SWATHES OF EUROPE is currently on fire and the week’s most notable mitigation against fossil fuels was Al-Hilal’s billion-euro package to take Kylian Mbappe on loan for a year.
The turbocharging of the Saudi Pro League is the kingdom’s latest gambit in economic diversification for their post-oil age and, were Mbappe to agree to the deal, it would be an epochal transfer, marking a shift in the balance of power away from Western Europe for the first time since the game went professional.
As to whether he will take the contract, we will have to wait and see. In fairness to Mbappe, he hasn’t agreed to relegate himself to a lesser level of football in return for a boatload of cash in almost a year.
Perhaps he won’t yet lend his name to this Saudi project, and in that case the league will have to be satisfied with its headline act remaining the angry twilight of Cristiano Ronaldo.
We all know the image-laundering benefits of nation state investment in sport overseas, but the Saudi league appears to be primarily geared for domestic purposes. Their Vision 2030 plan – which plots a future for Saudi Arabia once the oil runs out – wants to double household spending on entertainment activities in the kingdom by the end of the decade. The league is also intended as some good old-fashioned opiate for the masses, in a country which has introduced taxation for the first time. Though there are apparently no immediate plans for a general income tax, VAT was introduced for the first time in 2018 and then tripled two years later.
Amid this latest barrage of wealth, Premier League CEO Richard Masters is remaining calm. “I wouldn’t be too concerned at the moment but, obviously, Saudi Arabian clubs have as much right to purchase players as any other league does.”
Privately, he and England’s top clubs – with the possible exception of Newcastle – should be nervous, as there is nothing to prevent the Saudi Pro League superseding the Premier League as football’s pre-eminent domestic competition.
Money is less a piece of matter in professional football than it is its entire gravitational pull. English football has rich history both at home and in European competition but this is mere background in the Premier League’s success, which is entirely down to money. The tradition and the deep, genuine support has been commodified in the pursuit of further wealth. These verities have not bestowed the Premier League with its eminence, however. No, the fact is more prosaic: the Premier League is currently the best in the world as it has concentrated many of the world’s best players by paying them more money than they would get anywhere else.
But if there is more money on offer somewhere else, then the best players will inevitably be attracted in that direction. In professional football, everyone has their price. Jordan Henderson has traded the Liverpool captaincy and the respect of the LGBTQ+ community for a reported £700,000 a week at Al-Ettifaq in Saudi Arabia. It’s claimed to be a life-changing amount of money but it’s certainly not a life-affirming sum.
When Bernardo Silva was linked with a move to the Saudi Pro League, Jamie Carragher was exercised to tweet his opinion, saying “when players in their prime are going & missing out on Champions League/European football that for me is a big problem for football.”
We have seen how the splintering of competition has diminished golf, and the same would likely happen to the club game if Mbappe and some of his prime-age peers headed for the Saudi Pro League, and the greater part of the damage would be inflicted upon the Champions League. (The winners in this case would be Fifa, whose upcoming 32-team Club World Cup would certainly be nicely-timed.)
European football should treat this as a very real prospect: the lure of tradition and heritage won’t be enough to keep the best players in Europe if they can make more money elsewhere. It would also be a deep hypocrisy for some clubs to play this card to guilt trip players whose heads have been turned, given many of them recently conspired in a bid to blow up the Champions League and establish their own competition.
Once upon a time English football was protected from outsized finance, with the FA’s rules limiting the size of the dividends that could be paid to club directors. Tottenham circumvented this in the 1980s by creating a holding company, of which the club became a subsidiary and was thus free to pay out whatever it liked to its owners. The FA didn’t step in to block it, in a Thatcherite flourish of light-touch regulation. Keith Burkinshaw wrote the era’s epitaph in reacting to the Spurs trick. “There used to be a football club over there.”
English clubs have been thirsting after finance ever since, which has culminated in what the Premier League has become today. But even the it cannot win a financial arms race with the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund.
Were the Premier League to suddenly lose value, the implications for English football could be catastrophic. The football pyramid is currently built of too many loss-making clubs, propped up by debt owed to benefactors who are chasing the riches of the Premier League’s promised land. A recent study by Analytics FC was startling: 63 of the 92 clubs in the Premier League and English Football Leagues are recording annual losses, which total £1.2billion. Collectively, English clubs owe their owners a total of £2.6 billion, which could technically be called in at any time.
Having wielded financial might over world football for years, the Premier League is vulnerable to dying by the sword by which it has lived.
The Saudi Pro League may be a relative backwater for now, but its awesome financial power can change all of that in a sport that has long since stopped believing in anything else.