Originally Posted by Don
Every time I click on a thread here at the moment another part of my life has been bought by the Saudis for £200 million.
I didn't realise that the PIF has (as of yesterday) actually bought out Nassr, Hilal, Ahli and Ittihad. This is a proper game changer. Within a year top players in their prime will be going there.
103m Euros for Jude, rising to 133.9m.
400k a week wages is a bit mental.
Yeah, Brighton are definitely going to a Dortmund-on-Sea model. It'll be interesting to see how much they dig their heels in over Caicedo - my guess would be quite a lot, but he will go. Mac Allister had a stronger hand when he signed his new deal as his existing one didn't have long to run, whereas Caicedo's was for longer and on a crappy wage, so I guess that's why he has this weird not a release clause release clause.
Probably won't have to pay a penny of tax either.
It'll probably end up more like the China situation where it becomes a front for FFP laundering business. Either that or there turns out to be truth in the rumours of wild plans to loan loads of players back to Newcastle, which would be hilarious.
Not sure the PIF operates that way.
It would seem Liverpool could be getting 4 players for a bit more than the price of Bellingham.
Mac Allister seems to be £35m now. I've seen Thuram and Kone could be got for around £70m combined and the noises on this Gabi Veiga are getting louder too. He has a set £34.5m asking price as well.
Tough to miss out on Jude, but when the worlds biggest club offers you 400k a week, I don't see many turning that down.
Messi off to Inter Miami.
If it's £35m fee and £100k/week in wages, which is what seems to be doing the rounds, that's 3 years of Bellingham's salary.
What?If it's £35m fee and £100k/week in wages, which is what seems to be doing the rounds, that's 3 years of Bellingham's salary.
If Jude's on £400k a week, that's 60-odd million over 3 years, which is what you get if you add £35m [fee] and £26m [wages over 5 years] for Mac Allister. It's why those transfers [like the Haaland one] are out of reach for all but the most financially backed of clubs.
Ah, I didn't realise the Mac Allister contract was five years so that's why my maths wasn't adding up.
Just realised Phil Neville is Inter Miami’s head coach. Lol.
No he isn't.
No he’s not. Sacked (“fired”) a few days ago.
That's a shame, was looking forward to the arm around the shoulder on the sidelines pics.
Saudis in the mud, or the sand I suppose.
They'll just buy the MLS.
Yep. It’s going to utterly fuck football and there’s nothing FIFA or UEFA can do about it.
Just needs one big young ish name to sign for an obscene fee and the floodgates will open.
Can't see it myself. Who would have any interest in a Harlem Globetrotters in the sand of football type competition? The only type of 'fans' who would have any interest in it [namely 'new market' fans] don't need to be sportswashed anyway as they largely live in oppressive regimes and/or agree with most of what the Saudis get up to.
Maybe Oscar can make the move, again. Or Thiago. Do they want to buy Thiago?
The Saudi league is complete fodder so outside of the three PIF teams there's not a lot of pull (they can only register eight foreigners). Yes there will be the odd mercenary not approaching retirement who will take the plunge but for most decent players, they might as well stay where they are and play European football and cream millions off their current club whilst maintaining an actual life off the pitch.
I've watched what's happened in golf and I'm telling you, the PIF is an unstoppable force. Golf if anything is harder to buy as it has more pre-existing moral scruples and the blazers (small b) have/had more power. Football is defenceless.
I'd also be a bit worried or at least disappointed if I were a Newcastle fan, their plans are clearly a lot bigger than anything Abu Dhabi has done with City, it's a lot bigger than buying one club and trying to dominate. It's not even necessarily about getting people to their own league. It's about being in the room for every key decision, getting Aramco on every pitchside display, making Visit Saudi the number one corporate presence in the game, having the World Cup there, normalising Saudi Arabia in every way they can. It won't all happen at once but it's like the old boiling frogs thing, you'll look up and MBS will be at the helm of everything.
If you mean the fans, then they wouldn't initially, but if everyone good is playing there they would eventually - things like the World Club Cup would take on vastly increased significance and the whole thing would snowball.
If you mean the players? Kylian Mbappe has already committed what may well be the best playing years of his life to playing in a dogshit league for a side that seemingly suffer as a result and are absolute bobbins in the Champions League. If Al Desert chucked a billion quid a year at him he'd go in a heartbeat.
We need to forget about 'Sportswashing' it's a complete red herring and this is a proper threat.
It won't need to be that. It'll be Champions League final played in Saudi, Super League played in Saudi, all the clubs and personalities you know and love will still be there but their mouths will be stuffed full of Saudi gold and maybe Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr get into the Champions League, becasue why not?
This VAR check is brought to you by VisitSaudi.com. Tourism advert plays whilst offside lines are drawn for 6 minutes.
I'm not saying they won't be all over the game in the near future but they'll be far more successful buying more Newcastles, because a lot of Europeans especially will have the "who the fuck wants to go there" attitude when looking at Saudi. Any player with a sense of credibility will go for Newcastle (or whatever other top club they buy out) over Al-Hilal or whatever because whatever money is at their disposal, you're still confined to playing local binmen most weeks and living in a hell hole.
This is all bang on for my money. Forget about human rights, relevance and a proper place on the World Stage is what Saudi Arabia want and they're using the vast resources they have (can anyone compete? I genuinely don't know) to get it.
I know fuck all about golf, but haven't the PGA just completely folded as they realised they stood to lose everything if they didn't? If so, it's worth bearing in mind they did nothing to encourage it, whereas football has been sucking the desert cash cock for years now - The Premier League, UEFA, FIFA, they've all opened the door willingly and said come in. It looks like "thank you very much, we will" is the response.
That sounds like the sort of capitulation the established authorities are potentially going to have to do. I'd be more bothered, but the game has been morally and ethically bankrupt for years now (somehow successfully selling the illusion of sporting merit still existing to get away with it), so bring it on.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you don't think the sums of money that will be on offer (which will dwarf what Ronaldo is getting if it's directed at an Mbappe or Haaland) won't seriously tempt people. Again, buying into this romantic notion of the game that hasn't existed for years. 95% of everything is about money, the Saudi's have it by the bucketload and it looks like they've reached the stage of the plan is to use it to get people there - fair play to them, like many people I didn't realise until now there was a plan, but it's clearly been a brilliant one.
They have completely folded, yes, hence the surprise and shock at the announcement. I don't think they stood to lose everything though. LIV started out as a joke, became more of a joke as Tiger et al told Greg Norman to go fuck himself, then it picked up a lot of steam with a raft of huge signings and ruffled a lot of feathers last summer. But then it seemed to die off in publicity with them getting no half-decent TV deal and therefore little exposure. The past six months they've only been mentioned when there's been a major so a few of their guys were participating, and there was even murmurs of Koepka and a couple of others getting their lawyers to try and find a way out.
So if this had happened the back end of last year, then it probably would have been less surprising. The whole deal happened in the last seven weeks so I don't know what's changed, as the briberies were clearly always readily available to all.
I wouldn't say the PGA have folded necessarily (as they fought the 'breakaway league' very hard and it did ultimately fail in sporting terms), but they realised that Saudi money IS coming and is unstoppable, whether they like it or not, so it might as well be them that takes it rather than fight endless legal battles with a renegade league. Football I would have thought will skip the fighting stage and go straight to taking the cash.
As for whether anyone can compete, of course they can't, certainly not in democratic countries. This is the sovereign wealth fund of an oil-rich theocracy. It's worth £1 trillion or near enough.
Mbappe plays for his hometown team and gets to make millions living where he grew up. I’m not really sure it’s comparable lol
And what brought that situation about/extended it? The absolutely ludicrous cone-tract he's on.
Quite. I appreciate Ligue 1 isn't sponsored by Barclays or has brexitball big-name allure of David Moyes and Luton Town FC but fucking hell
Saudi league will always be a circus and no individual will be able to change that, it'll need decades of serious development for that to change.
Saudi league will be like LIV. The PIF says to the football establishment: look, we can easily buy out your over-the-hill big names, and the odd bit of prime talent, to this joke competition: now, do you want to have a hollowed out product with far less established star power than before, or will you accept us buying out your sport in the long term?
I wasn't saying that. They're creating avenues for players to stay in decent countries and earn that money, rather than whoring themselves out to Al-Hilal for it. Seems obvious to me which option most players will prefer.
How do you even go about 'buying' football in the same way you would golf?
You can't buy FIFA/UEFA [any more than the extent to which those associations have already been bought], you can't buy the national associations, can you even buy The Premier League [how is it even owned]?
There seems to be night and day between the idea of normalising Saudi Arabia through sponsorship/money/events etc [which is clearly happening and all part of the plan] and them owning everything and therefore having carte blanche to relocate Man Red to the Red Sea coast or whatever.
Also, the boiling frogs thing is apocryphal.
This is the transfer thread you boring cunts.
David Sullivan has said Rice will be leaving.
You can de facto control anything with money. Qatar show how you can 'buy football', but even they lack the resources of the PIF.
The avenues created in decent countries was the first step, they appear now to be moving on from that and giving them even better money to go there (without the difficulty of managing FFP - lol). Ronaldo wouldn't be on what he's earning now if he'd stayed in Europe.
'Alexis' is BBC official with the [more sensible] fee of £55m being quoted. Although I guess £55m deal could mean anything really.
Take it back, story has changed to £35m fee [rising to £55m if he wins 5 golden balls or something equally unlikely].
Weren't we saying all this about chinkyball a few years ago? Saudi Arabia might well get to slap its branding on everything but so what?
We might have been, but the Chinese are clearly amateurs compared.
The Chinese were told to stop by Xi as the football no longer aligned with his/the counties interests.
I can't see the Saudis getting bored with it any time soon and if anything this is only the beginning.
Even if they only go over for a season or two, how many players would really turn down 5x or 10x what they could earn at a Manchester United or Real Madrid?
Do footballers even pay tax over there?
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