on, has this investment succeeded?
In-person attendance figures are less than impressive. In a season that saw Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr easily swept aside by the unbeaten Al-Hilal, the average ground was only a third full. The average attendance being 8,321, 10% down on the previous year. Comparatively, this stands below England and Germany’s Third Divisions (9,698 and 9649 respectively) and below that of France, Italy and Spain’s second divisions (8648, 8989 and 10,497 respectively).
But that doesn’t paint the whole picture. A picture that changed drastically in June 2023. Last summer, it was announced the PIF would be taking a 75% stake in four founding members of the Saudi Pro League (SPL): Al-Alhi, Al-Hilal, Al-Ittihad and Al-Nassr.
Previously, until 2021, all clubs were under the guise of the government’s Ministry of Sport. A recent change in law opted to open the clubs up to privatisation and with that, further investment and competition on a global scale. The PIF stated at the time of acquisition that “The transfer of the four clubs will unleash various commercial opportunities, including investment, partnership and sponsorship across numerous sports.”
The reality is it also created a divide. Between those owned by the PIF and those not. €850.7 million of the €977 million spent last summer came from the four PIF clubs. The remaining 14 sides left with a cumulative expenditure of €126.3 million. Not exactly a level playing field. This inherent lack of competition resulted in changing viewing habits. Attendance figures spiked in games involving the ‘big four’ but dropped off in those not.
Just look at the figures below. On the left is each PIF clubs’ average attendance against the other ‘big four’ sides. On the right is the average attendance against the remaining 14:
Al-Ahli – 50,828 v 18,699
Al-Hilal – 39,585 v 18,018
Al-Ittihad – 33,279 v 14,690
Al-Nassr – 20,876 v 17,166
A more than 50% drop off in three out of four cases. Amongst the other sides, the trend follows. Al-Shabab, Saudi’s most successful team outside of the ‘big four’ with 6 SPL titles, had an average attendance of 12,253 against the PIF clubs. Against the other 13, it dropped to 4,814.
The PIF takeover may have enabled huge levels of investment and created global headlines in the process but, it has seemingly reduced interest in all other parts of the league. When the stakes are so clearly weighted to certain teams, why would you look anywhere else?
The same could be said about the European leagues. Man City in the Premier League. PSG in Ligue 1 Bayern in the Bundesliga. But their local and global viewership are already established. For a league trying to break the mould, entertainment value is key. Reduced competition does not make great entertainment.
Looking at TV viewing figures, the limited information that is available is unimpressive. Despite securing broadcast deals in over 130 territories last season, the lack of released data from both broadcasters and the SPL suggest there is little to boast about in the numbers.
According to Canal+ in France, a third division clash between FC Rouen and Sochaux-Montbeliard received six times as many viewers as the 5,000 that tuned in to watch Saudi heavyweights Al-Hillal and Al-Ittihad face off back in March.
In the US, Jamie Ojeda revealed the average viewing figures for the SPL on Fox Sports was a measly 8,000.
So global takeover? Not quite.
Activity in the transfer market has slowed dramatically. Expenditure sits at only €122 million so far this window. The number of players moving from European leagues number 8. Compared to 79 last season. Moussa Diaby’s €60 million transfer to Al-Ittihad may prove that the attraction is still there. But compare that to last summer’s list and well, there’s no comparison.
Is this solely down to the light waning on the SPL? Perhaps. But another key factor is budgeting. On acquisition, each PIF club was handed a three-year budget. It is thought, after last year’s expenditure, they may be close to the limit of that. Therefore, retaining stars has become more important than gaining them. Luckily, for the league, the rumours of a mass exodus have not transpired.
Yes, Jordan Henderson’s January move to Ajax signalled dissatisfaction with the Saudi experience. But for all the rumours of Benzema’s unhappiness, he nor any of the other major signings have departed.
The social media numbers for the league are another positive for it to hold on to. Al Nassr’s Instagram following jumping from 500k to 26.8 million since Ronaldo’s arrival. The SPL’s combined social media followers now totalling over 100 million. Predictions of instant success were overly optimistic. Football has always been resistant to change. The SPL isn’t the first to try to break the European League’s domination of the sport.
Forget the MLS, America’s first attempt to crack the footballing market came through the North American Soccer League (NASL). Established in 1967, its opening years showed little sign of breakthrough. So, by the late 1970’s, it was thought a new strategy was needed.
NASL teams began to bring in big-name talent to attract both national and global attention. Pele’s signing for the New York Cosmos in 1978 set off a trend seeing the likes of Franz Beckenbaur, George Best and Johan Cruyff crossing the Atlantic on gigantic salaries. Sound familiar? Those salaries came at a cost. Less than seven years after Pele’s arrival, the league was disbanded. The combination of overspending, over-expansion and high levels of debt not taking kindly to the American economic recession of the early 1980’s. Club after club would go and eventually, so would the league.
The Chinese Super League (CSL) is a similar example of an expanding league hit by wider economic woes. Initially huge investment throughout the 2010s on stars such as Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka, Carlos Tevez, John Obi Mikel and Aleksandro Pato seemed a success story. In 2018, the CSL’s average attendance was over 24,000, the 6th highest for a football league in the world. By 2019 TV viewership had topped 700 million, making it the most popular league in Asia.
In 2020, that all changed: COVID hit. Stringent lockdown measures and the Chinese economic downturn left many clubs in tatters. Over the past four seasons, it is thought 39 professional teams at different levels in the Chinese game have folded. Most significantly Jiangsu FC, who announced their liquidation in 2021 only months after winning the CSL title. The league has had to adapt to survive. No more expensive foreign player salaries but a re-focusing on homegrown talent, a requirement for more limited budgets.
Both the NASL and CSL serve as a warning to the SPL: High wages and high spending are great when the Saudi economy is booming but what happens if oil prices drop and things take a turn for the worse? Will PIF investment wane too? The goal to be in the world’s top ten most popular leagues by 2030. To increase revenue from €111 million to €444 million. To increase the market value from €740 million to €1.97 billion. Will that all disappear?
The wider economic focus on sport suggests not.
The SPL is just one part of Saudi Arabia’s sporting and footballing expansion. In Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salem’s Vision 2030, he outlined a strategy to diversify the countries economy away from their dependence on fossil fuels. Sport being a key part of this. Vision 2030 has involved expansions into all areas from Golf to Tennis to Formula 1, even WWE. It is a diverse portfolio.
A portfolio designed to curry favour. A natural result of the power sport often brings. Favour that overlooks human rights records.
“Sportswashing”, a term Amnesty International defines as “where states guilty of human rights abuses invest heavily in sports clubs and events in order to rehabilitate their reputations.”
For Saudi Arabia, the list of human rights abuses is long. One that includes the killing of hundreds of unarmed Ethiopian migrants at the border, an abysmal record on LGBTQ+ and Women’s rights, the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and regularly high levels of executions. In an interview with Fox News last year, Bin Salem himself signalled a lack of care for his critics: “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we will continue doing sportswashing.” He pointed to how sport had already risen from 0.4% to 1.5% as part of GDP.
This is no surprise seeing as they have invested $50 billion in the area since 2016, according to human rights group Grant Liberty.
In footballing terms, outside of the SPL, this strategy has already had huge successes. Saudi Arabia hosted the Club World Cup, the Spanish Super Cup, the Italian SuperCoppa and the Turkish Super Cup all in the last year. Add to that, the upcoming 2027 AFC Asia Cup and the 2034 World Cup, the dismissal of the Saudi footballing takeover due to the SPL’s lack of instant take-off is, at best, wishful thinking.
In reality, the league is part of an overall picture that aims to build towards 2034. The big-name stars are the headline generators. But underneath that, the goal is to build a footballing culture at grassroots level. Last year Michael Emenalo, former technical director at Chelsea, was brought in as director of football for the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF). His purpose: to head up a new strategy that focused on youth development. This involved reducing the playing age from 18 to 16, reducing senior squad sizes from 35 to 25 with the remaining 10 having to be under 21 (from the 2025-26 season) and requiring each side to have eight “homegrown” players from club academies (from the 2026-27 season).
It is part of a longer-term vision that builds Saudi Arabia to the point of competing at an international level. More than just remarkable one-off wins against Lionel Messi’s Argentina.
It is easy to dismiss the SPL as a fad, or delight in its failures. Hoping it will disappear as quickly as it came. But to do so ignores Bin Salam’s determination to succeed, at whatever cost. Morally or financially.
