I'm With Stupid
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 6 May 2013
- Messages
- 20,263
Shanghai signed Oscar in his prime. Kept saying that he'd be open to a move back to Europe, but ultimately he's now 31 and he's still over there and has been for 6 years. After that amount of time playing in a shit league, there's little chance he'd ever be good enough to compete at the top of European football again. There will always be some players open to a move for ridiculous money even in their prime. Meanwhile, the money soon dried up and China don't sign top players any more.Wait and see how many sign this summer, it may be a decent quality across the league in a matter of weeks.
If all Saudi clubs keep signing from the top 5 leagues, it will. The signing that is really making me look, is Neves today. Others may be more high profile, but you can point to their age and say it’s similar to USA or China over the last decade… but Neves is in his prime, was wanted by Barça (everyone seems to be atm!), that’s more of a sign of quality and intent than the C. Ronaldo, Kante or even Benzema signings IMO.
But what always happens in these cases (remember in the 2000s when Russian clubs were buying the likes of Hulk for huge money) is that there's a huge spending spree and then over time it becomes unsustainable. A league can't be sustained by having someone indefinitely pumping money into it. A individual club can, perhaps, but an entire league? And basically to sustain such ridiculous wages, they'd have to get the Saudi league to the income levels of the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga combined.
You can afford, like in America, to have the odd star and pay them huge money, but a team with one world class player isn't that interesting to watch and beyond the initial hysteria, it soon calms down. And that's when you struggle to get in the players in their prime, because they want to play with other great players, not go to America or China to try and drag a bunch of players you've never heard of to a title that no-one will care about after they retire. How many of these die-hard social media Ronaldo fans are actually tuning in to the Saudi league to watch the games? I suspect not many. Some of the teams in the league have 7000 and 8000-seater stadiums.