No one cares about Saudi league

Opinion

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This article was published 23/08/2024 (380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Does he want us to laugh? To groan? To sympathize? Maybe just look at him?

There’s not much else to look at, after all — something he seems to finally understand.

Cristiano Ronaldo threw a tantrum last weekend. That is, he threw one tantrum after the next as the Al-Nassr team he captains conceded four goals in 17 minutes to Al-Hilal in the final of the Saudi Super Cup. Many of his teammates, we’re given to believe, suck.

We don’t really know, and can only take Ronaldo at his frenzied, infantile word, given that nobody actually watches Saudi Arabian club football. Video clips of the five-time Ballon d’Or winner simply made the rounds on social media so the player’s remaining fans could laugh, groan, sympathize or maybe just look at him.

Yet, he still has sufficient personal support to set subscription records on his newly-launched YouTube channel. They are the only records even slightly associated — and in a very adjacent, barely-affiliated kind of way — with Saudi football that are being established.

Not that the Saudi Pro League or Al-Nassr, or anything that hints at either, are featured on the platform. No, its viewers can instead be regaled by footage of Ronaldo going for a bike ride and asking his partner, Georgina, to guess his favourite colour.

Ronaldo has clued into the fact that Saudi football is bad for his brand, which is bad news for Saudi football. As if it needed more.

You see, when we say that nobody actually watches the Saudi Pro League, we’re obviously engaging in hyperbole. But just barely.

Last March, despite a prime-time kick-off involving Al-Hilal and Al-Ittihad, and featuring well-known players such as Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, Kalidou Koulibaly, Fabinho and N’Golo Kante, fewer than 5,000 viewers tuned in to watch on France’s Canal+, representing a network share of zero.

Zero.

Since re-creating the league — which involved bringing much of it under government control — and signing the likes of Neymar, Karim Benzema, Sadio Mane, Riyad Mahrez and, of course, Ronaldo to astronomical contracts, the Kingdom has nevertheless failed to stamp so much as a footprint on the sporting landscape.

“The Saudi Pro League’s media flop” was how L’Equipe headlined the phenomenon, or lack thereof, in an investigation conducted in the spring. “Neither the billions invested nor the star players who have become ambassadors on social networks have been enough to transform this bling-bling Championship into a television success,” the article analyzed.

L’Equipe also found, as has anyone who’s pursued authentic viewership data, that the information ecosystem has been mostly cleansed of streaming numbers that could potentially be construed as embarrassing — which, in itself, is embarrassing enough. Because no doubt they’d be crowing about ratings that were in any way positive, or even promising.

Traditional TV figures, however, aren’t as easy to hide — especially in cases such as Spain’s Canal Cuatro, which simply stopped broadcasting Saudi Pro League matches for the final two months of last season.

Outlets make such decisions based on commercial viability, although the indirect consequence of Saudi Arabia’s sportwashing reaching so few eyes is a happy development.

As recently as June, a complaint of forced labour against the Saudi government was filed at the International Labour Organization in Geneva — the abuses involving parts of a massive migrant workforce recruited to construct the futuristic city of Neom. In may, the BBC reported just the latest incidents of forced relocation from the Neom path, which has included the expulsions of tens of thousands of people and the erasure of entire towns from the map.

Neom is the jewel in both the Kingdom’s diversification away from an oil-based economy and its successful acquisition of the 2034 World Cup.

Given that the salaries of big-name Saudi Pro League players and managers, the latter including Steven Gerrard and Laurent Blanc, are paid by the government, it is not hyperbole to suggest these individuals are active helpers to an ongoing human tragedy.

The less they are seen or even remembered, the better. (Without Googling, where does Gerrard manage? Exactly.)

Put more crudely, albeit fairly, they are losers. And even if the entire Saudi football project is reduced to its basic, on-field product, they are losers still.

On Wednesday, Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr played its first home game of the season. The stadium was less than a quarter full. Ronaldo doesn’t want to play in front of three-quarters empty stadiums with teammates that drive him to tantrums. That makes him a loser.

Similarly, viewers don’t want to watch a match that can’t even draw local support. The crowd is part of the spectacle, and if there isn’t one they end up feeling like losers as well.

In the end, nobody’s laughing; nobody’s groaning; nobody’s sympathizing. Nobody’s looking.

When it comes to the Saudi Pro League, they simply don’t care.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

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