Benzema before shock transfer?
Saudi Arabia is scrapping the old soccer system
By Stephan Uersfeld
06/01/2023, 8:29 p.m
It’s hard to get used to the newest big player in the football market. Saudi Arabia has been investing heavily in the world’s most popular sport for some time. At the end of the current season, they are once again stirring up a lot of sand. The storms reach Real Madrid and also the Bundesliga.
Has everyone gone insane? At the end of a long football season, Saudi Arabia dominates the headlines in international football. The kingdom not only grabs the greatest players of the dying generation of football heroes, but also causes disruption in the Bundesliga with its European affiliate Newcastle United. The power of money is also causing despair for the mostly unpopular cup finalists RB Leipzig. Everything is related to everything.
So now also world footballer Karim Benzema. The French superstar packs his bags and leaves Real Madrid for the desert, reports not only the usually excellently informed “AS”. The 35-year-old has made 647 appearances in his 14 years with Los Blancos, scoring 353 goals and providing 165 assists. He has cleared all the prizes in club football, mostly several times. Only last October did he concede the Ballon d’Or 2022 after his unbelievable performances in the knockout phase of the Champions League 2021/2022. Everything achieved in Europe and now the exit to Saudi Arabia?
There, the current champion Al-Itthiad should open the bag and offer the Frenchman a tax-free salary of 100 million euros per season. His contract will run for two years. The double Eurojackpot in the desert. So what a fairy tale for Benzema, who is said to have asked his old teammate Cristiano Ronaldo about life in the desert. The transfer, it is said, should only be a formality, especially since the contract of the captain of the royal team will expire at the end of the month anyway.
Tectonic shifts in world football
Benzema’s former strike partner at Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo, has been around for a long time. The Portuguese was kicked out before the World Cup after a confusing interview with Manchester United. His sporting achievements had not been on a par with his unrestricted self-confidence for a long time. Ronaldo signed with Al-Nassr, scoring 14 goals in his 16 appearances in the Saudi Pro League, while also missing a coach and otherwise remaining untitled. His club ended the season in second place, behind Al-Ittihad. They are coached by former Tottenham Hotspur coach Nuno Santo and are now doing it again.
Tectonic shifts everywhere you look. And the Saudis do what they want or what they want others to do, as in the case of Lionel Messi. Probably the greatest living footballer recently felt compelled to apologize. The Argentine was briefly suspended by Paris Saint-Germain, his current employer, after an unauthorized trip to Saudi Arabia and then meekly declared: “I organized this trip, which I had previously canceled once, and Now I couldn’t cancel it again,” said the world champion, who acts as a tourism ambassador for the desert state. According to the Spanish “AS” he receives 30 million euros per year for this alone.
Soon, however, these 30 million euros could only be pocket money for the 35-year-old. His contract with Qatar club PSG expires at the end of the month. He can move for free. In addition to his old employer Barcelona and MLS franchise Inter Miami, the desert state is also courting the king of Qatar. Messi only crowned this last December with his magical performances at the World Cup in the emirate. But the circus of world football has moved on and could soon become a permanent guest in the neighboring kingdom. Saudi Arabia, that much is clear, is currently doing what it wants with football. That’s not necessarily good news.
Newcastle United as the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Not even for European football. A new giant is growing high up in the north of England. Up there at the mouth of the River Tyne, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF bought less than 18 months ago and took over the ailing traditional club Newcastle United. In their first full season in possession of the desert state, the Magpies qualified for the Champions League again after more than two decades. In the new Forbes list of the most valuable football clubs in the world, Newcastle climbs to number 22. Within a year they have doubled their market value to around 750 million euros.
The Magpies, who sometimes appear in the Saudi national colors, will be in a pot with the German debutants Union Berlin in the Champions League, but otherwise have little in common with the Iron. But, as the club anthem says, they don’t want to be bought by the West either. Newcastle however from the Middle East. The billions that Saudi Arabia has invested in sport have an internal and external effect and are now also causing shocks in the Bundesliga.
They have an internal effect because stars like Ronaldo or, soon, Messi and Benzema are supposed to entertain the young population, 70 percent of the residents are under 35. They have an external effect, where they are used as soft power alongside hard power, military and political resources, as a geopolitical instrument. Sports washing has become very fashionable in the region, not least thanks to its small neighbor Qatar. To top it off, the 2030 World Cup is to take place in Saudi Arabia. Experts currently describe the chances as realistic. The world of sport, as the world tournament in Qatar emphatically showed, does not only consist of European and Western values.
Even RB Leipzig is drawn in
What these are and what they mean for football is a popular topic in Germany to be discussed at RB Leipzig. Ever since it was founded in the late 2000s, the club from the city of heroes has been accused by critics of being nothing more than a marketing vehicle for the Red Bull brewery. The people of Leipzig are also the role model for a new development in football, multi-club ownership. A group owns or holds shares in several clubs and can create competitive advantages by bundling competencies and also significantly simplify transfers among themselves through shorter paths.
RB Leipzig have played 20 times since the 2011/2012 season at Austrian sister club Red Bull Salzburg. One of these transfers was that of Hungary’s Dominik Szoboszlai, who moved to Saxony in January 2021 for 20 million euros. But after 18 months, the 22-year-old is now aggressively flirting with a departure.
“If I can now take a step towards the top five or six clubs in Europe, should I say no? I’ve never been that type of guy,” he said in an interview with Hungarian newspaper Index. At the end of his career in the distant future he does not want to blame himself for not having made the best of his career. He got into a lot of trouble just a few days before RB Leipzig’s DFB Cup final against Eintracht Frankfurt. The club management around sports director Max Eberl ordered him to report and probably also gave him a hefty fine, reported the “Kicker“.
The suspected reason for all the excitement in Leipzig: Newcastle United are said to be very interested in the Hungarian. The fixed transfer fee of 70 million euros should not matter to the Magpies. Because they have Saudi Arabia and they own the football world.
2023-06-02 12:40:34
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