Aymeric Laporte leaving Manchester City for Al Nassr feels like the saturation point for rage against the Saudi machine. It is the first major England-Saudi transfer which has raised no eyebrows, invited no outcry, the first treated as if he were joining another European club. It just makes sense in a way nothing about the Saudi Pro League really has so far.
At 29, Laporte is in his supposed prime as a centre-back, and earlier this year Pep Guardiola called him “our best player in the build-up by far”. He was once City’s record signing and has rarely erred in his five years at the club. Yet he has fallen out of favour at the Etihad.
And so a player who would probably start for every club bar one in world football has chosen to join Cristiano Ronaldo at Al Nassr. It’s not as though the rest of the market was priced out, with the final fee somewhere around £25m. Laporte wanted to join the Saudi project, as Ruben Neves or Aleksandr Mitrovic did before him. A first choice, not a last resort.
Looking at Laporte’s transfer, as with all the Saudi moves before him, you can’t help but ask: is this just about money? Has all this professional football only ever been about money? Do we kid ourselves with our infantile romanticism?
And what if it isn’t just financial? Is that scarier, more permanent? If Saudi Arabia isn’t just a career graveyard for Europe’s elite, or even a lavish desert sanatorium for the fitness-challenged, but a legitimate option for both career continuation and potential advancement?
If players are being attracted not just by the private Boeing 747s or fleets of supercars, but by the football and quality of life on offer? For every player that goes there – for every Fabinho and Laporte – this becomes more possible, more real.
Signings beget signings and progress begets progress.
If this happens every transfer window for the next two seasons, how long is it before the Saudi Pro League has the second-strongest playing corps in the world?
In a week Saudi border guards have been accused of killing thousands of migrants and asylum seekers crossing from Yemen, human rights concerns in the gulf state are as serious as ever, but there’s little evidence that impacts the vast majority of footballers.
If you could still do your job, but for more money under less pressure, wouldn’t you take it? This is where the issue of who’s paying comes in.
Eddie Howe parroting that he hasn’t given much thought to issues around Newcastle’s ownership probably exemplifies this better than anyone. Howe tends to indicate he doesn’t have the time to engage with such trivialities, but really it’s a matter of simply not needing to.
When you earn a certain amount of money, you become largely exempt from needing to engage politically, so some simply don’t.
Public transport, or affordable housing, or migrants being allegedly killed don’t really infringe on the lives of most mega-multi-millionaires, so they don’t need enter their consciences either. In fact, when you have quite so much money, as most footballers do, politics becomes an inconvenience. If this is in a country you don’t consider your own, that feeling instantly quadruples.
English fans can say these players are effectively dead to them, that they would never switch on the Pro League even on their darkest, loneliest night, but the football will happen all the same, still commanding the rest of the world’s attention. It will still be selling what their chief operating officer called “experiential entertainment”.
And so Laporte’s exit is wholly significant in its perceived insignificance, a vital next step in the continued normalisation of Saudi football to the West. In the space of a summer, the Pro League has dramatically shifted the Overton window, lurched from novelty to priority in the psyches of Europe’s top footballers. It’s just somewhere elite players choose to go now.
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