Arab News | Neom sporting director plans to turn club into backbone of Saudi Arabia’s 2034 squad

RIYADH: When Al-Suqoor Club in the Saudi First Division became Neom in June 2023, there was no clear picture of what this project would become.

While Middle Eastern football is known for its big spending, rarely has there been a case like Neom’s — a lower-league club in a city longing for top-flight football, with a visionary board behind it.

Three years on, Neom has become the first Saudi side to inflict a league defeat on Simone Inzaghi’s Al-Hilal in the Saudi Pro League, snapping the Italian’s personal 39-game unbeaten league run and ending Al-Hilal’s broader streak of 47 without defeat.

Neom followed that win with a 4-2 victory over Al-Fateh to enter the first international break of the season in the top five. And while it is still early days, Neom’s path to this point has been one of steady growth.

Many in the Saudi football world dismissed Neom after their first season in the top flight. They had finished in a respectable eighth place, but the bar had already been set high by Aramco-backed Al-Qadsiah, who have pushed for the title since arriving in the top flight in 2024.

The Neom approach is different, however. Rather than chase titles immediately, they are building around youth and Saudi talent first — a strategy sporting director Kyriakos Dourekas laid out to Arab News after their win against Al-Hilal.

“Of course, for us it was a big win,” Dourekas said. “But the best thing for us in the match was that we had five Saudi starters.”

“We are not a team with the fan base of the top clubs in Saudi Arabia, so we have the luxury of fielding Saudi — and young Saudi — players in our starting lineup,” he added.

The SPL rules allow a team to use up to eight foreign players at one time in a starting lineup, but Neom’s transfer strategy has seen them bring in Saudi players who have claimed important starting roles.

Among them is Alaa Al-Hejji, who excelled last season and earned a place at the World Cup.

Others include the versatile Abdulmalik Al-Oyayri, left-back Islam Hawsawi, former USL Dunkerque winger Muhannad Al-Saad and summer signing Khalil Al-Absi, who had been an afterthought in the Saudi football scene since leaving Al-Nassr in 2023.

But Neom’s strategy is not only about the Saudi players — even the foreigners they bring in align with their belief in youth. While Alexandre Lacazette and Said Benrahma lead the squad in terms of experience, Neom boast the third-lowest average age in the SPL this season.

Dourekas traced that thinking back to a broader shift in how football clubs are run.

In Europe, he explained, clubs were once owned by local figures — Italian owners of Italian clubs, English owners of English clubs — who rarely considered the financial implications of running them.

“Many of these clubs went into debt,” he said. “Some are not even playing in the professional leagues anymore, like Bordeaux.”

“But in the past seven or eight years, you started to see a lot of Americans owning clubs in Europe,” he continued. “They see football as more of a business.”

This, according to Dourekas, has transformed that landscape, treating football more explicitly as a business with a stronger financial footing — and one of the clearest ways to generate returns is by investing in players still in their teens or early twenties, who can later be sold at a profit.

 “If you sign many 29- or 30-year-old players, you are not going to make your money back,” said Dourekas. “Our goal is to make the club sustainable, which is why we invest in young foreign and Saudi players.”

“In fact, according to a CIES (International Centre for Sports Studies) study, Neom are the club giving the most minutes to players under the age of 21.”

Two of those foreigners came into Neom at the age of 20 and have become regular starters: Amadou Kone and Nathan Zeze. Both have been among the standout performers in the SPL, and it came as little surprise when reports emerged of bigger clubs circling over the summer.

But while Neom, on paper, are expected to push for a top-five finish this season — and possibly win the Gulf Club Champions League — Dourekas believes the club’s ambitions extend beyond this season’s results.

“We want to contribute to the Saudi football ecosystem,” he said. “You saw what happened at the World Cup — there were many players who were quite old and will not be there in 2030 or 2034.”

“That is our main target right now: to ensure that most of the players representing the Saudi national team in 2030 and 2034 have come from Neom,” he said.

“They do not necessarily have to be playing for the club at the time — but to have started from Neom or passed through the academy or the first team: that should be the main target.”