At the time of writing, officials from Al-Hilal are in Paris negotiating the transfer of Kylian Mbappé, who will be expected to replace some of the 26 goals provided last season by Odion Ighalo. With forward Luciano Vietto also leaving in the summer, the Blue Waves have joined the list of clubs in the Saudi Pro League looking for a proven goalscorer who can also play out wide. Although you also wonder how Mbappé’s arrival will impact the club’s current left winger and star of the recent World Cup, the veteran Salem al-Dawsari. What a way to treat a club legend.
Perhaps on reflection this is the only respect in which the signing of Mbappé from Paris Saint-Germain makes any kind of sense: as a footballing solution to a footballing problem, the missing piece of the Al-Hilal jigsaw. Will defenders be wary of fouling Mbappé on the edge of the penalty area, given the presence of Rúben Neves on free-kick duty? Will Neves even be allowed to take the free-kicks? How will Mbappé adapt to the pace and intensity of the Pro League? Will he gel with Moussa Marega? And if not, who will be the one to make way? The new coach, Jorge Jesus, may end up with a dilemma on his hands.
Approach this whole affair from any other angle, however, and quite frankly it disintegrates on contact. In the first instance, there are no guarantees that Mbappé is even interested in a move. According to L’Equipe, he has refused even to enter into discussions. This is, after all, one of the world’s outstanding forwards, and there is an understandable reluctance to decamp to an uncompetitive league with a tiny international audience, where he will doubtless be used as a public relations tool for one of the world’s most abusive regimes. Say what you like about Mbappé, but he learns from his mistakes.
Nor does this make any sense as a kind of 4D chess, a short-term expedient that would allow Mbappé to make his dream move to Real Madrid in a year’s time. Mbappé’s proposed Al-Hilal deal, which with commercial addenda is worth a potential £770m, would be far beyond even the generous leveraging facilities of a superclub like Madrid.
Is your first overture to the golden boy really going to be an offer to slash his wages? And from the Saudi perspective, what exactly is the point of positioning yourself as a rival to the big European leagues when you essentially allow yourself to become a stepping stone to La Liga? Congratulations: you’ve spent £1bn on becoming the new Tottenham.
The natural reaction here is to be a little dazed and confused, to mutter churlishly about how the game’s gone, to deconceptualise these big numbers – the £259m transfer fee, the £171m base salary – as if they were not real money that could be used to improve the lives of real people. The money Al-Hilal are proposing to spend on Mbappé – money that will probably not be covered by increased ticket and pie sales at the King Fahd – is worth more than La Liga’s entire international broadcast rights.
It’s more than the entire wage bill of the Championship. And even if it is comparatively small feed in comparison to the deals and contracts signed by the Saudi state on a weekly basis, its significance is colossal for two main reasons.
For one thing, there are the identities of the buyer and the seller. You can dress this thing up in as many shells and disguises as you want: this is in effect a business deal between the Saudi Arabian state and the Qatari state with football as its backdrop.
Relations have been slowly thawing ever since the Saudis and other states lifted their blockade on Qatar in 2021, a rapprochement most visible in the crown prince’s attendance at the recent World Cup. Meanwhile, analysts have noted a growing rift between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Their two leaders Mohammad bin Salman and Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan have reportedly not spoken for six months. Really this is transfer gossip as a form of diplomacy, a geopolitical realignment unfolding via the yellow ticker of Sky Sports News.
The other significance is for Mbappé himself. Here is one of the world’s greatest footballers essentially trapped by his own success, much like Lionel Messi before him. Of all the world’s top clubs, how many could realistically afford him? Not Liverpool or Arsenal, not Bayern Munich or Juventus, and barely Madrid, who have already pledged around £860m to the refurbishment of the Bernabéu. And before you break out the world’s smallest string quartet, of course Mbappé has benefited immensely from this very same system of exploitation and exponential growth. But on a purely sporting level, there is a kind of heartbreaking inefficiency to a market that forces its best assets to choose between a massive pay cut or a massive brake on ambition.
And so in effect it makes very little difference if Mbappé ultimately decides to move to Al-Hilal or not. The structures and power imbalances that generated his predicament are perfectly capable of generating others: footballers as tools of foreign policy, sporting talent as a commodity to be traded between states, the sport itself as a poker game between the world’s richest men. Wise and sane voices have spent years warning that this was football’s inexorable future. It is now an inescapable feature of our present.
