Al-hilal is the most decorated club in Asia, if you ever participated in a pub quiz you’d be foolish not to know them.
But that’s just to say Saudis had a decent league (perhaps the best in the region) and a solid national team, featuring at the World Cups, even before becoming the retirement home for the former superstars. Their current model doesn’t make sense IMO, it’s a large country with significant population, if they were serious about becoming anyhow relevant in global football they’d try capitalize on that, hire the best coaches, get some state of the art training facilities, poach young foreign talent building academies in Africa, like Qatar does. The fact that the fans are fine with them spending the majority of money of foreign, past it players, IMO shows some inferiority complex still and for me their investment is shortsighted.