It’s not just going to Saudi Arabia that’s the issue, it is staying there. Lawyers, guns and money

 

By Tony Attwood

There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia is attracting some players – but there can be a problem, as a few are already finding out, in that what happens when one arrives might not be exactly what is expected.

Karim Benzema was one of the first to find that out.   He had been at Real Madrid for 14 years before deciding the make a bit more money at the end of his career in Saudi Arabia – in his case playing for Al-Ittihad a club based in the coastal city of Jeddah.

As ever in these cases the salary offer was enormous, coming in at over half a billion dollars if he stayed until 2026. 

However, it seems that the striker quickly fell out with his new employers, and has since been trying to find out, presumably with his lawyers, what the obligations of his new employers are, if any.  Not exactly another case of lawyers, guns and money but getting on that way.

Now the team in question, Al-Ittihad, is not one of the newly created entities set up to make the new league work.  They played at the King Abdullah Sports City, the second-largest stadium in Saudi Arabia, and pretty much the same size as Arsenal’s north London stadium.

And indeed they even have a celebrated local derby with  Al-Hilal, which is apparently known as the Saudi El Clasico.,  According to Wikipedia it is the most watched match in Saudi Arabia.

So with the club dating back to the 1920s, and the winner of a number of trophies across the decades – and indeed coming fourth in the 2005 Fifa Club World Championship, it looks like a real team and not one made up for the occasion. 

And yet, and yet, the manager of this esteemed club is Nuno Espirito Santo, who you might recall was sacked by Tottenham Hotspur after four months managing the club.   Anyway, he has said that he doesn’t have a role for his new player, and that the player was hired by the club owners without telling their club manager.   And rather bravely, given which country we are talking about, Nuno has said all this on the radio.

Now on hearing this, it appears that Benzema – a man who has won the Champions League five times as a player, felt rather miffed.  Both men are of course certain who is the key individual all this… the manager demands the right to manage and a player of such esteemed background and achievements expects to be able to stroll on the pitch and do his thing.

Benzema apparently has asked for a mediator to come in and fix the mess.   But Nuno has just won the league for his club for the first time in rather a large number of years, so he naturally says that he is the man hired to run the team.    The club has meanwhile said that the relationship between the two is “positive and ideal”.

Apparently, there are other problems too.  Jota moved from Celtic to the club and said he was ready to return to from whence he came after a couple of months, apparently because he too doesn’t have a place in the squad.   There has also been talk of Mohamed Salah joining them, but the local difficulties are not doing very much for the club’s international reputation.

And in matters like this reputation is everything.  The manager’s reputation to be in charge.  The player’s reputation to be seen as a top man in the team.

Some of the problems may well of course be cultural.   Democracies tend to have organisations that although under one all-powerful manager are still places where rules are set down and matters discussed.  Religious autocracies however tend to have a different set of views, which maybe only now the players are discovering.   Indeed, lawyers, guns and money.