If sustained, the scale of the finance behind the Saudi Pro League means that, even if Mbappé follows
Lionel Messi in choosing to play elsewhere, the flow of talent towards the highest pay on offer is now inevitable. If you want to watch the best players, consume the premium product, the Saudi league may soon be a fixture in your content mix. But will anything truly change in the relationship between the fans and a sport that could plausibly be under new ownership soon? Or is this merely a further debasement of an already utterly corrupted product that we’ll nevertheless keep on consuming?
Fans with attachments to domestic leagues in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, Belgium or Scotland have seen this sort of thing before. Accelerating in the early 1990s, the successful commercialisation and marketisation to global TV audiences of a small number of powerful leagues led to an increased concentration of talent in England, Spain and Italy, directly at the expense of “smaller” leagues, which were turned into relative backwaters. The extractive relationship between European football and the African continent had been established long before, running directly along colonial lines.
The hoarding of talent may have hollowed out other leagues, but in England the Premier League is celebrated as a great national success story regardless. Subsequent attempts to protect the integrity of competition from the “financial doping” of petro-states and oligarchs have proved no match for the legal teams of alleged offenders.
US billionaires, hedge funds and private equity companies are now widely regarded as a relatively bland, least-bad option as club owners. Crucially, for the most part they have politely chosen to keep elite football at “home” (ie in powerful European nations), allowing the illusion to persist that it is still “our” game, no matter how high the cost of tickets and subscriptions for us to be allowed to enjoy it.
You might think football belongs to the people, but rest assured it is already a minor, if particularly conspicuous, part of someone else’s diversified and sustainable investment portfolio.