A biting wind envelops the Riyadh night on this last evening of February. An unusual coolness, but not enough to dissuade the Al-Bairaq footballers from training on the synthetic turf of a private school, in the northwest of the Saudi capital. Fourteen players, teenagers and thirty-somethings, rented the equipment (cost more than 100 euros for two hours) for this final preparation session before a tournament in Jeddah at the beginning of March. Warmly dressed, generally with leggings under the shorts, they play ball tennis and a seven-on-seven match, blue bibs against fluorescent yellow bibs. At 10 p.m., those in less of a hurry take the time to have a coffee and a pastry distributed by their two coaches.
While the stadium guard prepares to turn off the floodlights, Sarah Ben Saleem, 24, finishes unlacing her cleats. The small forward wears shorts in the colors of Paris Saint-Germain. “Who doesn’t love this team?” “, says the business school student in perfect English.
She spent part of her childhood in New York, where she was interested in basketball. For a year, football has been his passion. Until recently, she remembers, not all parents accepted that their daughters practiced this sport. His, “not too strict”did not discourage her, even if her mother wondered what the neighborhood and friends would think of it. “She comes from a generation where women weren’t even allowed to take off their abaya. » The young woman wants to believe that ” everything changed ” in this rigorous country, which represses homosexuality and relationships outside of marriage. “We can do what we want, like men, thank God. Saudi Arabia has always been a men’s football country, but now it is also a women’s football country. » With some nuances.
In 2023, when the Saudi Sovereign Public Investment Fund responsible for financing Prince Mohammed Ben Salman’s Vision 2030 project to prepare the kingdom for the post-oil era, decided to invest massively in sport, it showed itself very generous to four clubs in the Saudi Pro League (SPL), the local football elite. They have spent hundreds of millions of euros to attract international stars, much less for their women’s sections.
Question of timing, thinks Sarah Ben Saleem. She’s an optimist, she predicts women’s football “very strong within two years”. To have. For the moment, the majority of high-level female footballers, professionals, have the support of their family, but for others, the matter is more complicated: they prefer to keep this guilty passion from their parents and, for the sake of discretion, only their first name appears on the back of the jerseys. Let’s play happy, let’s play masked.
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