Saudi Arabia's grand football takeover hits a speed bump
Just a few months ago it looked like the Kingdom was buying its way into the world's most popular sport. The early returns on the investment aren't great
Last spring it seemed possible that Saudi Arabia was about to try the same attempted takeover of global soccer that it had already tried with golf.
Lionel Messi, fresh off winning the World Cup with Argentina to complete his resume as one of the sport’s icons, was rumoured to be headed to the Saudi Pro League, a coup that would be akin to Patrick Mahomes leaving the Kansas City Chiefs to play gridiron football in Germany.
He didn’t go in the end, with some combination of David Beckham, Apple, and Major League Soccer swooping in to recruit him to Beckham’s Inter Miami, where Messi has since brought in a handful of ageing pals from his Barcelona days. The Futbol Expendables.
The Saudis, though, were undaunted. Over the summer the nation’s Public Investment Fund, the same giant pile of money that bought a stack of golf stars to form the basis of LIV Golf, took over the operations of four of the SPL’s bigger clubs and started aggressively courting stars from Europe’s major soccer leagues. Karim Benzema from Real Madrid. Neymar from Paris Saint-Germain. Aymeric Laporte from Manchester City. Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and Jordan Henderson from Liverpool. It was kind of insane. Imagine if Joe Biden nationalized MLS clubs in, say, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas and went on a money-is-no-object recruitment drive to raise the league’s profile. It would be kind of insane.
Did it work? Not really, or at least not yet. If there was an over-arching theme to the players who agreed to take massive wage increases in places like Riyadh and Jeddah, it’s that they were a little or a lot beyond their best days on the pitch. In most cases, they had already won a pile of hardware with their club teams in Europe and, legacy secured, they decided to wind down their playing careers in warm weather and with absolutely bulging wallets. By some reports high-profile players were offered four and five times their previous salaries, and without any of that troublesome income tax in a country that doesn’t need it.
Last month, during one of the two periods on the soccer calendar when player movement is permitted, there was a flurry of stories about pioneers who had found their trip to the Saudi frontier to be less fulfilling then they imagined. Players were unhappy with the oppressive heat, the quality of play in the SPL, and the often small crowds. Laporte, in a particularly inspired bit of grousing, lamented that he spends a lot of time sitting in traffic in Riyadh — in part because he chose to live in neighbouring Bahrain. Aside from the hilarious fact that none of these fellows seem to have done the slightest research before uprooting themselves — “hey Siri, what’s the weather like in Saudi Arabia?” — it speaks to the challenge of recruiting actual humans to live in and play sports in your country, as opposed to horses. Or falcons.
In the end, there wasn’t a January exodus out of the SPL, aside from the departure of Henderson, who left Al-Ettifaq for famous Dutch side Ajax. He’s reportedly facing millions in tax penalties as a result of the early departure, which might explain why the other grumblers stayed put.
Which leaves a couple of significant questions: Will more players follow Henderson back to Europe when their first seasons in Saudi Arabia are over? Or will the Saudi league push ahead and try to woo more top talent as it tries to build on what it started last year?
The Henderson reversal is not great PR for the Kingdom’s soccer plans, but the experience with LIV Golf suggests it won’t give up easily. Its list of big names at launch was limited (Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, and a few others) but it has since added many more, including reigning Masters champion Jon Rahm, even as it has failed to generate much interest in actual LIV events. The poaching of Rahm was a weird flex, coming several months after a ceasing of hostilities between LIV and the PGA Tour, and as those two entities were thought to be working out a long-term partnership.
Even now, with the PGA Tour having secured a multi-billion-dollar investment from a group of American sports-owner rich guys to create a new for-profit golf entity, it’s been reported that the Saudis could yet throw some of their billions in the pot for a stake in New Golf Thing.
Quite why the Saudis would want to operate LIV Golf at a steep loss while also partially bankrolling a direct competitor is a question only they can answer, although one possible answer is: because they don’t care. The PIF is estimated to be worth something close to US$800-billion, and growing steadily, so it doesn’t need any kind of a viable business case for its golf investment other than Because. Its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, is said to be a golf nut, which is pretty much all that matters. Yasir likes golf? We buy golf.
So, sure, you can look at the initial returns of the Saudi soccer takeover and correctly conclude that they are underwhelming. But what you cannot do is assume that they will evaluate the viability of the project through any kind of rational lens. Might they decide next summer that they need to go after better players with even more money? At what kind of price would they be able to fetch one of the game’s in-his-prime stars? This is, essentially, what happened with Rahm, who said recently that he resisted the Saudi entreaties for months until he was eventually sitting on a Smaug-style mountain of gold. Or US$300-million, reportedly.
That is 0.03 per cent of the PIF, or thereabouts.