Until a couple of weeks ago, global sport thought it was in the midst of an ethical debate about Saudi money.
So what we are talking about here is a sports club paying $1-billion to acquire one player for one year only. Jordan Henderson is a good example. He was captain of Liverpool when Liverpool was the most admired team in the world. That wasn’t long ago , but things fall apart. Henderson is 33, slowing down and not good enough to start regularly for an elite European club any more.He can take that off his to-do list at Al-Ettifaq Football Club, because homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis aren’t constructing a top-class soccer league. Not with all the retreads and soon-to-be has-beens they’ve purchased. Your fellow French star, Kylian Mbappé, is getting offered many hundreds of millions of dollars to play in Saudi, where no one will ever see him. What are you getting paid to play in front of the whole world? A lousy US$12-million.