Consider, before we begin, that not long ago, the grassy pitch of Riyadh's Al-Awwal Park was desert, and before that, it was still under water. Around 250 million years ago – give or take – much of what we call the Arabian Peninsula was submerged beneath an ancient sea that teemed with life: algae, diatoms, and sundry other prehistoric critters in their trillions. When these creatures died, their bodies littered the ocean floor and became trapped. Bedrock accreted. Tectonic plates shifted, smashed together. And, under pressure and heat and time, those organisms transformed into the substance we now know as crude oil.
Whole eras pass. The dinosaurs come and go. Continents break up, sea levels fall, and a new landmass rises from the waves, eventually giving way to an inhospitable desert. The resourceful Homo sapiens that do make it their home toil and quarrel until the early 20th century, when much of the territory falls into the hands of the warrior they call Ibn Saud, who proclaims his fiefdom the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Then, fortune: prospectors discover that the bygone ocean has left behind some of the richest oil-and-gas reserves anywhere on the planet, making the ruling family of this fledgling desert kingdom among the wealthiest human beings alive.
The point being that places change – slowly, continuously, and, on rare occasion, all at once. Oh, and that for the craziness of what follows to make sense, perhaps keep in mind that while money doesn’t grow on trees, it does, in a few places, flow freely from the earth.
Anyway. Present day. Where once was only rock and dirt now stands a state-of-the-art football stadium, and on this balmy Friday night in Riyadh – match night in the Saudi Pro League – fans of the home side, Al-Nassr, are arriving en masse. Outside the ground, a group of what might be the world’s most polite ultras have formed a human tunnel and are singing songs, handing out sweets and free football shirts. On the concourse, fans wearing yellow-and-blue scarves over traditional Saudi thobes and abayas queue for coffee and popcorn, chattering excitedly about the chance to see their new superstar. Even now, they can’t believe it: Cristiano Ronaldo – the five-time Champions League winner, and contender for football’s best-ever player, here! In Saudi Arabia!
“The GOAT! The Greatest of All Time, come to my club?” Ghaida Khaled, an Al-Nassr fan, says, her eyes gleaming from behind her niqab. “History is written right now!”
The fans here in Saudi – like the wider football world – are still in disbelief over Ronaldo’s arrival, even a year on since the Portuguese forward left Europe to sign a contract reportedly worth over £150 million annually with Al-Nassr, a mid-sized club in the Saudi Pro League. While fading stars have been tempted to the Middle East over the years with offers of palaces and Scrooge McDuck money, none had ever been as celebrated, or as decorated. Whereas another player might have been written off as a 37-year-old chasing one last payday, this was something bigger.
After decades of isolation, Saudi Arabia, under its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), is undergoing a rapid transformation, as part of a national effort to reshape the kingdom into a global economic power and wean itself off its financial dependence on oil. As part of this effort, called Vision 2030, the government – under the influence of MBS – is spending billions on tourism-friendly projects such as Neom, a futuristic new megacity on the Red Sea, as well as making audacious investments in sport – including golf, Formula 1, boxing, tennis, and the America’s Cup. Critics have called these investments sportswashing: an attempt to use sport’s mass appeal to distract from the regime’s human rights abuses. MBS has dismissed those claims, saying, “If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by way of one per cent, then I will continue doing sportswashing.” Either way, football, with its unmatched global audience, is seen as the Saudis’ greatest prize. And so the regime has set out to transform the Pro League from a competitive backwater into a rival for the Premier League or Spain’s La Liga.
Ronaldo turned out to be just the opening salvo. Last June, six months after his signing, the Public Investment Fund, which controls Saudi Arabia’s sizable sovereign wealth, took a majority stake in four of the kingdom’s biggest teams: Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad, Al-Ahli, and Al-Hilal. The investment triggered a wild shopping spree. Al-Ittihad signed the French striker Karim Benzema, then holder of the Ballon d’Or, from Real Madrid. Riyad Mahrez, a reigning Champions League winner at Manchester City, signed for Al-Ahli. Bayern Munich’s Sadio Mané joined Ronaldo and a growing cast of all-stars at Al-Nassr. Every other day it seemed a player from one of Europe’s most esteemed clubs was boarding a flight to the kingdom to sign for teams that, just a few weeks earlier, most of them had probably never heard of.
While European clubs have, from time to time, spent millions assembling Super Teams – Real Madrid during its two galácticos eras, or Manchester City today, for example – this was something new. Nobody had ever tried to sign a whole league before. The whole thing seemed to pose deeper, existential questions about sport, human rights, and fandom. Would players really want to move to an unknown team, in an unknown league, in a country not exactly known for its warm welcome? Would anyone actually watch the matches? Perhaps more to the point: should they?
If you’re thinking that Saudi Arabia seems a somewhat odd place for a league dedicated to the world’s most popular grass sport – well, you have a point. It’s not just that summer temperatures can reach 50°C, or that part of the country is blanketed by the biggest continuous sand desert on earth. The kingdom lacks a single river, so it draws much of its water – for, say, irrigating football pitches – from the sea, whereupon it must be desalinated in huge industrial plants. Buildings tend to be aggressively air-conditioned. When outdoor sport is played at all, it tends to be late at night, after dark; even then, temperatures on the pitch at the start of the season can hit over 35.
Still, the first impression you get upon arriving in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, is not of heat, but of cranes. The city is forested with them, as if a sketch artist has roughed out a skyline and everyone else is now tasked with filling it in. The tinnitus hum of construction is everywhere. You can’t seem to drive three blocks without encountering signage teasing some new development – an impossibly tall skyscraper, a new entertainment district, an upscale housing complex illustrated with 3D mock-ups of smiling, uncovered people of all races and genders living in harmony. Along the brand-new highways, images of the crown prince and his father, King Salman, stare down from billboards, looking stoic. It’s tradition in Saudi to display a portrait of the king in your home or business, so everywhere you go – shops, restaurants, hotel receptions – you find yourself under his beneficent gaze, which, having considered the ramifications of objecting, I, of course, find a totally chill and non-authoritarian thing to do.
But then, this is the new Saudi Arabia: a freer, generally more easygoing place to be. Since MBS took de facto control in 2017, life has changed immeasurably. Women can now go out with their hair uncovered, play sport unrestricted, even drive. The religious police who once roamed the streets harassing citizens have been stripped of their power. At the same time, MBS has solidified control of the security services, imprisoned enemies, and at one point locked up hundreds of the country’s elite, including some of his relatives, converting the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton for a time into a luxury prison. Justice Square, once known as Chop Chop Square for being the official site of public beheadings, has been redeveloped as a charming pedestrian plaza, complete with a bookstore and hipster coffee shop; the only hint of its gruesome past is the large covered drain at its centre. (The executions still happen, but out of sight.)
The Riyadh headquarters of the Saudi Pro League lie in Al Falah, a dusty neighbourhood of sandblasted blocks of flats in the north of the city. I’d expected grandeur, but the office itself is typical of any sporting organisation: all world maps and football paraphernalia, and staffed by an assortment of young and smiling faces. (A publicist tells me the HQ will soon be moving to a nicer building.) The only real sign we’re not in Paris or Geneva is the stack of prayer mats in the corner.
The architect of the SPL’s superstar-acquisition strategy is Michael Emenalo, a charming, slimly built Nigerian who previously worked as technical director at Chelsea, at a time when the club’s recruitment was the envy of world football. Mohamed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne, Eden Hazard – Emenalo signed them all. He was persuaded to join the Saudi project, he says, by a “masterful” seven-minute pitch from the Saudi sports minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Saud, who explained to him the country’s ambition: to turn the SPL into one of the world’s top 10 football leagues. “This has not been done just to get hype,” Emenalo says, taking a seat behind a desk. “It’s been done to have a lasting impact. And for it to have lasting impact, it means that it won’t operate as just a project for the league, it will operate as a project for the development of football in its entirety in the kingdom.”
Reshaping the SPL was not an overnight decision. Long before Ronaldo signed, the league commissioned Deloitte, an official told me, to draw up a plan for overhauling the country’s football infrastructure; Ronaldo just accelerated things. Still, Emenalo is the first to admit that last summer got slightly out of hand. “I wouldn’t say that we did the best job in terms of controlling the narrative,” he says.
That might be an understatement. The money on offer was, even by football’s standards, absolutely bananas. Benzema was said to be getting £172 million per year. (To compare, the Premier League’s highest-paid player is reportedly De Bruyne, supposedly on £20 million a year at Manchester City.) Even lesser stars were fetching huge sums: former Liverpool midfielder Jordan Henderson was supposedly earning about £350,000 a week. Then there were the perks, with players reportedly being offered houses complete with staff, free flights, schooling for their kids, and luxury cars (with drivers). Before the Brazilian megastar Neymar signed with Al-Hilal, the tabloids claimed that his contract demands had included a Bentley, an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, and a never-ending supply of acai juice. When Neymar eventually did sign, the Saudis sent a private Boeing 747 reportedly owned by a prince to convey him to Riyadh, where he was met by delirious crowds.
Somehow even more unbelievable were the players the SPL failed to sign. Al-Ittihad reportedly offered about £150 million for Mo Salah. The club also tried to prise De Bruyne, arguably the world’s best midfielder, from City. Al-Hilal supposedly offered a package worth more than £1.2 billion to Lionel Messi – reportedly already making approximately £20 million as a tourism ambassador for the kingdom – before he spurned the Saudi League in favour of Inter Miami in the US. When Messi turned them down, Al-Hilal unsuccessfully offered Paris Saint-Germain a world-record £260 million transfer fee for Kylian Mbappé. “We needed to get everybody’s attention,” Emenalo says.
The challenge at the time, Emenalo adds, was that some of the Saudi clubs were not yet well equipped to scout superstars, or negotiate with powerful agents. “They started spending very quickly,” Emenalo says. “As time went on, it became clear that some, I believe, could have signed a really legacy-defining player for their clubs. But they had spent their budget.”
When you’re attempting to transform the football culture of an entire nation, there’s more to scouting prospective players than key passes or expected goals. “The number one KPI is performance on the pitch,” Emenalo says. “After that it’s: what kind of societal impact is this player going to have? We’re talking about cultural impact within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. When kids tune in, we have to make sure that their parents are not scared that the player is going to misbehave.” The aim, he says, is not only to sign superstars but “ambassadors, to tell good stories about what we’re doing here, so that other people want to come and join.”
When a club wants to sign a star player, Emenalo and his department review the terms. If the team has the money, and they decide the player is worth the fee, the process is simple. “If it’s a superstar, it’s easy, yes, a no-brainer,” he says. After that, he says, the deal can be scrutinised by higher authorities. “If it gets to the stakeholders above my pay grade, or Saad’s pay grade [SPL interim CEO Saad Al-Lazeez], and if they want to review it, they can do so.”
Who those stakeholders are, or where the transfer budgets ultimately come from, nobody seems eager to say. The league’s financial structure is complicated. The SPL’s title sponsor, the property developer ROSHN (chaired by the crown prince) is owned by the Public Investment Fund (also chaired by the crown prince). A number of the league’s other major sponsors are also owned in part or run by the government. And while the government, through the PIF, holds a truly dizzying portfolio of investments, its fortunes are inevitably underpinned by the kingdom’s oil reserves, currently thought to comprise some 260 billion barrels. As long as the world is still hooked on oil, the money might as well be limitless.
At least officially, however, the plan is that the SPL will eventually pull its own weight. “The strategy isn’t where you get the money, as long as you ensure that you’re monetising [the league],” the SPL’s chief operating officer, a former WWE executive named Carlo Nohra, tells me. “But most significantly, the influx of players has delivered the eyeballs, which has made it a viable product for us to go to market, whether it’s regional, domestic, or international.”
That so many players declined the bounteous riches on offer underlines the difficulties facing the Saudi project. After the young Spanish midfielder Gabri Veiga signed for Al-Ahli, the legendary Real Madrid midfielder Toni Kroos posted that it was “embarrassing,” and told the German edition of Sports Illustrated that he would never move to Saudi Arabia because of its human rights record. Other players also made no secret of the fact they’d turned down Saudi offers.
And let’s face it, Saudi Arabia doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record on human rights. Its less-than-excellent reputation has only worsened since 2018, when Saudi operatives murdered and dismembered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul. While US intelligence agencies concluded that MBS approved the operation that killed Khashoggi, the crown prince himself has denied giving the order, telling The Atlantic – not entirely reassuringly – that “if that’s the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.” Despite recent reforms, it’s still a country where same-sex relations are illegal, alcohol is forbidden, and where dissidents are routinely jailed or executed. As the golfer Phil Mickelson said in an interview, shortly before taking a Saudi contract reported to have been worth around £160 million, “they’re scary motherfuckers.”
Even so, by the end of August, 94 overseas players had agreed to join the Saudi Pro League, at a combined cost of some £767 million, according to Deloitte Sports Business Group. Attracted by their new stars, dozens of broadcasters, including Fox Sports, signed up to broadcast league matches internationally.
If players did have concerns, Emenalo says, they didn’t tell him. “Nobody ever asked the question ‘Am I going to be safe?’ That didn’t come up,” he says. “Maybe they asked their agents.”
In a way, the number of players who did end up accepting the Saudi money shouldn’t be that surprising; given the geography of the global game, the idea that an athlete would end up in the Middle East is not much weirder than playing for a team in Manchester, or Munich. As Fábio Henrique Tavares, the Brazilian midfielder better known as Fabinho, tells me, “On the pitch, everyone speaks the same language.”
The muezzin is calling the faithful to prayer when I arrive at Al-Ittihad’s training complex in Jeddah, on the kingdom’s western coast. The summer heat has ebbed away and the breeze is rolling in off the Red Sea. Inside an empty conference room, the club – perhaps unused to dealing with journalists – has set up a little table with national flags, as if preparing for a visit by a foreign dignitary.
Fabinho joined Al-Ittihad from Liverpool in July, having won every major title in England, and before that the French Ligue 1 with AS Monaco. “I think because I’m used to moving [to] different countries, different cultures, it was easy for me and my wife,” he says.
When Fabinho’s agent told him about Al-Ittihad’s interest, he was unsure. He texted a friend who had played in Saudi, Hélder Costa, who reassured him. Then he saw the offer. “A really good contract,” he says, grinning.
Fabinho, his wife, and their baby have been living in a hotel downtown while their new place is being finished. “I still need to buy the furniture,” he says. His fellow new Al-Ittihad signings Jota and N’Golo Kanté are, he says, both living in the hotel, too.
Such an arrangement isn’t uncommon. Ronaldo, when he moved to Riyadh, was reported to have stayed at a £249,000-a-month Kingdom Suite at the Four Seasons, before moving to a private compound in the suburbs. Some of the Brits at Al-Ettifaq, based in the eastern city of Dammam, were said to have moved their families over the border to Bahrain, where there are better international schools and alcohol is legal.
There are things you have to get used to, Fabinho says. The roads for example, which are crazy. The club gifted him a Mercedes-Benz when he arrived, but the first day he had a prang and so now travels with a driver – which might explain why, when Karim Benzema arrives later here at the training ground driving a yellow Lamborghini Urus, he is accompanied by the flashing lights of what appears to be a police escort.
The heat is undeniable, particularly in summer. “Sometimes you cannot put the intensity [in] that we had in England, because of the weather,” Fabinho says. The heat means training takes place in the evenings, instead of the mornings, as it does in Europe. Doing well in the SPL means competition in the Asian equivalent of the Champions League, which requires travelling to play in countries such as Uzbekistan and Iran, where the facilities can leave a lot to be desired.
Otherwise? It’s not too bad. A little harder to see friends and family back in Brazil. “We are used to being, I can say, more alone,” he says. “Sometimes my wife said some things, the way she dressed maybe needed to change. But the way I see it, the way I live [here] is amazing.”
Some players have found the change liberating. Allan Saint-Maximin, a French winger, joined Jeddah’s Al-Ahli this last summer from Newcastle United (a team now majority owned by the PIF). The nocturnal schedule, he explains, allows him to use the daytime hours to focus on other pursuits. “I have my brand. I have a board game. Clothing, jewellery, many things,” Saint-Maximin says, lounging on a sofa in the Al-Ahli training ground, across town. “I’m not the type of person to like, just stay on the sofa. That’s not me.”
Then there’s the money. Saint-Maximin grew up poor, on the outskirts of Paris. “It was difficult for me to be able to buy stuff, to be able to have a normal life like the people who have money, you know? I was worried about what I was going to eat,” he says. So he’s less coy than some about talking about it. “I asked [for] the money I wanted. It was a big fight, but they gave me exactly what I asked, and what I think I deserve to have.” Tabloids put Saint-Maximin’s Al-Ahli contract at £10 million per year. Those reports aren’t accurate, he says, but that’s kind of beside the point. “If your work says, ‘OK, we’ll give you 50 million in three years,’ it’s impossible to not be happy about it. I feel good here. Not only about the money but about everything – the life, the people. Everything.”
Each player moved for their own reasons. “Of course, it’s a lot of money, but as a football player you’re always making good money,” Aleksandar Mitrović, a Serbian striker for Al-Hilal, tells me. Mitrović signed last summer after six seasons at Fulham, bouncing between the Premier League and the Championship. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved the club. But after six years, it’s hard, you know? I play in the Premier League, get relegated, get promoted. I was two times top scorer in the Championship. Broke the [goal-scoring] record,” he says. “I never had a chance to play for top teams… So when this club came, it was giving me something that I always wanted.”
Sure, it’s different. But you know what? Al-Hilal are top of the league, and Mitrović is second in the goalscoring table. “I love it here, to be honest,” he says. “So far so good.”
Not every player has settled in as easily. In January, there were widespread reports that some of the league’s new superstars – including Benzema and Al-Ahli’s Roberto Firmino – were unhappy and trying to secure moves back to Europe. Jordan Henderson terminated his lucrative contract with Al-Ettifaq to move to Ajax, in the Netherlands, after just six months, supposedly struggling with the low quality of play, the paltry attendances, and the challenges of adapting to life in the country.
Still, all the players I meet seem happy, and contented. Of course, it’d be easy to write off their comments as practised; after all, in a country where even tweeting something critical of the royals can result in a jail sentence – or worse – it’s not like they’re going to say anything negative. Hell, even asking the players about Saudi’s human rights record could be seen as defaming the government and therefore a jailable offence, and so, being a coward, and not wanting anyone else to say anything that might get them in trouble, I don’t even ask. But then, that’s the power of authoritarianism: silence enough people and the rest will silence themselves.
Nearly a year after signing Ronaldo, the Saudis built him a shrine. The CR7 Signature Museum is in Boulevard City, one of Riyadh’s new shopping-and-entertainment districts, where for a small fee fans in thobes and Al-Nassr scarves can gaze at a hall of Ronaldo’s real trophies, take photos with a dubiously convincing waxwork, and even measure their own shooting power and vertical jump against Cristiano’s, before heading home with a signed poster. (I don’t see anybody beat Ronaldo’s record, but then, most of the people trying are children.)
If you want to see the new Saudi Arabia, there’s no better place than Boulevard City. The place is overwhelming, 220 acres of Western chains and American fast food joints: Burger King, Baskin-Robbins, Chuck E Cheese. There’s a go-cart track and a “virtual reality arena.” We walk through a giant imitation of Times Square to Boulevard Studios, where visitors are welcomed on a huge red carpet in front of an homage to the Warner Bros. tower and the World of Barbie to the pièce de résistance: a genuine Disney castle, the first in the Middle East, for which kids are queuing excitedly. All this in a country where cinemas were banned as recently as 2017.
Nearby, someone manning a fairground game yells, in perfect English, “All right, guys, we have a winner!”
Is this not, reader, the meaning of progress? Families walking hand in hand, smiling, buying happily the best of what the Free Market has to offer? It’s strangely beautiful. It’s also deeply uncanny. Not to see Saudi teens queueing at Starbucks or giggling outside the Five Nights at Freddy’s experience – but the undeniable physical sensation that this is all so precarious. One can only imagine the energy consumption, the sheer feat of engineering required to build this place. Everything glows. In the food court, a giant fountain periodically puts on musical light shows. We are in the desert.
Beside Boulevard City stands Boulevard World, a theme park that features the world’s largest man-made lagoon, a re-creation of the Pyramids and a giant Chinese temple and what appears to be a smaller version of the Las Vegas Sphere. Nearby, workers are putting the finishing touches to Al-Hilal’s new 26,000-seater Kingdom Arena, which is air-conditioned and features a retractable roof, allowing sporting events to be played even in extreme heat. Man 1, Nature 0.
This is the kingdom’s power. While us schmucks in the West are freaking out about climate change, here, growth continues unabated. All of this is running on oil and gas that – despite the country’s climate commitments – Saudi’s future relies on perpetuating demand for. The money comes out of the ground.
At the Boulevard, I notice that everything is being watched by countless CCTV cameras; I’m told the system is so cutting-edge it could spot someone who so much as clenches their fist. True or not, that’s either a comfort in a country with a history of terror threats, or a troubling allegory for something. Did you know that, according to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia executed 196 people in 2022, a reported 30-year high? Anyway. The brands are all here, and business is booming.
Back at Al-Awwal Park, warm-ups are finished and kick-off is approaching. Overhead, floodlights stain the night sky purple as fans trickle into the half-empty ground.
The turnout is a concern. Midway through the season, the SPL project was already being dogged by reports of pitiful attendances: in October, Al-Ettifaq, with its expensive cast of international signings, played Al-Riyadh in front of just 696 fans. When Al-Riyadh played Al-Khaleej in Riyadh, only 144 people turned up. Explanations given so far include ticketing problems and the league’s new schedules conflicting with prayer times. Tonight’s opponent, Al-Okhdood, has a simpler excuse: its home city, Najran, is a 10-hour drive across the desert, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I don’t see a single away fan all evening. Still, the seats are about 90 per cent full as the announcer reads out the teams. When Ronaldo emerges from the tunnel, the place goes wild.
Everyone is here for Him. “All my friends, even those not interested in football, now they’re interested, because we have Cristiano,” Ghaida Khaled, the Al-Nassr fan, says. Khaled being here at all is still new; women have been able to attend football matches only since 2018.
“Before, we couldn’t come to the football,” explains Salpy Loshkhadjian, another fan, here with her 14-year-old daughter. They’re Armenian Lebanese, but Loshkhadjian has lived in the kingdom for 17 years; her daughter has signed for Al-Nassr’s taekwondo team. Not that long ago, being a professional athlete would have been an impossible career path for a teenage girl in Saudi. Loshkhadjian talks about what’s happening in the kingdom as if a miracle has occurred. “Now we can do whatever we want. And sure, there are rules, but we can do everything – we can drive, drink coffee outdoors, smoke, everything.”
Al-Okhdood, a small club with no expensive foreign signings, sits near the bottom of the table. (The injection of PIF money has caused grumbles of unfairness among other teams. “My car is a small Japanese sedan, and I’m somehow expected to race against Lamborghinis,” Khalid al-Baltan, president of the lower-league side Al-Shabab, has complained.)
The game, inevitably, is not particularly competitive. Al-Nassr score in the 13th minute, and dominate without producing many chances. Ronaldo mostly walks around offside, with the calculated lethargy of an apex predator. But when he does come to life – a deceptive run behind the defence, a deft flicked pass – his superiority is obvious. Champions League teams may no longer want him, but here anyone can see he’s the best player on the pitch.
Halftime comes and goes. The Game of Thrones theme plays over the tannoy. The crowd is getting a little distracted. As a spectacle it’s all very polite, delivered with broadcast polish. Watching on TV, you’d struggle to tell it apart from a midweek game in any European league, except minor details such as Al-Nassr’s sleeve sponsor being a brand of camel’s milk.
Then, in the 77th minute, Ronaldo latches onto a free ball in the penalty area, and fires in a goal from a tight angle. He leaps into his customary celebration, and the whole place erupts in unison:
“SIIIIUUU!”
Drums. Phones are out. Everybody’s bouncing. Then, a few minutes later, he scores again, an absolute golazo: the Al-Okhdood goalkeeper is caught off his line when the ball bobbles loose, and Ronaldo, 35 yards out, hits a perfect arcing lob over four opposing players to put Al-Nassr up 3-0. The stadium loses its mind. Within minutes, highlights of the goal are trending worldwide on X. This is what a reported £150 million a year gets you.
After the final whistle, there’s a festival atmosphere. A few rows below me, a father is carrying his little girl, waving a flag together. Everyone seems proud – of Ronaldo, of the league, of their country. Everyone thanks the crown prince by name, and says how grateful they are. For Saudis, at least, this all seems to be working.
Bread and circuses. That’s what the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, around 100AD, of the means that the emperors used to pacify their subjects. Spending time at Al-Awwal Park, I can’t help but think of the Colosseum, and its menagerie of imported delights. Are you not entertained?
Here’s the thing about sportswashing: people act as if Saudi Arabia is investing billions of pounds in sport as an apology, a way of distracting the world when the regime silences dissidents. Maybe it isn’t about that at all. Maybe it really is that buying up the world’s football stars is a way to bring in tourists and foreign investment, and make the kingdom even more money. The dissidents, after all, are still being imprisoned, as brutally as ever. Maybe it’s saying to a populace of 32 million Saudis who have watched pro-democracy uprisings on social media: we’ll give you all that you could ever possibly want – except freedom. Everything in the kingdom is new, everything can be remade, just not the people in charge. Maybe it’s just that a load of princes with limitless money got bored of buying superyachts and da Vincis and thought it’d be fun to have a few sports leagues.
And maybe for a lot of Saudis that doesn’t matter. When you’ve come as far as they have, as quickly, this all must indeed seem like a miracle. And if they felt any other way, they certainly wouldn’t be reckless enough to tell me.
“It’s a country that the world has been calling on to change and open up, and now that it has, everybody’s knocking it. You can’t have it both ways,” Nohra, the SPL’s chief operating officer, tells me over lunch on the grounds of At-Turaif, a beautiful 18th-century ruin recently remade into a shiny new tourism complex. “They get no credit for the transformation that they’ve been through already.”
But then, the depth of that transformation is the whole point. In December, Turkey’s football federation was scheduled to host its Super Cup final between Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe in Riyadh – at Al-Awwal, in fact – but postponed the game at the last minute, after the Saudis reportedly refused to let players wear shirts and carry signs referring to Atatürk, the country’s founder. (Atatürk being the guy who brought democracy to Turkey.) Some changes happen more slowly than others.
Whether the SPL’s big experiment will work long-term is anybody’s guess. A few years back, China got heavily into football, and even signed a few superstars, only to lose interest and see most of them move back a couple of years later. That could still happen here. It’s unlikely.
If anything, this is only the beginning. In October, FIFA announced that Saudi Arabia is the sole country bidding to host the 2034 World Cup. Before the announcement, FIFA president Gianni Infantino was photographed hanging out with MBS at a boxing match and at the World Cup in Qatar. (Shortly after Saudi Arabia’s bid was announced, The Times reported that FIFA was negotiating a new sponsorship deal worth up to £84 million a year with the state-backed oil company Saudi Aramco; when reached by GQ, FIFA declined to comment, citing a policy not to confirm or deny commercial discussions.) Even if Michael Emenalo can’t persuade them to join, the superstars will end up in Saudi eventually.
The Saudi government has already announced plans to build several new stadiums, and move one of its clubs to Neom, the crown prince’s new £395 billion megacity project that will, among other things, supposedly be powered entirely by renewable energy and staffed by robots. With that kind of investment, it’s hard to see how other leagues stand a chance. “It’s a great advantage,” Nohra tells me. “The audacity of the whole project is that we can deliver what we set our minds to. We’re not hindered by virtually anything.”
Looked at another way: perhaps the SPL and football are perfect for each other. Players have always followed the highest bidder. Few really care as much for their clubs as they’d like us to believe. Think about it: you live a hermetic life, shuttling back and forth between matches and training, coming out in public for 90 minutes at a time. Here, you can do so in air-conditioned luxury, away from the prying eyes of journalists, and retire at 30 with enough money to buy a small country. Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Saudi Arabia, but we’re talking about a sport where out of 2,500 or so active male players in the top-five European leagues, only one has felt able to come out as gay.
When Emenalo first started persuading players to come to Saudi last summer, he says, it was a challenge. These days, players WhatsApp one another asking how they can come. We are talking before the January transfer window, but Emenalo says he has “at least seven” superstars waiting to sign. “They’ve seen the level [of competition] and they’ve now heard from their friends that life is good and that there’s nothing to worry about,” Emenalo says. “So their concern now is, Did we miss the gravy train?”
“To be honest,” Mitrović tells me, “this country, for me, I think is the future.”
After the game at Al-Awwal Park, the media hang around in the mixed zone, hoping to speak to Ronaldo. A couple of Al-Okhdood players come out to talk to the cameras. Al-Nassr’s all-stars, however, stay in the changing room. Despite the players’ contracts, nobody at the Pro League seems to have required them to give interviews after matches, so they don’t. When Ronaldo eventually does appear, in his boxers, he disappears down another tunnel just as quickly. A disaffected crew member from the state broadcaster grumbles, “No one ever stops.”
Outside, the air is getting cold. Sand is blowing in from the desert, dusting departing traffic. A crowd of young fans has assembled at the exit, waiting for the team bus, hoping to get a glimpse of Ronaldo. But it’s too late. He came in a private car, and has already gone.
