Saudi sportswashing experiment in shambles

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This article was published 16/02/2024 (961 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hear “Saudi Arabia” and you likely think “oil”, “human rights” or “Cristiano Ronaldo”, though not necessarily in that order.

The kingdom is savvy to how it’s perceived abroad, so having Ronaldo replace assassinated journalist “Jamal Khashoggi” in the lineup would tend to indicate its investment in sportswashing is paying off. Which is hardly surprising.

What was never anticipated is just how tenuous the project would seem, and how quickly. At least, on the football side. Make billions of riyals in state funds available, the thinking went, and the likes of Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Roberto Firmino, Aymeric Laporte and Jordan Henderson would get in line with their auto-deposit slips at the ready.

Well, it’s not worked out that way.

Henderson, the LGBTTQ+ advocate-turned-hypocrite is already gone, his Middle Eastern adventure ending after five months and 19 matches. “The best move for me and my family,” he insisted. And no doubt his wife would agree, what with the hissing aimed at her and her daughters while they fumbled with head coverings in public.

The 33-year-old former Liverpool captain moved to Amsterdam last month. No English club would touch him, quite ironically, as his own reputation had been irreparably soiled while he laundered someone else’s.

At least Henderson landed, however wobbly, on his feet. The Saudi Pro League’s other unhappy footballers – and there are more than a few – have yet to be so lucky.

Take Laporte, for example.

In refreshingly candid remarks made to Madrid daily AS in January, the Spain defender, currently with Ronaldo’s Al Nassr, said his new employers had not “made it easy” to settle into the culture and club. Ultimatums, he revealed, had been presented to administration — Al Nassr is owned by the state — but to no avail.

“You negotiate something and then they don’t accept it after you have signed it,” he said. “They fight you.”

Less pertinent to the actual football were the five-time Premier League champion’s frustrations with the lifestyle.

“Riyadh is a waste of traffic, of time wasted in the car,” he said. And, with astonishing honesty: “There are many players who are dissatisfied.”

Count Benzema among them. And Firmino. Neither is even playing at the moment — Benzema because he can’t stand his manager and Firmino because he can’t find the back of the net, or is simply uninterested. As was Neymar. Remember him?

Currently sidelined with a knee injury that has all but ruled him out of the upcoming Copa America, the Brazil forward’s lasting contribution to Al Hilal will likely be a single goal, five games played and a series of viral photos in which his face takes on progressively sadder expressions of sad.

Now, the Saudis can afford to lose Neymar — and Henderson, and eventually Laporte, Benzema, Firmino, Ruben Neves, Jota… the list goes on. So long as they have Ronaldo, anyway. Such is the ex-Manchester United, Real Madrid and Juventus marksman’s personal brand that he can blink funny and a hundred million people will have mentioned it on social media within the hour.

It’s a global fixation that also makes him dangerous.

On Wednesday, after scoring the winning goal in Al Nassr’s AFC Champions League round of 16 match away to Saudi rivals Al Fayha, Ronaldo cupped his ear as he looked to the fans — or, more accurately, searched for them in the stands.

Barely 3,000 of them had walked through the turnstiles of a stadium with a capacity of more than 44,000. Of course, no one should ever be compelled to attend a sporting event, so the embarrassment was felt less by the Al Fayha supporters than the Pro League project as a whole. Or, in other words, by the apparatus of the state.

If Ronaldo is dissatisfied and was sending a message with his gesture, it’ll have been received loud and clear. But at the end of the day, all the kingdom can do is spend money and sign players. That, or they could — and they may have already thought of this — pack the arenas with the hundreds of thousands of people their NEOM super-development has displaced.

Three thousand people, incidentally, represents a crowd three times bigger than the one that saw Henderson’s last win as an Al Ettifaq player. That one was nearly 10 times the size of the audience, all 133 of them, that turned up for Al Riyadh’s 1-0 loss to Al Okhdood in September.

Again, attendance figures point to many different things, but these ones indicate there isn’t even a novelty factor to the mercenaries hired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his other prince bros.

Again, that’s fine. Even unlimited resources can’t manufacture a football culture overnight. Then there’s the notion that the Pro League was never meant for domestic consumption, but rather overseas screens – screens that won’t stay on if big-name players aren’t involved.

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Move Henderson to Ajax and no one will much notice. Nor will most people care about Laporte’s road rage in Riyadh.

But remove Ronaldo and the whole thing falls apart. That’s how delicate it is. Take him out of the kingdom’s football and its perception reverts to “oil,” “human rights” and a third undesirable descriptor over which it has zero control.

And control – of narrative and ultimately of geopolitical power – is all this was ever about.

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