Looking back it was easy to get swept away by what was happening in Saudi Arabia. A staggering feat of football revolution, unprecedented in the history of the game. What started out as Cristiano Ronaldo eventually became Karim Benzema. It became N’Golo Kante and Roberto Firmino, Aleksander Mitrovic and Riyad Mahrez.
As the days passed yet more players from Europe’s top leagues arrived in the kingdom until, like some sort of fever dream, one of them was the Brazilian superstar Neymar. It was a football transfer window like no other, global news merged with sporting frenzy. The problem was that, just for a beat, we were thinking too one-dimensionally about it all, sent off-track like a hapless defender from a Sadio Mane dropped shoulder. This wasn’t football, this was the show. This was tourism.
On April 25, 2016, the Saudi government announced Vision 2030, a robust and wide-ranging blueprint aimed at helping the country break its 65-year reliance on oil in favour of bringing tourists to Saudi shores. But while UNESCO Heritage sites such as AlUla and futuristic endeavours like Neom took the headlines, the reality was that there were far more ways to get the job done. Cue the Saudi Arabian Football Federation’s General Secretary Ibrahim Alkassim, ably assisted by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia’s (PIF) acquisition of the kingdom’s top four clubs: Al-Ittihad, Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal and Al-Ahli. A plan was hatched to not only plunder Europe’s top leagues for elite talent, but make Saudi Arabia a football nation of global repute. People would come as a result of this. People always do.
“In Saudi Arabia, the economy mainly depends on oil but part of this 2030 transformation is to diversify the economy,” explained Alkassim. “Vision 2030 stands on three main pillars, the first one of which is the quality of life. A part of the quality of life is sport.
“When we chose the tag Vision 2030, sport was just sport. But today sport is a bigger part of the economy. If you talk about the total ecosystem in any culture and any country, sport not only directly impacts the economy but also indirectly impacts other fields.”
To the neutral observer, football tourism might sound pretty niche. How can 22 men or women kicking a ball around a field for 90 minutes really boost a country’s economy in a global sense? Well, the simple answer is in every way possible. And it’s been happening for decades.
“To put it bluntly, there’s money in football tourism,” says Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School. “Figures from the English Premier League indicate that there are upwards of 1.5 million people visiting Britain each year to watch football. These people travel on airlines, use public transport, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, and visit shops and cultural attractions. There is consequently a tangible economic impact, which is boosted further by repeat visits (evidence shows that fans who visit once are likely to return more times). Given the tourism capacity that Saudi Arabia is developing, having a significant number of people visiting the country is a boon, helping to generate revenues but also promoting capacity utilisation.”
As Chadwick points out, the English Premier League is by far the biggest driver of football tourism in the world – a recent study on England’s top flight by Ernst & Young showed 686,000 people came to the country for the purpose of visiting one of its clubs and spent $687.9m during their stay – but there are signs that the Saudi Pro League might just have the potential to shift that balance. An identifier of changing times in the world’s most popular sport.
“When Ronaldo joined Al-Nassr it took the Saudi Pro League to a new level,” explains Ali Khaled, the sports editor at Arab News. “But once the newly PIF-owned clubs began ticking off major signings things shifted beyond all recognition. A sign of football’s shifting goalposts being that many observers saw this as being linked to an ‘entertainment’ umbrella as much as it was to the game itself.
“Suddenly, the Saudi Pro League had a heightened visibility around the world,” continues Khaled. “The best example of this I can give was when one of our reporters recently covered El Clásico (the name given to matches between Real Madrid and Barcelona). While there he found a yellow Cristiano Roanldo Al-Nassr shirt hanging in a shop window – something that simply wouldn’t have happened a few years ago. Bear in mind, too, that this was in Barcelona, not Madrid where Ronaldo had once played. Saudi football has a rapidly rising, global reputation.
“Closer to home I think that a lot of people in our own region are now looking to travel [to Saudi] and watch these games,” says Khaled. “Again, something that just didn’t happen previously. Over the last 10-15 years we’ve seen a huge rise in people travelling from the GCC area to go and watch football in Europe; the Premier League being the biggest draw, but also to Spain for La Liga. However I now think that we’ll see something of a reverse of that traffic. First of all, if you live in the GCC then travelling to Saudi rather than Europe obviously costs a lot less. Also, as it’s closer to home you only need to go for a few days, and yet you’ll be watching some of your favourite players. As a byproduct, I think that people around the world will start to see Saudi as a viable tourist destination. Football, as ever, is the great equaliser.”
It’s certainly true that the game has been known to breathe life into destinations previously unheard of on the tourist trail. Case in point, how Spain and Barcelona legend Andrés Iniesta single-handedly turned his home town of Fuentealbilla into a must-visit spot. After winning the Spanish treble in 2009, the midfielder announced in celebration, “Visca el Barça, visca Catalunya i visca Fuentealbilla” (Long live Barça, Catalonia and Fuentealbilla). Fuentealbilla’s Councillor for Culture later explained that this brief mention was the equivalent of a “multi-million euro” campaign. Five years later, Rey Juan Carlos University conducted a study to measure the impact of Iniesta’s impact on tourism in the area, and most of the respondents who visited the town said that they only knew about it because of Iniesta’s exclamation.
On the subject of player power, a 2021 article from the Barca Innovation Hub explained another study in football-related tourism, the so-called “Nakata effect.” In 1998, when Japanese player Hidoteshi Nakata signed for Perugia, at that point playing in the Italian Serie A, 5,000 Japanese tourists came to watch his debut. During that season there was an average of 300 Japanese fans in the stadium for each game. When Nakata was eventually sold to Parma two years later it became the second biggest tourist destination in Italy for Japanese visitors, even ahead of high profile cities such as Venice and Florence.
Consulting a fixture list might seem a rather odd way to plan a holiday, at least to a non-football fan. For the rest of us it’s simply how we’ve travelled, accepted wedding invites, and planned family events for years. In lieu of having to consult the weather – it’s the Middle East after all – it’s now the football calendar dictating movement into Saudi.
Floyd Meenan is a British expat on his second stint in Dubai and, as a Manchester United fan, is looking to take his two sons over to Saudi to watch Cristiano Ronaldo (the aim being Al-Nassr versus Al-Ahli). “I probably wouldn’t have travelled there [Saudi Arabia] previously as a tourist,” admits Meenan. “In truth that was based on a lack of knowledge and general stereotypes. But while the current plan is to just go and watch some football, as the country develops I would certainly be interested in visiting other places. Perhaps Neom and the Red Sea developments. If we started to visit regularly for football, and learn more about the country, I’m sure we’ll visit other areas, too.”
Unsurprisingly, discovering a nation through a filter of football is exactly what the Saudis have in mind, and it’s a blueprint that has been developed – and utilisied – by countries in Europe and South America for decades. So, maybe you would like to spend time by the sea in Jeddah? In which case you can go watch the 2023 Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema lead the line for current Saudi Pro League champions Al-Ittihad. If flying wingers are your thing, then you also have the option of heading across town to see Riyad Mahrez and Allan Saint-Maximin bamboozle their respective full-backs for newly promoted Al-Ahli. While there, Muslim travellers have the option of visiting the city of Mecca, just a short 57-minute drive down the road.
If Riyadh and big names are your thing, then you can watch Cristiano Ronaldo power Al-Nassr forward in a bid to improve on last season’s second place, or alternatively marvel at the trickery of Neymar at Al-Hilal. After that head to the At-Turaif District in ad-Dir’iyah, a 15th century UNESCO Heritage site that was the very first capital of the Saudi dynasty.
It’s worth noting that Saudi’s vision doesn’t just involve football either. Even those with the vaguest interest in sport will have taken note as it recently hoovered up high profile events ranging from boxing to F1, UFC to golf. So, maybe you’ll combine sports for your visit? Come to Jeddah in early March 2024 for example, and watch Al-Ahli versus Al-Fateh with the added bonus of also being able to catch the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
While there has undoubtedly been some pushback to Saudi’s football power grab, the reality is that this is a long-term plan aimed at not only having a globally recognised football league, but also legitimising the kingdom as a country worth your hard-earned tourist cash. What happened this summer changed everything. Saudi Arabia hopes that this change is good.
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