The sun has set on Cristiano Ronaldo’s first six months in Saudi Arabia and he appears optimistic about the future of football there.
The now 38-year-old scored 14 goals in 16 appearances for Al Nassr, the club he joined last December on an initial two-and-a-half-year deal worth around £177million ($224m) per year, though it wasn’t enough for them to pip Al Ittihad to the 2022-23 Saudi Pro League (SPL) title in May.
The disappointment of not winning the championship — likely cushioned by the enormous salary he is being paid — did not stop Ronaldo from pointing to an optimistic future in the Gulf nation.
“In my opinion, if they continue to do the work that they want to do here for the next five years, I think the Saudi league can be a top-five league in the world,” Ronaldo said at the beginning of June. “The league is very good but I think we have many opportunities to still grow.”
The SPL’s website says it wants to be in “the top 10 best leagues in the world, technically, commercially, financially and media”. Currently, it is widely considered that the biggest five domestic leagues in the sport are England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1.
Research carried out in January by the sports intelligence agency, Twenty First Group, ranked the SPL as the 58th-best domestic league in the world. The SPL is now up to 54th thanks to performances in the 2022-23 Asian Champions League, where Al Hilal got to the final and two other Saudi sides qualified for the round of 16. But with an influx of big-name players from European clubs in recent weeks, including Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante and Ruben Neves, the SPL’s rise seems to be accelerating.
Saad Al-Lazeez, the SPL’s interim chief executive officer, has been holed up in a west London hotel coordinating all this summer spending. He replaced Garry Cook, who formerly was CEO at a post-takeover Manchester City, who The Athletic revealed is taking a job at Championship club Birmingham City.
The SPL’s board now includes Al-Lazeez, chairman Abdulaziz Al Afaleq and Carlo Nohra, among others. But apart from splashing the cash on players some may argue are past or close to the end of their peak years (besides Ronaldo, Benzema turns 36 this year and Kante is 32), how do the Saudis plan on catching up to the world’s elite domestic leagues?
The Athletic has talked to well-placed sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their position and relationships, and the overriding sense is that this summer is merely the beginning.
There is acceptance within the SPL that becoming one of the world’s best leagues will not happen overnight, but a plan is in place — supported by enormous financial capital — to accelerate development over the next five to seven years.
The motivation for this level of investment in the domestic league is subject to speculation.
One view outside Saudi Arabia’s borders is that it is the country’s latest attempt to sportswash its reputation, which has been tarnished by the criminalisation of homosexuality and restrictions on freedom of speech and women’s rights there, and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Those close to the SPL do not view it as a drive to curry favour abroad or enhance the country’s global standing, but understand why it could be looked upon that way. Instead, they speak of it as a domestic project, with Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s crown prince and prime minister, wanting to make a largely young population proud to be Saudi. Another reason for investing in sport in the kingdom was raised publicly by the Saudi government: it wants to drastically improve public health, with around 60 per cent of the population said to be either overweight or obese.
Aside from speculating about why Saudi is investing so much in SPL, the other guessing game this summer has been wondering which players will be recruited next.
The number of players being signed by the SPL has caught many by surprise, but it also raised the question of whether the league has gone about its business slightly back to front. Instead of ensuring quality infrastructure and state-of-the-art training grounds are in place to welcome some of the game’s biggest names, they have signed the players first.
There is an awareness inside the SPL that there is a need to invest in these areas, and that it can’t purely be about hoovering up footballers. A plan is said to be in place to begin rolling out new infrastructure, but the horse has already bolted in that regard.
When it comes to media, The Athletic revealed the SPL has instructed top sports-marketing firm IMG to secure international broadcast deals for its matches ahead of the 2023-24 season kicking off next month. IMG worked with the SPL earlier this year after Ronaldo joined Al Nassr and completed short-term TV deals, including in the United Kingdom, China, Turkey and Brazil, that saw the Saudi league televised in around 45 countries.
The value in such TV deals, however, can really be found closer to home.
Saudi Sports Company (SSC), which is state-controlled, acquired the domestic rights to the SPL for three years from 2022-23 to 2024-25 and the deal’s value is 10 times the amount the league generates from international rights. It is unlikely that equation changes over the next couple of years, which is why the SPL will focus on domestic revenue when it comes to broadcasting matches.
One figure close to the SPL believes that getting players with large social-media followings — Ronaldo, for example, has 594 million Instagram followers and 109 million on Twitter — to post positive messages about Saudi Arabia and its league is far more powerful than getting people in other countries to watch their games live.
Signings with big presences on social media are also expected to be the league’s route to achieving its desired speed of growth. “The players can accelerate things,” said one well-placed source.
Another way the SPL hopes to establish itself as one of world football’s major domestic leagues over the next decade or so is through investment at grassroots level. The country’s Ministry of Sport has coordinated a national football strategy in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF), the SPL and other stakeholders. There is an emphasis on grassroots football and announcements in that area are expected to be rolled out in the coming months. Key to the SPL’s growth plan is developing homegrown players to go alongside the big-name signings and investing in the pyramid to make the domestic game sustainable.
On the theme of sustainability, sources point to this being a major motive behind Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquiring the SPL’s four biggest clubs: Al Nassr, Al Hilal (both based in Riyadh, the capital), Al Ittihad and Al Ahli (both from Jeddah, the country’s second-biggest-city).
The idea is to build up the brands of those clubs, then bring in private investors to buy them. If that plan proves successful, there could be a scenario in which the PIF then takes control of the nation’s next four biggest sides, and tries to repeat the process. By doing that, the league could change from being 18 state-owned clubs to 18 privately-owned ones, which, in turn, means they would not have to rely on the government for funding. “Think about how much money you could generate by selling Al Nassr to private investors, particularly ones who want to do more work with the oil industry and curry favour within the territory,” a source said.
There are natural comparisons to be drawn between the recent rise and fall of the Chinese Super League and what’s now going on in the SPL, but those close to the Saudi league point to the country’s long history of football, qualifying for six of the past eight men’s World Cups and beating eventual champions Argentina in the most recent one (in contrast, China have only ever made it once, losing all three games while failing to score a goal in 2002), and the fact its government — unlike China’s — do not see this investment as a flash in the pan.
This summer is likely to only be the beginning of an aggressive growth plan which will last years, and there is no denying Saudi Arabia has the financial capital to turn the SPL into one of the top domestic competitions in world football.