Half a year ago, the Arab World made history thrice: Qatar’s historic hosting of the World Cup, Saudi Arabia’s historic defeat of the champions-to-be Argentina, and Morocco’s historic entry into the semi-finals over the dead bodies of Portugal and Spain. Who cares about the Messi-Ronaldo rivalry when the Arab World defeated them both? Carrying on the momentum, in 2023, the stature of Middle Eastern football has appeared to reach its zenith to date. Ronaldo has moved to Saudi Arabia to join Al-Nassr, as has Benzema who is now playing for Al-Nassr’s rival Al-Ittihad. Messi has turned down the wooing of another rival Al-Hilal, but the Saudi club is not easily giving up and has raised their offer to an eye-watering €1.5 billion. If Al-Hilal had their way, the Saudi League, incomparable in prestige to its European counterparts, would, for the first time, see three Ballon d’Or winners playing against each other.

What is unfolding in Saudi Arabia is a new battle against Qatar in their prolonged cold war. Whilst both are Sunni absolute monarchies allied to the US, they embody opposite values – Saudi Arabia is the leading status quo power of the Middle East, whereas Qatar is prominently revisionist. Over the decades, Qatar has projected a disproportionately huge power, given her size, over the Islamic world through Al Jazeera, the world’s most influential Arabic news network owned by Doha, which Riyadh and allies criticised as Qatari propaganda directed against their regimes. Al Jazeera, the Saudis believe, has been used by Doha to catalyse the Arab Spring, which saw the collapse of Saudi allies such as the Tunisian and Egyptian strongmen Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. The Saudis also allege that Qatar has been plotting to overturn regional stability by sponsoring terrorism and supporting the expansion of Shia-Iranian presence. There is also a material dimension to their rift: Saudi Arabia is an oil power, whereas Qatar is a gas power; it is reasonable that neighbours who amass their wealth through substitute goods will not enjoy good relations. Moreover, Qatar’s dependence on gas has led her to cooperate with the Saudis’ nemesis Iran, with whom she shares the world’s largest gas field. It was therefore no surprise when Saudi Arabia, teaming up with the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain, put Qatar in her worst diplomatic crisis in 2017 by severing relations with and blockading her, whose only land border is shared with the Saudis. It took nearly four years for the US and Kuwait to broker a deal which brought Qatar back from the cold. Qatar would go on to host the 2022 World Cup, which Doha had dedicated to Arab and world unity during its 2009-10 bid. Doha’s hopes unexpectedly came true when the Arab World overcame internal divisions and celebrated for the Saudi and Moroccan teams as they won surprise victories against established rivals.

As the World Cup concluded, Saudi Arabia began to ramp up efforts in boosting her football profile as the Saudi clubs’ serial purchases of Ronaldo, Benzema, Ruben Neves, and N’Golo Kanté occupy international headlines. It was not the success of Qatar’s World Cup that inspired Riyadh to wage its war against Doha with football – it had made major moves such as acquiring and reinventing the Premier League club Newcastle before it heard the claps in Qatar. But Pan-Arab cheers certainly consolidated Riyadh’s belief in the political effect of sports. Against the growing trend of territorialisation as Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco rushed to recognise and embrace their pre-Arab Pharaonic and Berber heritages, football proved successful in fostering reconciliation of a divided house and resurgence of a once-dreamed-of Pan-Arab identity which Hussein bin Ali, Nasser, and numerous other leaders worked hard to forge and nonetheless failed. This marvel of sports, coupled with the landmark reinstatement of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to the Arab League, created the best conditions for Pan-Arabism to regain ground in Arab politics. In turn, this poses an opportunity to take up leadership of the united Arab bloc, one that can well develop into leadership of a new pole in an increasingly multipolar world and one that Saudi Arabia cannot afford losing to Qatar. If football is glue for the scattered Arab shards, Riyadh desperately needs to emerge as the football power to reassert its loom over them, which it had historically maintained through its Custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques, but now finds the importance of this sacred role eclipsed by Doha’s secular custodianship of the most important national football competition in the world.

Geopolitics explain why Al-Nassr was willing to pay €200 million for an aging, maybe-not-so-helpful Cristiano Ronaldo. Failing to save his club from the embarrassing dethronement by Al-Ittihad, the forward might have passed his prime in the football stadium. But to Al-Nassr’s controller Mohammed bin Salman, he remains a valuable asset in the international stadium against his true enemy, Qatar, against whom the crown prince is so willing to spend money. While Al-Nassr denied the widespread rumour that Ronaldo’s contract includes a clause obliging him to be the ambassador for Saudi Arabia’s World Cup endeavour, it is undeniable the Portuguese star’s arrival in the kingdom injected a huge boost to her football standing and soft power, a front on which she had previously not possessed the slightest chance to trump over her rebellious neighbour. 

Qatar had been a forerunner in football investments. Emirs Hamid bin Khalifa and Tamim bin Hamid Al Thani have been investing heavily in eleventh-time Ligue 1 champions Paris Saint-Germain since 2011, which operated with an unprecedented cost of €1 billion in 2022 and gathered Mbappé, Neymar, and Messi, three of the world’s most renowned and expensive players. The Qatari royal Abdullah Al Thani also owns the La Liga club Málaga. Perhaps sensing the Saudi threat, the emir’s brother Jassim is now in discussion of taking over Manchester United, one of England’s best clubs. 

Yet despite its counter-efforts, the football empire Doha paid heavily to build is likely to be dwarfed by Riyadh’s very own one, which transcends its Qatari predecessor by breaking free of its Eurocentric ontology. While Qatari money is primarily poured into the traditional European leagues, the Saudi war chest is dedicated to the construction of a rival league of her own – Mohammed bin Salman has earmarked $3 billion per year for the development of the Saudi League and, in particular, four select teams: Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal, Al-Ittihad, and Al-Ahli. Breaking free of the mindset that prestigious football must be European, Riyadh is guided by the vision to elevate its domestic football to, or even have it surpass, the calibre of Europe. In this sense, Saudi Arabia is far more ambitious and strategic than Qatar. The Arab states did produce world-renowned players in the past such as the Egyptian Mohamed Salah, but they were all lost to European clubs. What Mohammed bin Salman is doing now is to prevent such losses by transforming Riyadh into the Baghdad of football, a ‘core’ that Arabs from the Maghrebi and Levantine peripheries would orbit around when it comes to football. Thus, by bidding for dominion over Arab football that can parallel that of European football, Saudi Arabia is, in fact, bidding for dominion over the Arab World that can parallel the established poles of the world, namely the US, BRICS, and the European Union. As the glory of all Arabs – in the realm of football and beyond – is now vested in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia checkmates Qatar with the very strategy she introduced to the Arab World.

This tactic Riyadh employs is no stranger to history. A popular outlet of nationalist sentiments, football has always been at the forefront of identity politics. In Argentina’s famous 1986 match against England, the legendary Diego Maradona became the embodiment of the Argentine nation. Scoring the two goals which dictated Argentina’s victory, one of which was a handball, he took symbolic revenge on whom the Argentines believed were aggressors that occupied their Malvinas (Falklands). What ought to be booed as cheating is, until now, lauded by the Argentines and sympathisers as the Hand of God. Sometimes football politics go beyond the stadium. The 1970 World Cup qualifier served as an immediate spark of the Football War between El Salvador and Honduras, who fought first on the grass field then on the battlefield. All these are enabled by football’s magic of uniting and dividing, and it was this enchantment that caught the crown prince’s eyes. 

It is almost certain that more and more players and managers will be lured by the crown prince with his oil money to flock to Saudi Arabia. Ronaldo and Benzema were only the first shots of a perhaps decade-long fight for soft power and cultural supremacy between two rivals who both possess huge piles of fuel cash to fuel their war machines. In the meantime, Ronaldo fans should sincerely hope that the Saudis prevail over Qatar. If things ended up like the star’s final season with United, publicly calling out the king on Saudi television would probably result in more than a dishonourable exit from the club and the continent.