Al Hilal burns half a billion euros: CIES is right, but you're reading the verdict wrong

Summer 2026, I sat in a café on Hang Bong Street, Hanoi, scrolling through Al Hilal's transfer list on my phone. Neymar in. Koulibaly in. Milinkovic-Savic in. Ruben Neves in. I texted a friend who does sports finance analysis in Singapore something he laughed at: "In three years, the world will call Al Hilal the biggest-loss club on the planet. Not because they play badly. Because they bought the wrong players at the most expensive moment."

On February 5, 2026, CIES published a five-year study. Al Hilal lost 502 million euros. The largest figure in the entire database of the International Centre for Sports Studies, headquartered in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Goal.com ran the headline: "Al Hilal the worst in the world: how did Saudi clubs lose a billion euros in five years?" The whole Asian football scene shared the article. Nobody asked what CIES actually measures.

People call me a disruptor. I call it reading the run one step ahead.

The real story isn't in the 502 figure. It's in what CIES measures, what it doesn't, and why four Saudi names sit on the same ranking as Manchester United and Tottenham — two clubs utterly different in ownership model, philosophy, and pathology.

In October 2026, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) took over 75% of four clubs: Al Hilal, Al Nassr, Al Ittihad, Al Ahli. Not to resell. Not to profit on the books. To build a league. This is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's official statement, not my speculation.

In January 2026, Cristiano Ronaldo landed in Riyadh in an Al Nassr shirt. The deal was reported internationally at 200 million euros per year, a figure unprecedented in professional football history. Then came the wave: Neymar to Al Hilal for a 90 million euro fee from Paris Saint-Germain, Karim Benzema to Al Ittihad, Sadio Mane to Al Nassr, Kalidou Koulibaly to Al Hilal, N'Golo Kante to Al Ittihad, Riyad Mahrez to Al Ahli.

Within 24 months, the Saudi Pro League spent over 1.5 billion euros on transfers. The Premier League needed nearly fifteen years to reach a comparable spending level in its first boom period, around the mid-2000s. Saudi did it in two transfer windows.

History is not short on precedent. The Chinese Super League did something similar between 2026 and 2026: Oscar to Shanghai SIPG for 60 million euros, Hulk to the same club, Carlos Tevez to Shanghai Shenhua on a 40 million euro annual salary. The bubble burst in 2026 when Beijing imposed salary caps and transfer taxes. Stars left en masse, many clubs dissolved. Nobody can say for certain PIF will repeat that mistake — but the structure of buying over-age players is strikingly similar.

And CIES — an organization known for research on youth development, fixture congestion, average squad age — decided to measure something else: value destroyed on the transfer ledger.

Their method has two channels. First, realized loss: total fees paid minus total fees recouped on players who left the club over five years. Second, unrealized loss: total acquisition cost of the current squad minus its market value at the time of the study.

For Al Hilal: 315 million euros in realized loss, 187 million in unrealized loss. Total 502 million. The largest figure in the entire database.

This is where I want you to stop and read slowly.

The full ranking:

| Rank | Club | Loss (€M) | Ownership model | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Al Hilal | 502 | PIF (state) | | 2 | Manchester United | 405 | Private (Glazer/INEOS) | | 3 | Al Nassr | 229 | PIF (state) | | 4 | Tottenham Hotspur | 188 | ENIC (private) | | 5 | Al Ittihad | 175 | PIF (state) | | 6 | Al Ahli | 134 | PIF (state) |

Total for the four Saudi clubs: 1.04 billion euros. One billion and forty million euros of value destroyed on the transfer ledger in five years.

Goal.com calls the four Saudi clubs sharing the top six "strange." To me, nothing is strange. Those four clubs are funded by the same sovereign investment fund. Same hand signing the cheques. Same strategy. Same starting point. Same buying pattern. Their sitting next to each other on a statistical ranking is not coincidence — it's the signature of centralized capital.

The most important point in the entire CIES study, the one no Vietnamese outlet has mentioned: Al Hilal's 502 million figure splits into two parts with completely different diagnostic meaning. The 315 million is bad buying. The 187 million is bad holding. Both are abnormally high, meaning the problem isn't one bad deal — it's the recruitment system.

Bad buying, made concrete: Al Hilal paid 90 million euros for Neymar in August 2026, when he was 31 with an extensive injury history at PSG. He played five matches for Al Hilal in the Saudi Pro League before tearing his ACL in October 2026. He returned in September 2026, played a few more games, then the two sides terminated the contract in January 2026. Al Hilal recouped not a single euro in transfer fee. 90 million euros evaporated, wages not counted.

Bad holding, made concrete: the 187 million euros is the gap between what Al Hilal paid to assemble its current squad and that squad's market value at the time CIES froze the data. This number says something very specific: Al Hilal holds a squad with high acquisition cost but low resale value. Players aged 31 to 34 see their market value fall faster than their on-pitch output. That's age-curve mathematics, not my emotional judgment.

Now compare with Manchester United. That club lost 405 million euros, second place. But an entirely different pathology. United paid high prices for players at their peak, kept them too long, let them leave on free transfers. Paul Pogba arrived for 105 million euros in 2026, left for free in 2026. Romelu Lukaku arrived for 85 million, departed permanently for 30 million. Alexis Sanchez arrived in a swap deal, left for free.

Al Hilal did the opposite. They paid high prices for players past their peak, brought them in for two or three seasons, then let them depreciate naturally with age. Same CIES metric, two different diseases. If you read the same number and draw the same conclusion, you're reading it wrong.

And there's another layer you should notice. CIES measures loss on nominal acquisition fees. But if players arrive on free transfers with massive wages — the Benzema case at Al Ittihad, the Kante case — transfer loss is low but operating cost is high. In other words, the 1.04 billion euro figure Goal.com headlines could be an underestimate of the true total cost. Or conversely, it could be an overestimate, if the market values CIES uses don't reflect the true commercial value of players in Saudi — where value lies in drawing audiences, not in resale to a European club.

At this point, the PIF defenders will say: "But this is strategic investment. PIF doesn't buy clubs to make a profit. They buy to build national brand, draw global attention, prepare for World Cup 2034."

True. I don't dispute that argument. And that's exactly the point I want to dissect.

CIES measures loss on the transfer ledger. CIES doesn't measure incremental broadcast revenue, new sponsorship deals, league brand value, geopolitical returns. If PIF spends a billion euros to buy the Saudi Pro League's place on the world football map — and they've achieved that, don't deny it — then that's the marketing cost of a national project, not the financial failure of a football business. On project accounting, it may be entirely rational.

But this is where I split from the crowd defending PIF with that argument: the "strategic investment" argument is being used to excuse a very specific operational mistake — buying the wrong players.

Strategic investment doesn't mean buying stupidly. If the goal is to build the league's brand and draw global audiences over a decade, why not buy players aged 24 to 26 at their peak? They offer performance, resale value, and enough time attached to the league to become icons. Why buy players aged 31 to 33, who will retire exactly when the league needs them most?

In Quang Nam I learned one thing: people hate you for being right one season before them. To PIF, I'll say it plainly: you didn't fail because you spent big. You failed because you spent big on men with no time left.

A smart state project can build a brand and reduce losses at the same time. Al Hilal did the first half. Failed the second. That's an execution error, not the model's fate.

The second blind spot, and this is where I self-critique: I don't have Al Hilal's commercial revenue data. Nobody outside PIF does. If that revenue tripled in three years — and there are signs it did, as the Saudi Pro League signed major international broadcast deals — then the 502 million figure may have been partly offset. But even then, the over-age buying model has a ceiling. And that ceiling is approaching, not because CIES says so, but because the age curve spares no one.

The night I write this, Riyadh is preparing for the next matchday. All of Saudi Arabia is singing. In three weeks they'll understand why I'm not singing.

My verification milestone, written down so you can come back and check: by the end of the 2026/27 season, at least one of the four PIF clubs will visibly shift its transfer strategy toward players under 27, or CIES will record the first decline in Saudi group transfer losses in five years. If neither happens, I'll come back to this article myself and stamp the date so you can judge.

Al Hilal doesn't need a golden generation. They need a generation willing to pay for men with their whole careers ahead of them, not men with only their names behind them. Football doesn't forgive those who buy the past at the price of the future. And CIES's balance sheet is the only piece of paper that doesn't know how to lie.