Saudi Arabia’s attempts at sportswashing back in the late 1970s sound depressingly familiar

Scrolling obituaries of the great Trevor Francis last month, we came across a line claiming he earned $250,000 for playing two seasons of summer soccer with the Detroit Express of the old NASL in the late 1970s. An extraordinary sum at a time when the average wage of a top-flight footballer in England was still just £140 a week.

Even more remarkable is that Francis’s fleeting presence in the American game in the very prime of his career was down to Jimmy Hill’s ingenuity as part-owner of the Express, and Saudi Arabia trying to transform its international reputation through sport. Imagine such a thing.

Grainy photographs in newspaper archives show a gurning Hill, that distinctive, angular profile, sitting at a table next to a sheikh, signing a contract to bring his soccer expertise to Saudi Arabia via his company World Sports Academy. Snapshots from the sweltering summer of 1976 when the former chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association received £25m to help grow the game in the desert. The Arabs’ original appointee, the legendary Ferenc Puskas, had just tried and failed to do just that so the potentates turned instead to arguably the most recognisable character in English football.

To those of us of a certain age, the avuncular goatee is forever associated with bleary-eyed childhood vigils, long ago Saturday nights suffering through interminable Late Lates in order to drink deep of Match of the Day. By the embers of waning coal fires, savouring every last drop of our weekly dose of televised soccer, we were a little young to appreciate that Hill, the chin-stroking pontificator, was an influential pioneer.

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He fought for the abolition of the maximum wage, campaigned for the introduction of three points for a win, and nearly half a century before Neymar’s gaudy G-Wagon laden tour rider, took his talents to Riyadh. For big bucks.

One financial columnist worried the Saudis withdrawing such an eye-watering sum from their Bank of England account all at once might diminish sterling reserves but Hill was quick to clarify that the £25m was an overall budget. It was intended to fund a squadron of English coaches, administrators, and referees, working there for several years to improve the national team and foster the development of the next generation of young players.

Contemporary English media coverage obsessed about the country’s alcohol ban, oppressive heat, and strict Muslims customs, but aside from mentioning that women were not allowed to drive and advising foreign men to “ignore” local ladies, there was no talk of human rights. In a way that is depressingly familiar today, Hill sold the project as a forward-thinking nation merely trying to modernise its image via the global game.

Nobody seemed unduly bothered when he was quite frank about Jews not being eligible for any of the jobs on offer there, Hill even assured The Guardian this wasn’t really an issue because, “I don’t think there are many Jewish footballers.”

[ Neymar joining Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hilal in €90m deal as PSG end galáctico era ]

Johnny Giles rejected the lucrative opportunity to become the Eddie Howe/Steven Gerrard of his generation but so many managers around England had their heads turned by the prospect of earning £45,000 a year tax free (nearly twice what all-conquering Liverpool were paying Bob Paisley) to guide the Saudis that the Football League considered disciplining Hill, then chairman of Coventry City, for “enticement”.

Eventually, Hill hired former Wolves’ boss Bill McGarry as national team manager and brought the Saudis on a six-week tour of England. The country that will next month stage a pair of controversial, high-profile friendlies at St James Park, that charming little corner of the north-east that is forever Arabia, mostly played behind-closed-doors games against Midland League teams like Stafford Rangers. The only people they wowed were hoteliers with the extravagant spending of their entourage.

Although Hill and his cohorts never made good on a bold promise to raise the Saudis to the level of the English Third Division, he made a lot of money from the three-year contract. So much so that he was faced with a conundrum. Repatriating his profits to Britain would see the taxman take 90 per cent so, instead, he used the cash to buy into the fledgling NASL via the Detroit Express.

Over the course of 1977 and 1978, Hill and World Sports Academy spent $1m getting the Express up and running, bringing the mercurial Francis in on loan from Birmingham City to score 22 goals in 20 games and to fire them to the play-offs in their inaugural season.

Coventry City got involved with the American project too, buying a piece of the Express and lending players to the cause, including a teenage Mark Hateley and the experienced Scottish international Jim Holton. Long past his Manchester United heyday, European Cup-winning Dubliner Tony Dunne came out for one campaign at the ripe old age of 38.

No matter what innovation Hill tried though, Detroit just couldn’t get enough people to come to the Pontiac Silverdome and, facing bankruptcy, the team eventually relocated and rebranded as the Washington Diplomats. A short-lived, ill-fated solution to their problems.

His American misadventure ended rather rancorously and, for years, Hill countered suggestions he made a fortune from the Saudis by pointing out he lost it all somewhere on the road between Washington and Detroit. The ridiculous sums of money involved were all people ever wanted to talk to him about. Human rights not so much. Funny that.