The 27th minute of the AFC Champions League Elite final, King Abdullah Sports City, Jeddah, 26 April 2026. Ivan Toney peels off the back shoulder of Machida Zelvia’s right centre-back, takes a clipped pass from Riyad Mahrez on his chest, and is fouled inside the box. The referee waves play on for an advantage that does not arrive. Twenty seconds later Toney is booked for dissent. Ninety minutes will end goalless. Firas Al-Burikan, the Saudi international striker introduced from the bench, will score the only goal of the night three minutes into the second half of extra time, and Al-Ahli will retain the trophy they won twelve months earlier against Kawasaki Frontale.
The image that travels — the one Saudi state broadcasters lead with the next morning — is Mahrez lifting the cup for the second consecutive year, with Toney, Roberto Firmino and Franck Kessié around him. It is a photograph that, on its own terms, looks like vindication. Two years of continental dominance. A Saudi club, with Saudi ownership, with a foreign spine and a Saudi captain in Al-Burikan delivering the decisive moment. The project, on this evidence, works.
The honest assessment is more complicated than that. It is more complicated than the boosterism, and it is more complicated than the dismissal. Three years and four months on from Ronaldo’s signing — Al-Nassr announced the agreement on 30 December 2022, and he made his debut on 22 January 2023 — the Saudi Pro League is not the league it told the world it would be in 2023, and it is not the failed bubble that critics predicted in 2024 either. It is something more interesting and more uneven than that, and it is worth trying to describe it precisely.
What the project actually was
The June 2023 transfer window remains the load-bearing event in the league’s recent history. Karim Benzema joined Al-Ittihad on a Bosman from Real Madrid. N’Golo Kanté followed him on a free. Sadio Mané left Bayern for Al-Nassr to play alongside Ronaldo. Riyad Mahrez left Manchester City for Al-Ahli. Rúben Neves left Wolves for Al-Hilal. In August, Neymar arrived at Al-Hilal from PSG for a reported €90m fee on wages reported in the €150–200m-per-year range. The Saudi Pro League’s transfer net spend that summer reached just under $1 billion, second in the world behind only the Premier League.
The structural ambition behind the spending was clear, if not always coherently articulated. Four PIF-owned clubs — Al-Hilal, Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad, Al-Ahli — were to function as a marquee tier, capable of attracting and paying late-prime European stars on contracts that no European club could match. The league would, on this strategy, become a “top-five league” inside a decade. The Saudi national team, the long-term hosting infrastructure, and the AFC Champions League would benefit downstream. The branding around the project — Roshn League, the rebrand of the broadcast rights, the partnership with EA Sports — was, throughout, the surface of a sovereign-wealth strategy that ran deeper than the football.
It is worth being honest about what was bought. The 2023–24 league season had Ronaldo, Mané, Otávio and Aymeric Laporte at Al-Nassr; Benzema, Fabinho and Kanté at Al-Ittihad; Neymar, Neves, Koulibaly, Milinković-Savić and Malcom at Al-Hilal; Mahrez, Firmino and Édouard Mendy at Al-Ahli. It was, at the level of name recognition, the most expensively assembled non-European league in football history. Al-Hilal won the title with 96 points from 34 games, an unbeaten league campaign — their nineteenth domestic championship.
The slowdown
The 2024 summer transfer window was the first signal that the strategy had been recalibrated. SPL clubs spent roughly €530m gross — about half the 2023 figure. The biggest signing was Moussa Diaby to Al-Ittihad from Aston Villa for around €60m. Ivan Toney to Al-Ahli (around €40m from Brentford) and João Cancelo to Al-Hilal were the other headline moves. Bloomberg had reported in March 2024 that PIF had instructed Saudi clubs to curb spending in the next window. The reasons given, broadly, were fiscal: oil revenues had softened, the giga-projects programme — NEOM, the Line, Qiddiya — was running at scale, and the football vertical was being told to find sustainability earlier than originally planned.
Summer 2025 sat between the two extremes. Al-Hilal, under newly appointed head coach Simone Inzaghi, signed Darwin Núñez from Liverpool for around €53m and Theo Hernández from Milan for around €25m. Al-Nassr added João Félix from Chelsea for around €50m and Kingsley Coman from Bayern for around €35m. Al-Qadsiah crossed €100m in summer outlay. The total spend rose from 2024’s level but remained well below the 2023 peak, and the structure had visibly shifted: signings were younger, contracts were shorter, image-rights weighting was reportedly heavier in the wage compositions.
The Neymar exit, in January 2025, told its own story. Al-Hilal terminated his contract by mutual consent. He had played seven competitive matches across eighteen months. An ACL rupture on Brazil duty in October 2023 had taken him out for the entire 2023–24 season; a hamstring problem on his return cut short his comeback. The club, on most reasonable accounting, paid roughly €230m in fees and wages for those seven appearances. Whatever the marketing return, the football return was zero.
Karim Benzema’s path has been less catastrophic but similarly instructive. He stayed at Al-Ittihad through the 2024–25 title-winning campaign, was reportedly at the centre of contract disputes through January 2026, and on the final day of the 2025–26 winter window terminated his Ittihad contract and signed for Al-Hilal on a free until 2027. Sadio Mané, after persistent transfer speculation across summer 2025, has stayed at Al-Nassr; reporting through the year suggested both Inter and Fenerbahçe had been linked, and that the foreign-player slot constraints rather than performance issues had driven the speculation.
The pattern, read across the three windows, is not collapse. It is the maturation, painful and partial, of a wage structure that began with no upper bound and has been slowly forced to acknowledge one.
The football
The on-pitch story is more textured than the spending story, and it has been less well covered.
Al-Hilal’s domestic dominance broke. They won the league in 2023–24 unbeaten. They lost it in 2024–25, finishing nine points behind Al-Ittihad — Al-Ittihad’s tenth title, secured with two games to spare under Laurent Blanc. The 2024–25 campaign was Al-Hilal’s first season since the Neymar departure and a season of structural transition; the squad rebuild around Inzaghi began the following summer.
The continental record is the more interesting line. Al-Hilal exited the 2024–25 AFC Champions League Elite at the semi-final stage, beaten 3–1 by Al-Ahli in Jeddah on 29 April 2025 with Koulibaly sent off after a second yellow. Al-Ahli went on to beat Kawasaki Frontale 2–0 in the final, with Galeno and Kessié scoring inside the first half-hour, completing an unbeaten campaign and winning the club’s first Asian title. Firmino was named MVP. A year later, on 26 April 2026, Al-Ahli beat Machida Zelvia 1–0 after extra time to defend the trophy.
Two consecutive Champions League titles for the same Saudi club is not, in itself, a transformation of the Asian football landscape. Saudi clubs have won the AFC Champions League before — Al-Hilal four times, Al-Ittihad twice — and the dominance of Gulf clubs in the AFC era has been a recurring theme regardless of the SPL’s marquee project. But the depth of squad behind Al-Ahli’s two-year run is recognisably the post-2023 product: Mahrez and Firmino as the technical spine, Toney as the centre-forward, Mendy in goal, Kessié in midfield, Demiral and Ibañez at centre-back. Saudi football’s continental peak is, currently, an entirely-foreign-spine team with a Saudi captain in Al-Burikan and Saudi internationals filling the rotational slots.
The J1 League comparison is awkward but worth making. Kawasaki Frontale and Machida Zelvia, the two Japanese sides who reached the last two finals, did so with squads whose total wage bills would not buy a single Al-Ahli starter. They were, in both finals, structurally out-coached and physically outpaced. The football, watched on the eye, is what one would expect of the spending differential. The political question — whether that differential is a sustainable foundation for an Asian football pyramid — is a separate and more difficult one.
The development question
The harder question, and the one the league’s marketing has been least willing to engage with, is whether Saudi-born players are improving in measurable ways.
The available data is not encouraging at the surface level. U23 minutes in the SPL across recent seasons have run at roughly 10–12% of total league minutes, against 16–27% in the Big Five European leagues. Saudi nationals as a whole account for about 42% of league minutes — a figure consistent with most top leagues’ domestic share, and held up by a handful of smaller clubs (Al-Wehda, Al-Khaleej, Al-Raed, Al-Fateh, Al-Qadsiah) that run squads built mostly around domestic players because they cannot compete at the top of the wage bill. The Saudi Pro League in 2023 introduced regulatory measures intended to push youth integration: reduced squad sizes for over-21s, two international squad slots reserved for players born in 2003 or later. The numbers have moved, but slowly.
The structural problem is straightforward. A league whose top tier is dominated by foreign late-career signings on contracts that occupy a disproportionate share of the wage budget will, mechanically, have less space for domestic development at the top end. The middle of the league does development work; the top of the league does marketing. The hope, articulated more than once by SPL administrators, is that the marketing tier eventually subsidises the development tier through revenue and infrastructure investment. Three years in, the evidence for that downstream effect is partial.
The Saudi national team picture is uneven. Hervé Renard’s reappointment in 2023, the World Cup 2026 qualifying campaign that did not produce direct qualification, the change to Donis as head coach — none of this reads like a national team that has visibly benefited from a marquee league above it. Saudi Arabia is the host of the 2027 AFC Asian Cup and therefore qualifies automatically. The tournament will run from 7 January to 5 February 2027 across Riyadh, Jeddah and Khobar, with the opening match and final at the redeveloped 70,000-capacity King Fahd Sports City Stadium. The hosting will be a useful test case for whether the league’s three-year project has produced anything that translates into a national team capable of competing at confederation level on the pitch as well as on paper.
The geopolitics
None of this can be analysed without acknowledging the political frame, and it is worth acknowledging it directly rather than gesturing at it.
The 2034 World Cup was awarded to Saudi Arabia by FIFA on 11 December 2024, on an uncontested bid, by acclamation. The vote was paired, structurally, with the 2030 award to a Spain-Portugal-Morocco co-host with three South American matches, in a process that human rights organisations and several European federations had publicly criticised as designed to suppress competing 2034 bids. Saudi Arabia’s bid scored 4.2 out of 5 in FIFA’s evaluation report, the highest score in the history of the process. The tournament will be the first 48-team World Cup hosted by a single nation, played across five cities — Riyadh, Jeddah, Khobar, NEOM, Abha — with fifteen stadiums, ten of them new.
The football-political reading of the SPL’s three-year arc has to begin from this hosting decision. The marquee signings of 2023, the spending pullback of 2024, the more measured 2025 window, the youth-development regulations, the AFC Champions League titles — all of it sits inside a longer-term hosting strategy whose endpoint, on current planning, is summer 2034. The league does not need to be commercially self-sufficient on its own terms to be considered successful by its own backers, because its purpose has always been broader than its commercial line.
That observation is not, in itself, a moral verdict. It is a description. But the description matters, because it changes what counts as evidence of the project’s success. A football journalist asking whether the SPL has “made it” by European commercial standards is asking a question that the project’s own architects have never fully accepted as the relevant one. The relevant question, to its backers, is whether the league has built the football infrastructure, the international visibility, and the soft-power architecture that the 2034 hosting was always going to require.
By that measure, three years in, the project has done much of what it set out to do. It has made the Saudi clubs continental champions. It has put the league on European broadcast schedules. It has built a sovereign-wealth-backed wage structure that will not, in any plausible scenario, collapse before 2034. It has not produced a competitive Saudi national team, and it has not produced a deep domestic player pipeline, but it has produced the visibility and the venues that the hosting cycle requires.
Whether that constitutes “having legs” depends on what one considers the body of the project to be. As a sustainable commercial league competing with the Big Five on football grounds, the SPL three years in is unconvincing — its top tier is over-reliant on imported late-career talent, its development pipeline is shallow, and its competitive depth past the four PIF-owned clubs is thin. As a hosting-cycle infrastructure project running on a ten-year horizon backed by sovereign wealth, it is on track and probably ahead of schedule.
The honest answer to the question this piece set out to ask is, then, two answers. The first is football. The second is everything the football has been built to enable. Both readings are correct. Each obscures the other if used alone.
The harder question — the one Western football coverage has been least willing to engage with directly, on either side of the boosterism-or-dismissal axis — is what the next eight years look like for a league whose football identity remains unsettled and whose political function is not. Three years in, the project has legs. Whose body those legs are attached to, and where it is walking, is the question that has not yet been honestly asked.