Demba Ba remembers exactly where he was when the “offer of a lifetime” from the Chinese Super League came in.
“Right before the season started in Turkey, my agent called and said to me ‘What I’m going to tell you, I’ll only tell you once’,” he recalls.
“I’d already turned down one offer to go and play in China, I wasn’t interested. I had a great life in Turkey and was on very good money. But he said to me: ‘This kind of offer only comes once in a lifetime’. So I said ‘Well let’s look at it’. He’d looked after me from the age of 16, we could be open and honest with each other. Then he brought me the offer and I thought ‘Damn, what am I going to do with this?’”
The second offer turned out to be more than double the amount he was on at Besiktas. The potential to change his life, and that of those around him, was simply too tempting to turn down and in 2016 he joined Shanghai Shenhua, one of the first players based in Europe to join an ambitious effort to supercharge China’s football evolution.
That push was inspired by president Xi Jinping, who expressed a desire that China would become a power in the global game, hosting and winning the World Cup in the not-too-distant future. Seeking to ingratiate themselves with the regime, wealthy businessmen took over clubs and sanctioned huge spends on big name players. The two situations are different but Ba sees some similarities in what is happening this summer.
“What happened to me is why I can understand exactly why the players now are looking to Saudi Arabia,” he admits.
So far the recruitment drive, kick-started when Newcastle’s owners PIF took control of four of the biggest clubs in the kingdom to facilitate an overhaul of the domestic league, has seen mostly players edging towards the end of their careers accepting hugely lucrative contract offers to move.
Behind the scenes, though, those involved in the recruitment drive say it is even more frantic than it appears – a whirlwind of speculation, secret talks and smokescreens being used by players and representatives for leverage and lucrative pay days.
i has been told by one agent it has “absolutely” disrupted the summer market. As i revealed last week, Marco Silva was offered more than £300,000-a-week to manage Al-Hilal.
And Ba is adamant that discreet calls from people connected to “some of the biggest players in the world” have been made about moving to Saudi Arabia.
“I spoke to a guy who is very close to the agents who are influencing things in Saudi Arabia and he was telling me the amount of calls they are getting is huge because every player wants to play there now, they’re just not public about it right now,” he says.
“And we are not just talking average players, we are talking some of the biggest in the world.
“They cannot keep up with it, the demand for players to go to Saudi. It is not just about Saudi Arabia trying to poach players, it is about players actively wanting to go to Saudi Arabia which is not heard of as much but is true.”
It is not simply a case of adding another Ferrari to the collection that is attractive to many of them. Ba says he was motivated by wanting to take care of his family and give them “generational wealth”.
“In African culture, when we make it big we want to take care of people around us. There’s that sense of gratefulness and care towards the community around us so it can be a factor and will be for these players too,” he says.
In China Ba prospered, scoring 20 goals in his first 20 games. But he noted that the players who followed him – the likes of Brazil international Oscar and Belgium international Yannick Carrasco – had used the sums offered to the first players to move to negotiate even bigger contracts.
His team agreed to renegotiate his contract but he suffered a sickening broken leg in a game 24 hours later. To their credit, they supported his rehab and when he returned, offered him new terms which represented a 40 per cent pay rise.
So the money sloshing around Chinese football was not inconsiderable but it was not enough to make a lasting legacy.
Ba believes impatience with the rate of progress and inferior infrastructure did not help but he says the biggest issue – and one which he predicts may undermine Saudi Arabia – was not having a plan to grow the grassroots of the game or improve homegrown players.
“What the Saudis are doing will have an impact. If you sign Cristiano Ronaldo, he has so much power in world football that he can change things,” he says.
“But if they want to change everything and develop something in the country, you must go from the ground up. Where is their plan for grassroots?
“It’s not right to compare it to Europe, it will never rival that. The game is in the blood here, it is a cultural thing and it takes more than just money, it takes time and willingness to grow it organically.”
