While contract stars like Cristiano Ronaldo have been able to bring tens of thousands of fans to Saudi Professional League matches, some clubs have struggled to bring just hundreds to watch them.
Two teams from the Saudi Professional League witnessed a poor attendance of only 315 fans for the match on Thursday (January 9).
The Riyadh team, which currently occupies seventh place in the league standings, received the Gulf team at Prince Faisal bin Fahd Stadium at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon. Although the match ended in a 2-2 draw after an exciting second half, there were only hundreds in attendance to watch the events.
The stadium, located in the capital Riyadh, has a capacity of 22,188, however, many seats were empty during Thursday’s match, when only 315 people turned up to watch – with a sea of blue seats overwhelming the fans. In attendance.
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However, this is not the lowest crowd attendance Riyadh has ever seen – the team embarrassingly suffered a 1-0 loss to Al-Ukhdood in September 2023 in front of a shocking 133 fans.
The awkward attendance for Riyadh this week is a far cry from the Al-Nasr crowd later the same day, as 16,458 fans made the trip to Al Awal Park to watch Cristiano Ronaldo score a penalty and Sadio Mane score an own-goal brace. -1 beat the groove.
Elsewhere, even teams playing in the sixth tier of English football had an average attendance greater than the number of fans at Prince Faisal bin Fahd Stadium on Thursday, with Leamington, Vanarama’s national team North, welcoming an average of 689 fans to their home matches. . In the 2024/25 season.
Their lowest home attendance this season was 434 in matches with Curzon Ashton and Carlton Town. The struggle to fill seats in the Saudi Professional League shows that there is still a gap between the four clubs owned by the Public Investment Fund, which have spent huge sums of money attracting stars to the Middle East.
The highest attendance figure this season goes to first-placed Al-Ittihad, with 55,120 fans attending King Abdullah Sports City in December to watch the league leaders beat Al-Nassr 2-1. However, with stars like Ronaldo, Mane, Karim Benzema, Fabinho and N’Golo Kante taking part in the game, it is no surprise that many decided to invest.
Meanwhile, the league’s current average attendance of 8,183 is heavily influenced by the struggle of smaller teams to attract the same levels of fans. However, this appears to have not dissuaded the Saudi Ministry of Sports, which is currently planning to renovate Prince Faisal bin Fahd Stadium to a capacity of 46,865 for the 2027 Asian Cup and 2034 World Cup.