Italy Goes Saudi: the Story of the Italian Supercup in Riyadh
On January 2nd Saudi Arabia will host the 37th edition of the Italian Supercup: it will be the 5th time in the country. Serie A was the first major league to expand into Arabia.
The year 2025 in Italian football will begin with the national Supercup, starting next Thursday in Riyadh at King Saud University Stadium. It will be the fifth time the competition will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, and for the 2nd time it will have four team instead of the classical two, following the Spanish example launched in 2020. But Italian Serie A was a pioneer of agreements with Riyadh, and in general with foreign countries, especially those with worrying human rights records. Italian football has also a particularly sensitive taste for countries about to organize the World Cup.
The Supercup was first hosted abroad in 1993, and the location were the United States, then in 2014 it took place in Qatar and in 2018 already in Saudi Arabia. The tournament was held in Gaddafi’s Lybia in 2003 too, and in 2009 it landed in China. The first time abroad for the French Trophée des Champions was in China in 2014, while the Supercopa de España crossed the boarders no earlier than 2020 edition, held in Saudi Arabia. Italian football therefore has a huge responsibility in legitimizing this phenomenon.
The Supercup migration in Saudi Arabia in 2018 was justified with the money argument: Serie A needed new sources of investments and to expand to new markets, to make up ground in comparison with the other richer European leagues. But we can’t forget that the competition flight abroad already in 1993, and again in 2002 and 2009, when Serie A was at the top of its popularity. The now forgotten 2002 edition hosted in Tripoli was motivated above all by commercial needs (the Lybian oil) and by the friendship between Gaddafi and Berlusconi: one year after that, Al-Saadi Gaddafi - the son of Muammar Gaddafi - came in Italy to play football in Serie A with Perugia. Italian football has never had any particular problems in sacrificing his values in front of economic interests.
The forgotten controversy over the Supercup in Saudi Arabia
In January 2019 the fight upon the Supercup broke up in Italy. All of a sudden Italian politicians discovered that the competition will be held in a few days in Jeddah. The entire political spectrum exploded against the fixture between Juventus and Milan. On the left side, President of the Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini said that “The Lords of football can sell matches’ rights but they cannot barter women’s rights”, and deputy Minister to Equal Opportunities Vincenzo Spadafora (M5S) add his “more lively disagreement” with the decision. On the right side, deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini (Northern League) said that “Having the Supercup in an Muslim country where women can’t go to the stadium without a man is disgusting”. “Have we sold centuries of European civilization and women’s rights battles for the Saudi money? The Football Association have to stop this absolute shame and bring the Supercup in a country that does not discriminate against our women and our values” wrote on Facebook Giorgia Meloni, at the time leader of the opposition right-wing party Brothers of Italy. Inexplicably no one talked about the brutal assassination of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed just three month earlier.
The fun fact was that the Serie A chairman Gaetano Micciché had to intervene to bring some seriousness back into the discussion. He clarified that was false what Salvini and other politicians have said about the ban on women going to the stadium unless accompanied by a man, and stated that “Football is part of the Italian cultural and economic system and cannot act differently, especially in international relations, from the country to which it belongs. Saudi Arabia is the largest Italian commercial partner in the Middle East”. In few words: hypocritical politicians were attacking the Italian football system but they were silent about their own relationships with Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia is an element of stability and reliability in the Middle East” said Salvini only six months earlier, meeting the Saudi ambassador in Rome, and adding he wanted “to relaunch the collaboration between the two countries” on security, economic, commercial and cultural sectors.
Countermand, therefore: Saudi Arabia is an Italian crucial partner and the Supercup is something good for everyone. For the Saudi women, suggested Micciché, adding that “Our tournament will be remembered in History as the first international official football competition in which Saudi women will be able to attend live”. For the Serie A, of course: Riyadh government paid € 7mln to obtain the match, and other more € 14mln would be paid for the next two editions. In the Italian sports counternarrative of the Supercup, Sky Sport journalist Alessandro Alciato made a benevolent report of the women’s rights situation in the Gulf country, praising that “Many restrictions against women have been eliminated” and that the transformation “is only just beginning”. Alciato motivated his optimism by interviewing just two women: an Arab-Italian and the wife of the former Italian ambassador in Riyadh, who stated that “Events like the Supercup encourage change”.
Sadly, nothing of that really happened, and the changes were only superficial. “While these reforms have had a positive impact on women, the authorities’ failure to abolish the male guardianship system in its entirety and instead codifying it in law risk undermining these modest gains” denounced Amnesty International on March 2022, after Saudi government passed a new law against women’s rights. After the 2019 controversies, no one protested against the Super Cup in Saudi Arabia anymore, except for the NGOs. Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis, who initially criticized the competition (but not for human rights reasons), in January 2023 exalted the “extraordinary democratization” of the Arab country. No word from the current Italian vice-Prime Minister Salvini and not even from the current Prime Minister Meloni, who were so angry six years ago. In January 2024 the Minister of Sport Andrea Abodi said: “We must take the chance to illuminate those countries and to contribute to civil literacy”.
The economic connections between Italy and Saudi Arabia
Riyadh invested € 21mln in June 2018 to obtain three editions of the Italian Supercup; in March 2023, signed with Serie A a more challenging renewal worth € 100mln for four editions, including the final-four innovation already use with the Spanish Supercup. Everybody in Italian football liked this deal, more lucrative than the Hungary and the UAE options. As the then Serie A chairman Micciché had said in 2019, Italy has been doing business with Saudi Arabia for a long time, not just inside football. From left to right, all the political personalities in the country supported the increasing connections with Riyadh. “Italy and Saudi Arabia have a lot in common” said in 2013 Emma Bonino, at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs in a center-left government. “I think Saudi could be the place of a New Reinaissance” stated former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, talking with the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in 2021. Renzi was paid € 1,1mln from the Arab goverment as a consultant, and few month after that talk he denied Bin Salman ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi (something that differs completely from the CIA file on the case).
The Italian-Saudi partnership is long-lasting and has strengthened in recent years. In 2017, economic flows between the two countries grew by 9%: Italy became the ninth exporter to Riyadh in the world and the second in the EU. It traded goods for € 3,9bln, mostly food, wine, furnishings, machineries, electornics and - obviously - weapons. The armaments export to Saudi Arabia were worth € 45,6mln in 2017: in the previous four years, Riyadh has bought 1.5% of its weapons from Italy. This happened even though Saudi Arabia had been engaged in war in Yemen since 2014. The weapons trade stopped in July 2019 under the Giuseppe Conte’s government, and the embargo was confirmed again in January 2021. But in June 2023, under the Meloni right-wing administration, Italy has returned to selling missiles and bombs to Riyadh. Few months before, Meloni had phoned Bin Salman to talk about stategies on energy and weapons, and the next September Milan hosted the first Italian-Saudi Investment Forum.
Between January and September 2024 Italian export to Riyadh worth more than € 4bln, with an increase of 27.9% compared to the same period of the previous year. This economic connection are rapidly finding more ground on the football fields, as we saw with the Riyadh Season sponsorship of AS Roma signed in October 2023, followed shortly after by signing of Saudi defender Saud Abdulhamid. In just six years, Italian questionable relationships with Saudi Arabia have been completely normalized, but this occured because Italy had already decided to come to terms with authoritarian regimes in previous years.