Ruben Neves, in a farewell video for Wolverhampton Wanderers fans, was moved to tears on more than one occasion. Presumably, he was crying all the way to the bank.
The Portuguese midfielder’s wages at Al Hilal are likely to be in the £300,000-a-week area, comfortably more than three times what he was earning in the Premier League. Neves was a supporters’ favourite at Molineux and understandably so. He was a smashing player and seemed to be an all-round nice guy.
But notice the past tense. He has signed for the Saudi Pro League and will now be forgotten by everyone outside of the Saudi kingdom. And Neves has not long turned 26.
His transfer to Al Hilal, for an outlandish fee of £47million, has been one of the elements of a social media discussion in which Jamie Carragher and others have spoken out against the increasing amount of Saudi activity in football.
“This sports washing needs to be stopped,” he tweeted. Gary Neville posted: “The Premier League should put an instant embargo on transfers to Saudi Arabia to ensure the integrity of the game isn’t being damaged.”
Neville’s point - a very fair one - is that the ‘integrity of the game’ will be under threat if the Saudis pay artificially high transfer fees that help Premier League clubs in regard to financial fair play regulations.
All eyes, for example, are on Chelsea and on how many players they manage to offload to the Saudis. But if the Saudis pay silly money for players who are merely decent - Neves, for example - they would only be following a trend long established by the Premier League itself.
Eighty million pounds for Harry Maguire, anyone? Even taking into account his good form last season, £100million for Jack Grealish still looks exorbitant.
The bottom line is that we have welcomed the Saudis into our game with open arms through their purchase of a Premier League club so we can’t now complain when they want to buy players from our league.
That is the way it works. That’s the way the global transfer system works. And Carragher’s call for sportswashing to be stopped is, basically, a call to shut the stable door after the horse has long since bolted.
The Saudis have bought their way into the fabric of not just football, but sport in general. The involvement is irreversible and is only going to get bigger and bigger. But no one should really fret about the possibility of more Premier League players - even players in their prime - going to play in Saudi.
Quite frankly, who cares? Admittedly, my viewing of its product is limited but from what I have seen, it is strictly lower league - possibly non-league - standard, albeit well-attended.
And outside of the game, the Saudi culture - non-married couples cannot, by law, live together - poses issues for young European families. The money, of course, is outrageous. There are all sorts of figures given for N’Golo Kante’s wages at Al Ittihad but, conservatively, it seems that £20million a season is on the mark.
But the bottom line is that while Neves and Kante are going from very rich to fantastically rich, they are also swapping widespread acclaim and popularity for obscurity. And English football should not be bothered about that.
