Page 6 - Soccer360 - Issue 103

FIRST WORD
PREMIER LEAGUE HOLDS THE CROWN
IT’S DIFFICULT TO TAKE SERIOUSLY CRIES FROM THE ENGLISH FOOTBALL INTELLIGENTSIA ABOUT HIGH SPENDING IN THE SAUDI PRO LEAGUE, ARGUES GABY MCKAY.
Jordan Henderson was criticised for joining Saudi club Al-Ittifaq
‘JORDAN HENDERSON PROFESSED HIMSELF AN ALLY BUT DECIDED THE MONEY WAS MORE IMPORTANT’
The Saudi state controls four clubs in its own country – and Newcastle United
There is a period during the summer where outlandish news stories find their way to the front of the headlines and transfer speculation is top of the footballing agenda. In the UK they call it silly season, and it could hardly have been more silly than the summer of 2023. In June the Saudi state effectively nationalised four clubs in the country, including Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr, and promptly began throwing cash around.
The Portuguese superstar had joined in January on a scarcely believable deal believed to be worth over $200m per year and was now joined by some of European football’s biggest names on similarly lucrative salaries. Over the summer Ballon d’Or holder Karim Benzema, World Cup winner N’Golo Kante, treble winner with Manchester City Riyad Mahrez and many more made the move to the Middle East.
From Sergej Milinkovic-Savic to Kalidou Koulibaly, players swapped the biggest leagues in Europe for the wealth of Arabia in a way not even the brief explosion of the Chinese Super League back in 2012 could contend with.
Regular readers of this column will not be expecting to find a defence of the Saudi project here. Last year the state executed 81 people in a single day, and Saudi Arabia continues to wage a bloody war in Yemen - backed by western bombs and missiles - which has sparked a humanitarian crisis in the country.
Nor can much mitigation be offered to those
who choose to take the money. For a player like Jota, who swapped Scottish Premiership football
with Celtic for Al-Ittihad one could argue he’d
never be able to turn down the kind of money on the table. Players like Benzema or Kante, devout Muslims, may well see the appeal of spending their footballing dotage in an Islamic country. But what, then, of Jordan Henderson, that passionate ally to the LGBTQIA+ community?
Said he in October last year of the Premier League’s Rainbow Laces campaign: “The more we can understand, the more we can learn and the more we can stand together on issues like this, the more we will move towards the kind of inclusive society that is more welcoming of everyone.” Henderson regularly wore a rainbow armband and professed himself an ally, but when Al-Ittifaq came calling
the Liverpool captain decided - and objectively speaking this is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw - the money was more important. Homosexual activity is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and can even be punishable by death, and his new
club made sure to carefully edit out the rainbow armband in their announcement video. People hiding behind club badges on X - formerly Twitter
- inevitably responded by saying that we should ‘respect other cultures’. Respect other cultures? Absolutely yes. But saying that persecuting LGBTQIA+ people, or treating women as second- class citizens, is wrong is not a political position though, and by taking the cheque any player or manager who moves there is, at least implicitly, diminishing the importance of those concerns. Spare us, though, the hand-wringing emanating from the more shouty corners of English football.
A league with far more spending power than any
other is snatching your best players, is it? It might be time to take a look in the mirror.
Last season English clubs spent over €2.5bn on transfers - Serie A was second on €763m -and you have to go back to the 2001-02 season to find a year in which Premier League sides were not the biggest spenders.
Boyhood Milan fan Sandro Tonali, an Italian international, swapped the Rossoneri for Newcastle United while Crystal Palace spent £26m on a Brazilian wonderkid, Matheus Franca. That’s before you get to the youngsters being snapped up from academies across the continent to be stockpiled by the league’s biggest hitters.
Within the UK, where moving is easier and scouting less expensive, the trend is even more stark. Ben Doak, who came off the bench for Liverpool in their season opener, was poached from Celtic without ever playing a game for them. Billy Gilmour moved to Chelsea without a minute of competitive action for Rangers and the same was true of numerous others. At least Kilmarnock defender Charlie McArthur had a grand total of two appearances before being whisked away to Newcastle in the summer of 2022.
Given that last season’s treble winners and the team which crashed the top four are effectively owned by Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia respectively, and acknowledging mid-ranking English teams frequently outspend some of the giants from other countries, perhaps some self-reflection is in order before pointing the finger eastward.
6 SOCCER360 MAGAZINE
Tonali was tempted away from seven-time European champions Milan