It is 2040 and the AI-generated professor of global sports business at the University of Neom has entered the portal.
“Turn on your headsets, please, and think about the Saudi Pro League in 2023. Got there? Good. Now, today’s thought symposium is about why it became the new…”
Chinese Super League? As in the best example of a sporting financial bubble in the 21st century. So far.
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Or the Indian Premier League? As in cricket’s IPL, the most successful sports property to be launched in the 21st century. So far.
But who wants to wait until 2040 for the answer? Let’s have a crack at it now. After all, journalism is meant to be the first rough draft of history.
So, with the help of some experts, here are the arguments. Let’s start with the boom.
The Saudi Pro League is the new IPL
We may need to define some terms here.
Founded in 2007, the IPL is a 10-team competition that usually runs March and May. The format is an abridged version of cricket called T20, which takes as much time to complete as nine innings of baseball but is much more fun and the players do not need gloves to catch the ball.
Players who want to take part — and all the best T20 players want to take part — sign up for the annual auction and set their own base price. The city-based franchises then bid for them but there is a salary cap.
It is the most popular cricket league on the planet and the biggest sporting event in the world’s second-most populous nation. The 2023 final between the Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans was live-streamed by 32 million people, a world record.
The league’s media rights are worth $6.4billion (£5bn) over the next four years, which works out at $13.4m a game. Only the National Football League (NFL) beats that. The highest-paid players earn more than $2million for two months’ work and the total value of the league is estimated to be almost $11billion, not far off £9billion. This makes the IPL a “decacorn”, as a “unicorn” is any private start-up company that hits the $1billion milestone.
The IPL is a smash hit and it is probably coming to a stadium closer to you, as these Indian franchises — all owned by the country’s biggest wallets — have already bought teams in T20 competitions in the Caribbean, South Africa and United Arab Emirates. Four of them will have teams in Major League Cricket, the tournament that is set to start in Texas this summer.
Elsewhere on The Athletic…
- James McClean, the footballer who suffers ‘more abuse than any other in England’
- The Dutch footballer with a prison sentence and a drug trafficking charge – who is still playing
Right, enough cricket. Back to football.
The Saudi Pro League (SPL) started in 1976 but only went fully professional in 2007, the same year the IPL launched. Its best teams have enjoyed success in Asian football’s Champions League, particularly Riyadh’s Al Hilal and Jeddah’s Al Ittihad, but it would be a stretch to say that anyone outside the kingdom has cared that much about the league itself.
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Until December 30, 2022, that is, because this is when Cristiano Ronaldo — you’ve heard of him — signed for Al Nassr, Riyadh’s other big club. Arguably the world’s most effective billboard, the 38-year-old superstar guarantees eyeballs, which is only fair when you are paying him more than $200million a year.
And having gained our attention, the SPL seems determined to keep it.
This month, the league announced that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), had taken control of the three teams already mentioned and Jeddah’s Al Ahli, with four other teams assigned to state-backed businesses and the rest of the league to follow suit shortly.
Billed as a “privatisation”, the goal is to make the SPL one of the best 10 leagues in the world by dramatically raising its quality, profile and revenues. A day after the plan was launched, Karim Benzema, the current holder of the Ballon d’Or trophy given to the world’s best player, confirmed he will be leaving Real Madrid to play for PIF-owned Al Ittihad. He will be on similar money to Ronaldo.
Since then, transfer gossip columns everywhere have been dominated by stories about which thirtysomething star would be next. In the past few days The Athletic has also reported on offer made to Manchester City’s Bernardo Silva and Ruben Neves’ expected move from Wolves to Al Hilal.
“It’s been bonkers but the plan has been in development for years and it came from the top,” explains a consultant with close knowledge of the SPL’s growth strategy, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their position.
“(Crown Prince) Mohammed bin Salman wanted to know why the Saudi league could attract 60,000 fans for some games but hardly any for most of them. The answer is obvious: the overall quality of the league wasn’t high enough.
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“How do we attract better players? That’s really what the plan is all about. It’s an all-encompassing approach to improving the stadiums, the broadcasting capability, how each club operates, the overall professionalisation of the league.
“It’s a good plan but it’s going to take some time to bed in because you’ve got representatives from PIF negotiating with agents for players but you’ve also got people from the league doing that, as it has a central pot for talent, and then there are guys at the clubs getting involved.
“It might be a case of too many cooks. Look at the money being thrown at (Chelsea midfielder N’Golo) Kante. They are probably bidding against each other.”
Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport and geopolitical economy at the SKEMA Business School, puts it like this: “What we are seeing in Saudi football — and Saudi Arabia, more generally — is a no-expense-spared national development programme.
“While there are similarities between the two, I have often wondered why Qatar has done some of the things it has done in sport — but that’s not the case with Saudi Arabia. What they are doing makes sense and there is a very receptive domestic audience for it.
“If you go to a big game in Jeddah or Riyadh, you’ll soon see how popular football is in Saudi Arabia. It’s clearly the No 1 sport and there is a fan culture, with lots of banter on social media.
“But I worry about the extremely fast pace of change and the state’s high levels of expectation. If you look at the stadium capacity utilisation numbers, you can see there has been a big improvement over the last five years but it’s from a low base. Some stadiums have seen their figures rise from about 14 per cent to 25 per cent.
“The Saudis are following the old ‘if you build it, they will come’ model, and not just in sport. Maybe they will but there are no guarantees and you don’t have to stray too far from the big cities to see how far Saudi Arabia still has to come in terms of infrastructure.”
James Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. For him, Saudi Arabia has one very significant advantage over China, India and almost every country at the moment.
“Money, of course, and complete buy-in from their government,” he says.
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“The Saudi state wants to position the country as one of the most important tier-two players in global politics, with the US, China and probably India, at some point, being in the first tier.
“Sport is one way of doing that and they want to become the go-to destination for sport in the region. They have let Qatar and the UAE get a head start on them. MBS (Mohammed bin Salman) is playing catch-up and he’s doing it with a sledgehammer.
“The Saudi Pro League is buying up big names but they’re all at the end of their careers. Foreign talent helps — every league does it — but you still have to mix that talent with your own. That’s going to be a problem, so I’m sceptical of the league’s potential to become globally significant, although it can certainly become the regional power.
“The big investment in sport does make perfect sense, though. In a region where religion is so important, sport is probably the only other way to engage with a wide cross-section of society, which is why it will always be of interest to autocrats.
“Sport is also an industry now, and therefore a major plank in MBS’s strategy to diversify the economy. And there is also the public health angle, in that Saudi Arabia has high rates of obesity and diabetes. So, the huge investment in sport makes sense for multiple reasons. The question is whether this big bet on the Saudi Pro League is the right strategy.”
Tim Crow is the former chief executive of international sports marketing agency Synergy and is now a leading consultant.
If we are being honest, the SPL/IPL comparison was his idea but he started his conversation with The Athletic by thinking about the other big sports story currently involving Saudi Arabia: the end of hostilities between the PIF-backed LIV Golf series and the US-based PGA Tour.
Sports business courses will be debating that one for years, too, but Crow sees the peace deal as a tactical retreat by PIF, as it seemed to realise nobody wanted to watch the product, losses were mounting and a prolonged legal battle could get embarrassing. For Crow, LIV Golf could have been more like another famous cricket experiment, Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, but it did not stick around long enough to change anything.
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World Series Cricket, on the other hand, made a lot of great players relatively wealthy, introduced several innovations the game still uses (players in bright colours, helmets as standard, day/night games, trying in the field) and transformed how the sport is televised. Launched in 1977 by Packer, an Australian media tycoon, it was all over by 1979 but its impact was immense.
“The IPL had some big advantages over the SPL, though,” explains Crow. “First, it had a new format to exploit. Football is football; I can’t see the Saudis wanting to mess around with the rules too much.
“Second, the IPL had the extraordinary passion for cricket of its enormous domestic market. Saudi Arabia is not a small country, and it really likes football, but it’s not India and cricket.
“So, that leaves the third thing the IPL has going for it: getting all the top guys in one competition. It’s the Kerry Packer model again. There’s one potential problem, though: cricketers are cheap; footballers aren’t. When Packer did it, £25,000 was a life-changing amount for the players and they could earn that in 60 days.
“But how much is going to take to get Erling Haaland or Kylian Mbappe to go to Saudi Arabia? $400million, or whatever it was, wasn’t enough for Lionel Messi, apparently!”
As you may have gathered, Messi turned down the SPL’s advances and chose Miami, MLS and a cut of the profits in corporate America’s attempt to truly break soccer in the U.S. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to Crow but will global brands and broadcasters show such interest in the SPL?
“It is always about eyeballs,” he says. “Sure, there will always be some interest in what Ronaldo is up to and, if a few more join this summer, that will grow. But how is that going to shape up against the Premier League and the Champions League?
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“That will make it difficult for a non-Saudi brand to redirect some of their budget to the Saudi Pro League. One or two will dip their toes in but I cannot see any significant change in the near future.
“My advice to the Saudis would be to work out who their audience is and fight winnable battles. Can the Saudi Pro League become the top Asian league? Yeah. Is it likely to beat the top European leagues? No.
“I wonder if they will take a leaf from the IPL book and think about how they can spin franchises out around the world. That’s the next step for the IPL — a top player could stay within the multi-club group and move from one T20 competition to another. It’s global and local.
“Could the Saudis do that? We know they have that ambition because we’ve seen it with golf.”
Our sports consultant agrees.
“If you look at PIF’s sports portfolio, Newcastle are the unusual one,” he says. “It was basically brought to them by (British businesswoman) Amanda Staveley and the decision to do it was made at a higher level. That’s the blue-chip investment — at a great price — and they will treat it differently to the rest of their investments.
“More typical is what they’re doing with the E1 Series, which is racing in electric powerboats. It’s F1 meets the America’s Cup and the plan will be to create a global competition between franchises they can then sell off. Extreme E (off-road racing in electric SUVs) is another one.”
The SPL is the new CSL
OK, those are your prophecies of boom, here are the SPL short-sellers and item No 1 in the prosecution file is the Chinese Super League circa 2015 to 2017, football’s version of tulip fever.
It all started when President Xi Jinping declared his ambition to create a domestic sports industry to rival the US and make China a football powerhouse. This unleashed a tsunami of spending on clubs, coaches, stadiums and stars.
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In 10 dizzying days in January 2016, the CSL transfer record went three times. First, Jiangsu Suning paid Chelsea £24million for Brazilian midfielder Ramires, then Guangzhou Evergrande paid Atletico Madrid £25m for Colombian striker Jackson Martinez, only for Jiangsu Suning to hit back by paying £38.5m for Brazilian winger Alex Teixeira, gazumping Liverpool in the process.
That summer, Shanghai SIPG broke the record again by paying £45million for Brazilian star Hulk. That mark did not last long, though, as later in 2016 the same club gave Chelsea £52million for Oscar.
Former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said the Premier League should be “worried” about China’s “financial power” and Antonio Conte, then a relatively happy camper at Stamford Bridge, warned that the CSL was “a danger, not only for Chelsea but all the teams in the world”.
The wages were off the charts, too. Shanghai Shenhua agreed to pay a 32-year-old Carlos Tevez more than £30million a year, Shandong Luneng made former Southampton striker Graziano Pelle the world’s seventh highest-paid player and Ronaldo apparently turned down an offer of €100million (£85million) a year from an unnamed CSL club. Pelle, at least, stuck around and scored some goals.
There was one small problem, though. Actually, that is not true, there were several large problems, but the single smaller one was that President Xi decided all this gratuitous spending on foreign luxuries was not very Chinese.
“Football is popular with the Chinese middle classes but there is still no evidence of a vibrant domestic football culture,” says Dr Paul Widdop, an academic at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Sport Policy Unit and a core member of Edinburgh University’s Academy of Sport.
“During those boom years, it all felt a bit ‘rent-a-crowd’ and the fan experience was terrible. Even before President Xi signalled a change in policy, the superstar model did not appear to be working. Big names went but it was like they disappeared. Hulk was a player in demand but he went to China and was forgotten.
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“The Saudis have an advantage over the Chinese because they’re closer to Europe. Geography matters — Riyadh is six hours in a plane from Europe, which isn’t a huge journey. That helps.”
Omar Chaudhuri is chief intelligence officer at sports consultancy Twenty First Group.
“We had the Saudi Pro League at 58 in our (global league) rankings when Ronaldo joined and we now have it slightly higher at 54,” he says. “They had two teams make the AFC Champions League quarter-finals and Al Hilal thrashed (Qatar Stars League side) Al Duhail 7-0 in Doha. That bumped up our overall view of the league.
“To give you a sense of where the league can get to, our model ranks Japan’s J1 League as the strongest in Asia and the 22nd best in the world. Saudi teams have performed as well as Japanese teams in continental competitions but the J1’s mid-table teams are much stronger.
“But what’s going to hold back the Saudi league is the quality of local talent. If we rank all leagues on the quality of their best 50 overseas players, the Saudi Pro League is 22nd overall, ahead of J1 in 24th. But if we rank all the leagues on the quality of their 50 best domestic players, the Saudi league is 75th. The J1 is 21st.
“If the Saudi league is going to crack the top 30 in the short term, they’ll need the majority of their players to be foreign, which would currently violate the AFC’s homegrown player rules, although they are being relaxed from next season, with the cap on foreign players in Champions League teams going from four to six. Even so, the Saudis will need to focus on developing their own talent to really improve their league.”
For Chaudhuri, the success of any competition comes down to three fundamentals.
“The first is quality,” he explains. “Do you have enough talent? Are your athletes able to perform at their best? Do the best play the best on a regular basis? The Saudi Pro League has certainly started to sign big names but is the supply of domestic talent good enough?
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“The second is jeopardy, that uncertainty of outcome that drives interest. You have to think about the competitive balance of your league and how you avoid dead rubbers with play-offs and promotion and relegation.
“And the third is what we call connection, which is the reason why fans should care. The Premier League has this in spades. You’ve got the rich history of English football, the brands of the clubs and lots of stars — it is hard to replicate that in a hurry. Does anyone outside of Saudi Arabia really care about their clubs?
“MLS is a good case study as they have worked really hard to build the brand of the league and their clubs, and they have done a pretty good job in a competitive market. But I suspect if you were to survey fans in Europe, they would care more about South American teams like Palmeiras or River Plate than Columbus Crew or Sporting Kansas City. That’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the weight of history.”
Dr Jonathan Sullivan is the director of China programs at the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute and he is not buying these SPL/CSL comparisons.
“First, China did not see development of the CSL in terms of ‘sportswashing’,” he says. “They wanted to use football to stimulate consumption, leisure, entertainment and the domestic sports industry. There was no ambition to use the league as ‘soft power’ instrument or as cover for human-rights abuses or killing the planet with fossil fuels.”
It should perhaps be added that none of those goals appears anywhere on the Saudi Pro League website, either, but Dr Sullivan is on a roll so we should get back to him…
“Second, the Chinese state did not direct CSL clubs to spend crazy money. That was all down to the private entrepreneurs who got into football because they wanted to show fealty to Xi’s reform policies and/or to gain advantages for their business interests. The state was actually aghast at the sums of money being paid out and worried — with good reason — that people were using transfer deals to spirit currency offshore, avoiding capital controls. When the state cottoned on to the irrationality of the arms race, it stepped in with all kinds of regulations.
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“Third, the CSL was explicitly designed to be a breeding ground for Chinese talent. Yes, the state wanted good international coaches and some players to elevate standards but there was always the intention to keep foreigners limited in number. It is more important for China that any foreigners coming in are ‘good citizens’, well-behaved and respectful of Chinese culture and political boundaries.
“Fourth, the level of money being offered by the Saudis is on a different plane. Tevez was on $40million a year in Shanghai but he was an outlier. You could say it is inflation, or that the quality of player going to Saudi is higher, but it also reflects the fact that Saudi clubs are playing with House of Saud money.”
And contrary to popular Western opinion, Sullivan does not think the CSL is a bust.
“It was devastated by Covid-19 and is trying to consolidate a more rational position as a niche sport,” he says. “To that end, it is not doing too bad: the league is more sustainable now than in the crazy years.”
Is that the way the Saudi Pro League will go?
“From what I understand, it is being directed by the Saudi rulers and the clubs and other sports vehicles are just a conduit for their pursuit of image building,” says Sullivan. “I don’t know if they have a genuine intention to build a sustainable league.
“Who is it really for? I can’t imagine the Saudis are doing it for Saudi fans; they’re doing it for their international image. Are Europeans really going to care about all these has-beens?
“That said, there is a decent fan culture and Saudi clubs and the national team have been powerful in Asia for a long time. So, maybe it is a more natural fit than China was.”
Hmmm, plenty to ponder there. Perhaps we will have to wait until 2040 to know the answer. Mbappe will be 41 then and Haaland only 39. Come on, where’s your money on where they will be playing?