Not long ago I had an instructive conversation with a football-mad 10-year-old from Belfast. We were walking by a beautiful lake in Donegal. I’d seen him proudly wearing a Liverpool kit on the dancefloor at our Liverpool-mad friend’s wedding the previous day, so I asked him about the ongoing English league season. As everyone knows, football is “a common language”, particularly for people from different generations or cultural backgrounds who might otherwise struggle to know what to talk about together.
I asked him to name his favourite player (Mohamed Salah) and whether he thought Arsenal would be champions (he was certain they wouldn’t). He asked had I seen Cristiano Ronaldo’s latest goals? I confessed I had not. Ronaldo is smashing all the league records, he said, quoting the latest figures. Yeah, but it’s only the Saudi league, I interrupted. It’s not a proper league, is it? Who cares?
He hesitated and offered a look of sincere puzzlement. Politely but firmly he resumed his recitation of the Al Nassr captain’s many accomplishments in the Saudi Pro League over recent months. I felt he was doing his best to explain the future of football to someone he could see was still attached to a hierarchy that was obviously crumbling.
There’s a phrase that has long been used to describe football’s latest departure from its cherished traditions. “The game’s gone.” It has rarely felt quite so far gone as it does this summer, with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia turning its roaring cash-hose full force at the beautiful game. First it was Ronaldo from Manchester United, then Karim Benzema from Real Madrid and N’Golo Kanté from Chelsea. Now a gargantuan offer to Kylian Mbappé, a genuine superstar in his prime, has made global headlines and set off the kind of “engagement” from top athletes that must be the stuff of dreams for Riyadh’s social media managers.
“I’m ready to unretire for this one year salary $776M,” tweeted Usain Bolt, along with the quizzical emoji. “Me headed to Saudi when they call [my agent] for that 1 year deal!” posted LeBron James above a gif of Tom Hanks sprinting headlong down a road in Forrest Gump. The “joke” is hardly new material. Even for the richest and most beloved people, money talks.
There is much speculation as to the kingdom’s strategic objectives. Most suspect the plan may ultimately be to “buy” football, just as it has taken control of elite professional golf and increased investments, as documented by this newspaper, in boxing, cycling and Formula One. But is this a serious investment proposition aimed at diversifying and growing the assets of an oil-rich nation, or simply public relations? Does the “sportswashing” work by distraction, making Saudi synonymous with football, or simply by establishing the kingdom as an unavoidable presence in public life?
If sustained, the scale of the finance behind the Saudi Pro League means that, even if Mbappé follows Lionel Messi in choosing to play elsewhere, the flow of talent towards the highest pay on offer is now inevitable. If you want to watch the best players, consume the premium product, the Saudi league may soon be a fixture in your content mix. But will anything truly change in the relationship between the fans and a sport that could plausibly be under new ownership soon? Or is this merely a further debasement of an already utterly corrupted product that we’ll nevertheless keep on consuming?
As the centre of power shifts, plenty of people who love football will simply borrow a phrase from Donald Trump (himself reputedly a fan of both soccer and the kingdom) and say: “I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.”
Fans with attachments to domestic leagues in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, Belgium or Scotland have seen this sort of thing before. Accelerating in the early 1990s, the successful commercialisation and marketisation to global TV audiences of a small number of powerful leagues led to an increased concentration of talent in England, Spain and Italy, directly at the expense of “smaller” leagues, which were turned into relative backwaters. The extractive relationship between European football and the African continent had been established long before, running directly along colonial lines.
The rules of European competition were rewritten in the 1990s to further widen the gulf. The hoarding of talent may have hollowed out other leagues, but in England the Premier League is celebrated as a great national success story regardless. Subsequent attempts to protect the integrity of competition from the “financial doping” of petro-states and oligarchs have proved no match for the legal teams of alleged offenders.
Most of us having long since given up on meaningful fan control. US billionaires, hedge funds and private equity companies are now widely regarded as a relatively bland, least-bad option as club owners. Crucially, for the most part they have politely chosen to keep elite football at “home” (ie in powerful European nations), allowing the illusion to persist that it is still “our” game, no matter how high the cost of tickets and subscriptions for us to be allowed to enjoy it.
How clear is the ethical distinction between a game largely controlled by US, Russian and Qatari capital as opposed to Saudi? If you squint, you can still just about make out, through the continued existence of the football “pyramid” in particular, some meaningful connection between elite European soccer as a global entertainment product and the industrial communities that created the game as a working-class pastime and collectively developed it through a gradual, layered process over multiple generations into a permanent feature of popular culture alongside things like music, TV and film.
Others will view a Saudi takeover as a natural next step for a sport that had its soul sold off long ago. You might think football belongs to the people, but rest assured it is already a minor, if particularly conspicuous, part of someone else’s diversified and sustainable investment portfolio. If there is comfort to be drawn from the experience of football’s past several decades, it is the limitless capacity of supporters to derive pleasure from the game and use it as the basis for meaningful connections with others – no matter how shamelessly wealthy interests have sought to exploit and co-opt our affection and enthusiasm.
Elliot Ross is a writer who lives in Glasgow
