Will Euro 2024 prompt players to re-evaluate the strength of the Saudi Pro League?

Beyond the acclaim for Lamine Yamal and the praise of Dani Olmo’s performances, and the now-standard sense of awe at another game directed by Rodri, it was easy to miss one of Spain’s outstanding performers in their European Championship semi-final win over France on Tuesday.

Aymeric Laporte not only had to deal with a rotating cast of central-defensive partners but also three different French centre-forwards. It’s easy to blame those attackers for another blunt France performance, but it’s worth at least considering the possibility that they weren’t allowed to be threatening by Laporte, who was outstanding throughout.

It may have been even sweeter for Laporte, given he is only playing for Spain because the increasingly desperate-looking guy in the opposing dugout in Munich during that semi-final, France coach Didier Deschamps, ignored him for years, prompting his international switch from the nation of his birth to the one of his upbringing.

For France, N’Golo Kante did not have his best night but he had plenty of those earlier in the tournament, winning man of the match in France’s first two games and prompting the sort of warm affection you would direct towards a beloved old friend back in your life again after a period out of contact.

Earlier in the competition, Turkey’s path to a slightly unlikely quarter-finals spot was bulldozed by Merih Demiral, who not only scored both of their goals in the last-16 against Austria but threw himself in front of everything at the other end. One of the pities about his ‘Grey Wolf’ celebration and subsequent suspension was that it overshadowed just how good he was in that game.

You wonder how Turkey would have fared in their quarter-final against the Netherlands had Demiral been available.

Centre-back Solomon Kvirkvelia was one of the background players in Georgia’s extraordinary progress from the group phase, but a key one nonetheless. Nicolae Stanciu scored one of the best goals of the early stages for Romania, his rasping strike against Ukraine ultimately proving a significant factor in them winning Group E. Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, erstwhile transfer-gossip column stalwart, was probably Serbia’s best player at the tournament.

You’ve probably spotted the common theme here.

All of the above play for clubs in the Saudi Pro League (SPL), the cash-stacked footballing outpost that threatened — and may still threaten — the status of Europe’s top leagues as the game’s financial big dog.

The SPL provided 14 players to Euro 2024 in total, which is the most for a league not from a country taking part. (Belgium’s first-choice goalkeeper Koen Casteels could be classed as a 15th, though he only signed for Al Qadsiah from Wolfsburg in Germany four days before its opening game.) The next on that list is Greece, with 12. The SPL is also the tournament’s best-represented non-European league, ahead of the seven MLS players. It is more than the Portuguese Primera Liga, which provided 10.

It would be easy to think of the SPL as a retirement league, football’s equivalent of that myth about the Inuit pushing their elders out to sea on ice floes having served their useful purpose. But rather than a freezing death, their fate is to simply make more money than even an already highly-paid footballer could previously have imagined, having sold their sporting souls (and, perhaps, their actual soul) to provide a comfortable lifestyle for their children’s children.

And perhaps it is.

Few will argue that the standard of the SPL is anything close to the divisions most of those players left behind. The presence of a few big names does not a good league make, as the old North American Soccer League, the Qatar Stars League and the Chinese Super League will tell you.

Plus, while I’ve picked out the SPL players who did well in Germany, there are contrary examples too. Yannick Carrasco started as a left wing-back in Belgium’s defeat to Slovakia, was reduced to cameos off the bench for the remainder of the group stage, and struggled to influence the team as they slipped out in the round of 16 against France. Georginio Wijnaldum hasn’t been a factor for the Dutch. Ruben Neves barely got on for Portugal.

Then, of course, there is the looming spectre above all of this; the man who surely has set new records for the ‘volume of discussion/negligible actual impact on football games’ ratio at this tournament.

Cristiano Ronaldo played more minutes than any other Portugal player, which you could either view as an achievement in itself at 39 years of age or the result of managerial cowardice, with Roberto Martinez unable/unwilling to withdraw this fading legend despite him resembling a semi-sentient traffic cone for most of the time.

There was an assist, and a couple of penalties in shootouts but, beyond that, Ronaldo’s most obvious contributions were flapping his arms in disgust every time a colleague dared to pass to someone not named Ronaldo, and bursting into tears after he missed a penalty. It’s worth noting that, after Portugal were knocked out by France when Ronaldo did score his penalty — and thus didn’t personally suffer any trauma — the big man’s eyes were conspicuously dry.

But despite some poor performances from SPL players, the good ones present a slightly uncomfortable truth for those of us who thought the careers of those who joined Mohammed bin Salman’s great sports-washing project (non-Newcastle division) were effectively over.

It might be that playing a season in a lower quality/less competitive league is the perfect way to prepare for a summer tournament; the SPL players might be a little fresher, a little less battered, than their Europe-based contemporaries. One of the underlying themes of the bigger teams at Euro 2024, England and France in particular, is that the players who have 50 to 60 top-level club games under their belts since last August look shattered.

You do wonder how many times Gareth Southgate, as he watched Kante while bemoaning the loss of Kalvin Phillips and trying three different midfield partners for Declan Rice, wondered if he might have been a bit hasty in jettisoning Jordan Henderson, after his own half-season in Saudi Arabia.

But it’s possible there is no overarching reason for Laporte, Kante and Demiral to perform better than most of us expected in the past few weeks.

The logic is that players from a lower-quality league will not be good at an international tournament. But if you flip that around, it would mean players who have dominated higher-quality leagues this season would automatically perform brilliantly at the Euros. Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane and most of the Italy team, among others, have proved that not to be true.

Equally, it is worth considering a few other things.

Firstly, the possibility that the SPL might not be as bad as many of us thought. Or at least, that the overall level of international football and the level of the SPL are closer than we might like to think. Ronaldo famously declared that the SPL was of a higher standard than MLS or France’s Ligue 1 (there must be something, or someone, that links those two leagues…), which may or may not be true.

But what is true is that international football was usurped by the Champions League as the highest level of the game some time ago.

That doesn’t make it less exciting or valuable or entertaining — pound for pound, it probably is better than the Champions League by those measures — but in terms of technical, tactical and physical quality, it is way behind. Is international football of a significantly higher quality than the SPL? Maybe, but it’s probably closer than those of us who are uncomfortable with the whole Saudi football project want to believe.

It also raises the possibility that those players could quite easily come back to the mothership.

Laporte is 30, Kante 33, Neves 27, Demiral just 26. Carrasco himself has proved that this sort of thing is possible: he left Atletico Madrid for China’s Dalian Yifang in early 2018, returned to Atletico two years later and won La Liga with them in 2021. Kante was asked about this a few times after his early performances at the tournament and did not dismiss the idea of a return to Europe. The SPL might not quite be the ultimate retirement league that we thought.

It could convince other players that moving to Saudi won’t necessarily crash their careers. This is admittedly a very Eurocentric, ‘legacy’ leagues point of view, but if players can perform at a tournament such as the European Championship and return to a top-level club in Spain, Germany or England, then it might be a sign to others who were wavering about moving out there. They may now feel that they can go for a while, accumulate a nice pile of cash but still do well on a slightly more traditional stage.

It might even be possible to view it as a particularly well-remunerated training camp; a couple of years where you’re still active, still fit, still ticking over, but not being battered to paste by the demands of European competition every week.

All of this is not to say that any of this is necessarily a good thing.

The purpose of the Saudi Pro League remains the same: to make you think of Ronaldo or Neymar or potentially Mohamed Salah before you think of human-rights abuses or people being imprisoned for political opposition or Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. They will view the relative success of Laporte, Kante and Demiral as a victory for their project, which isn’t ideal from a moral perspective.

But Euro 2024 has told us that joining the Saudi Pro League is not quite a path to footballing irrelevance.

Something to keep in mind as the transfer market begins to gather pace again.

(Top photo: Kevin Voigt/GettyImages)