As the exodus of players from Europe to the Arabian desert continues, the question being asked is whether Saudi Arabia is the new China. When Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, one of his well-documented ambitions was to make the country a football powerhouse. And for nearly a decade, Chinese clubs spent colossal sums of money to lure veteran players and experienced coaches beyond the Great Wall, as part of a project that they hoped would make China Asia’s premier football power.
We now know how that story ended. Guangzhou Football Club, once Guangzhou Evergrande, won the Asian Champions League in 2013 and 2015. They now play in China League One, having been relegated in 2022 in the aftermath of crippling financial problems made worse by the global pandemic. The Chinese growth story was largely based on fortunes pumped in by property developers like the Evergrande group. With the president’s encouragement, billions of dollars were invested in existing football teams, and players like Carlos Tevez were signed on salaries that were three or four times more than top European clubs were prepared to pay.
Once the real-estate bubble burst, so did the Chinese football boom. The Saudi experiment is very different in that the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has already taken over four of the leading clubs in the Saudi league. The PIF is rumoured to be worth well over $450 billion, and Saudi’s increasingly diversified economy no longer runs on oil alone.
Less than a month ago, Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, was interviewed by NOS, a broadcaster based in the Netherlands. “I think that it’s mainly a mistake for Saudi Arabian football,” he said, pretty much dismissing any threat to European football. “Why is that a problem for them? Because they should invest in academies, they should bring coaches, and they should develop their own players.
“The system of buying the players that almost ended their career is not the system that develops football. It was a similar mistake in China when they all brought players who are at the end of their career.”
It was easy for European football to brush aside Cristiano Ronaldo’s move to the kingdom last December. He was, after all, years past his peak. Karim Benzema, who decided to move to Saudi in early June, will be 36 later this year, while N’Golo Kante is 32 and feeling the effects of having played with an all-action style for more than a decade.
These were all moves that raised only eyebrows, and not alarms. What has happened since is very different. Two Portuguese players have followed the trail to Saudi Arabia in the past month, and those are the transfers that have really induced panic. Ruben Neves spent six years with Wolverhampton Wanderers and was on the longlist of clubs like Barcelona, Arsenal, and Liverpool when the summer transfer window opened.
Neves was on a wage of 50,000 pounds a week at Wolves. After taxes, that meant he would have been taking home slightly less than $35,000. Al-Hilal, the most successful team in Saudi football, with a record four Asian Champions Leagues to their name, will pay him 300,000 pounds a week, with no taxes. It’s highly unlikely that Barcelona or any of the top English sides would have been willing to pay him more than a third of that. In effect, without taxes, Neves will be earning six times what he could have hoped to in Europe.
Jota, who joined Glasgow Celtic from Benfica last summer, has also followed his compatriot’s lead, in a $31.7m transfer. At 24, he is another player in his prime who has chosen to put earnings over glory. During the time Neves was at Wolves, he had often spoken of how he would only leave to test himself in the Champions League. That will now be the Asian version rather than its far more prestigious European cousin.
As damaging for European football is the loss of experience in the form of Marcelo Brozovic (Inter Milan to Al-Nassr), Kalidou Koulibaly (Chelsea to Al-Hilal), and Edouard Mendy (Chelsea to Al-Ahli). There are strong rumours too that Roberto Firmino, who left Liverpool after eight seasons, will soon join them. Chelsea’s Hakim Ziyech, Atletico Madrid’s Saul Niguez, and even Neymar, from Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), are other names that keep cropping up.
Not one of these players is in the winter of their careers. Koulibaly may have struggled to adjust to the frantic pace of English football, but Brozovic recently played in a Champions League final, while Mendy was in goal for Chelsea when they won the trophy in 2021. In a parallel universe, each of these men would sign a last lucrative contract with a top European club, where they would in turn mentor those coming through the ranks.
The likes of Lionel Messi and Luka Modric may have turned down the blank cheques waved in their faces, but the true litmus test will come in the next few weeks. Kylian Mbappe, currently football’s first among equals, is unhappy at PSG and has let it be known that he will leave when his contract ends next summer. If PSG are to command an astronomical fee for him, they have to sell in this window.
The Mbappe camp have not too subtly leaked the information that the salary package he expects would come to $261m a year, dwarfing even what Ronaldo currently makes. No European club can even countenance such a figure. A Saudi team bankrolled by PIF could. If Mbappe ended up leaving, without even winning a Champions League, that really would be the end.