2023-06-02 22:32:47
newspaper revealedThe New York TimesThe American newspaper, Friday, stated that Saudi Arabia has developed a plan supported by the highest levels in the country and funded by the sovereign wealth fund, in order to transform the local football league into a destination for the best football talents in the world.
The newspaper said that Saudi Arabia is seeking to attract some of the most famous soccer players in the world to join Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays in its national league.
She added that lists of the names of the targeted players had already been drawn up, and the necessary funding had also been funded.
To achieve this, the newspaper indicates that Saudi clubs are already communicating with players who accept the idea of moving to the Kingdom by offering them annual salaries, the highest in the history of sports.
And it indicated that such deals require more than a billion dollars for the wages of about 20 foreign players.
The newspaper says that Ronaldo, the best player in the world five times, was the first target of the Saudi League.
Ronaldo joined the Saudi club Al-Nasr after the Qatar World Cup in a deal that was said to be worth $200 million per season.
Although he has not achieved any championship with the club so far, officials in the Saudi League believe that Ronaldo’s presence represents a victory, because it guaranteed unprecedented interest in the Saudi Premier League.
Since Ronaldo’s arrival, the Saudi League has been studying whether to coordinate centrally on more massive signings, distributing talent equally among the major clubs, according to interviews conducted by the newspaper, Americans, with agents, television executives, Saudi sports officials, and consultants hired to implement the project.
According to the New York Times, according to people familiar with the project, the league, not the clubs, will centrally negotiate player transfers and then determine their destination for a specific club.
The amount of funding allocated to the project was not announced, but informed officials told the newspaper that it would be very large.
The newspaper adds that a lot of the money invested in the league and clubs recently came from the sovereign wealth fund, which is headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
She notes that the fund signed 20-year commercial agreements worth tens of millions with the four most famous clubs in the Saudi Premier League.
The deals would require the four teams, two from Riyadh and two from Jeddah, to play in new stadiums being built by subsidiaries of the sovereign wealth fund.
One of the people, who was briefed on the plans and spoke to the American newspaper on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly, said that the goal is for the four big teams to include three senior foreign players for each team, while the remaining eight players are distributed among the other 12 teams in the field. league.
Recently, media reports revealed that Saudi Arabia is close to signing the Argentine star, Lionel Messi, and other senior players, including the French star, Karim Benzema, the Croatian, Luka Modric, and the Spaniards, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba.
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