Ronaldo v Benzema was perfect final flourish of transformative year for Saudi Pro League

There are four footballers on earth still active as professionals who have won the Ballon d’Or. There is only one league on the planet where you can see two of them on the same pitch.

With that unique billing, the Saudi Pro League ushered out a calendar year in which the unprecedented and the inimitable have been standard setting.

As it turned out, Cristiano Ronaldo versus Karim Benzema, Ballon d’Or winners six times between them and Real Madrid colleagues through nine years and 342 matches in an era that celebrated the might and recruitment power of Madrid, had plenty of drama.

For Al Ittihad, Benzema gave away a penalty, one of two converted by Al Nassr’s Ronaldo; Fabinho was sent off, Sadio Mane and Abderrazak Hamdallah both netted a brace. It finished 5-2 in Jeddah, a snapshot 90 minutes of how stardom and imported talent are contributing to the spectacle of a league undergoing massive transformation.

In less than two weeks, Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and outsiders Osasuna will travel to Riyadh for the Spanish Super Cup, an event originally expanded and exported to Saudi Arabia four years ago, when the hosting of major international events there was less routine than it has become. Back in 2019, the likes of Barca and Madrid confidently imagined they were the most glamorous footballing attraction of a Saudi winter.

This year, they will think again. On Tuesday night, when Ronaldo’s Al Nassr beat Benzema’s Al Ittihad, the ebb and flow of the fixture was rather more compelling – Al Ittihad took the lead, lost it, equalised and lost it again – than, say, the final of the Club World Cup, won at a canter by Manchester City in the same city four days earlier. There’s a live thread of competition across those two