The director of football for the Saudi Pro League, Michael Emenalo, has said the upstart competition wants all the world’s top players and that it will not take long before it will be a league for “exceptional players only”.
Emenalo was speaking on the opening weekend of the Pro League season, when a number of high-profile signings from across the world are making their debut in the Gulf. The former Chelsea technical director says “the goal is to become sustainable” but more deals will be done before the end of the summer and will continue in future windows.
“I would love to have Kylian Mbappé here,” he said. “I would love to have Harry Kane here. The league would like to have all the top players. And I think it is something that will be at the heart of this strategy. In a couple of years, in a few short years, this will become a league for exceptional players only.
“It will become a league for those who are at the top of their game, because we have only 18 clubs and the space for just eight international players [at each club]. Yes, we have resources and we’re going to use those resources to make sure once we build up infrastructure, that players that are here are the ones at the top of their game.”
Emenalo’s full title at the Pro League is director of football, player acquisitions and club development. The role will mean treading a delicate line between trying to engage with the world’s elite talent, manage the aspirations of competing clubs and help develop the competition so that it generates enough revenue to stand on its own two feet.
The former Nigeria defender said: “I will be responsible for some of the international players coming into the league, I’ll be responsible for working with the different clubs in squad mapping; what they already have in their teams, what they need. I will make recommendations with my team to what I think would help them.
“We want a disciplined structure that allows the clubs to manage their affairs efficiently, whether it’s finance or recruitment, or coaching, we want them to be as efficient as possible. The idea is for every club to earn what they get – now and in the future. As time goes on we will look at it see if it works. The goal is to become sustainable.”
After the opening fixture of the Pro League season on Friday night, a 3-1 win for Al-Ahli over Al-Hazm thanks to a Roberto Firmino hat-trick, Emenalo said he had received calls from a number of players expressing their enthusiasm about what they had seen. He said he hopes their experience will help to correct a view that is proving the biggest barrier to acquisitions for the league.
“Surprisingly, the biggest concern is narrative and we have to demolish some of these very outrageous narratives out there that there is something wrong with the Saudi League or with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Emenalo said.
“That’s what they worry about, but I cannot tell you how many calls or messages I got last night from players who had stayed up to watch this game because they wanted to see and, after they saw it, thought: ‘You know what, it’s not what I expected and I would love to be part of it.’”
Carlo Nohra, the chief operating officer of the Saudi Pro League, said the target was for football to become a “net contributor to GDP and not costing the country money”. He also said the long-term strategy involved teams from the league playing competitive matches against the biggest clubs from the rest of the world.
“It’s extremely important, but it’s not an objective that we have for the immediate future,” Nohra said. “We have a strategy that will take a while before we can get to a stage where the Saudi clubs can compete against European clubs. They can certainly compete against a lot of the others in Asia [now], maybe in the US, but ultimately we want our clubs to be as big as the biggest in the world, and that’s going to take a lot of work.”
