After lighting up football’s biggest stage, Cristiano Ronaldo is facing a very different reality in Saudi Arabia with a smaller stadium and an inferior team – and some very high temperatures.
Ronaldo, 37, said he was embracing the “challenge” of the Saudi Pro League, an unfamiliar step for players more accustomed to Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium or Manchester United’s “Theatre of Dreams”, Old Trafford.
The transition has been facilitated by the combined 400 million euros he will receive from his new team, Al Nassr, and a separate payment to become an ambassador for the Saudi World Cup bid he wants, according to sources close to the club.
But it will be a big adjustment for the five-time Ballon d’Or winner, who will stop at modest venues including the 6,000-seat Al Batin Stadium.
After an exhibition performance against Lionel Messi’s arch-rivals Paris Saint-Germain in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Thursday, Ronaldo will make his Saudi Pro League debut for Al Nassr on Sunday.
The 16-team league will take Ronaldo from Dammam on the Gulf coast to Jeddah on the Red Sea, as well as provincial cities in the desert such as Majma’ah and Hofuf, hubs for Saudi Arabia’s date industry.
A chartered plane
While Al Hilal and Al Ittihad, the giants of Saudi football, play in home fields with a capacity of 62,000, some Pro League teams have small spaces for less than 10,000 fans, and some fields are surrounded by running tracks.
“Sometimes the stadium is not in the best condition,” Moqbel al-Zabni, editor-in-chief of Al Riyadiah newspaper, told AFP, warning that empty seats were a common sight.
“The usual presence of Ronaldo will not be there. We are not used to seeing the stadium at capacity,” he said.
Ronaldo’s home ground will be the 25,000-capacity Mrsool Al Nassr Park, located on the university campus in Riyadh and packed for the gala event earlier this month.
The chartered plane will take the superstar and his teammates to away games, club sources said, saving them long coach journeys across the desert landscape.
The Pro League season runs from August to May, avoiding the worst of summer when temperatures average above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).
Even in the evenings, when most games are played, it can stay above 30C (86 Fahrenheit) in August and September, and from March until the end of winter.
“The weather will be a challenge for Ronaldo… but I think he will adapt and excel,” said Saleh al-Khalif, deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Riyadiah.
‘No walk in the park’
Saudi Arabia is a major force in Asian football with six World Cup appearances, including a famous victory over Argentina’s Messi in the last edition in Qatar.
Al Hilal and Al Ittihad have won six AFC Champions League titles between them. With Ronaldo, Al Nassr will hope to qualify for this year’s competition and join their great rivals as the Asian champions.
Although the standards of the Pro League cannot match the heights of England, Spain and Italy, where Ronaldo has spent his career so far, it is a competitive division.
The Saudi League was launched in 1976 but in the 14 years since the Pro League became the top tier, there have been six different winners.
Khalif said the league’s “strength and diversity” was similar to English football, and insisted it would be no “walk in the park” for Ronaldo.
The Pro League is packed with 128 foreign players from 48 countries, each team is allowed to enter eight.
At Al Nassr, coached by Frenchman Rudi Garcia, Ronaldo’s teammates include Colombian and former Arsenal goalkeeper David Ospina and Brazilian midfielder Luis Gustavo, formerly of Bayern Munich.
Ronaldo’s first task was to keep Al Nassr at the top of the league and secure their first title in four years. But other teams will be highly motivated to stop him.
“Ronaldo is a legend … and all teams will play to beat Ronaldo,” Khalif said.