Saudi football rise ‘long-term project’, says top official

Riyadh: Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary football expansion is a “long-term project” with strong government support, unlike the short-lived Chinese boom, a senior league official told AFP. The Saudi Pro League has a years-long commitment from the oil-rich kingdom’s rulers in its goal to become one of the world’s top competitions, chief operating officer Carlo Nohra said. Nohra was speaking at Al-Hilal’s unveiling of Brazilian superstar Neymar, who joins Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and a host of other big names in a spending binge costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s not something that we expect will happen overnight. It’s not a one-weekend event — this is a long-term project, and everybody accepts that that’s what it’s going to take,” Nohra said at the King Fahd International Stadium late on Saturday. “And it’s not a function of throwing money at it and it will happen,” he added.

“It is ensuring that we do all the right things along the way to bring everything and everybody and the ecosystem up together.” The Saudi league’s rapid expansion has drawn comparisons with the Chinese Super League, which sucked in players for exorbitant sums until clubs hit financial problems. At one stage, Guangzhou Evergrande made little-known Argentine Dario Conca one of the world’s best-paid players, and Shanghai Shenhua was lavishing a reported 730,000 euros ($795,000) a week on an aging Carlos Tevez. “These comparisons are inevitable,” said Nohra.