Visiting NEOM, the new Saudi superclub built to rule all others before the 2034 World Cup

There are many projects in Saudi Arabia, most of them ambitious, and many of them designed to disrupt the status quo.

One such project is NEOM SC, a soccer club owned by the Public Investment Fund — the same sovereign wealth fund that owns Premier League club Newcastle United — and which is being fast-tracked to become one of the biggest in the world.

Five years is their ambitious target for reaching the Club World Cup, then the plan is for the team and its stadium, to be built at the controversial project The Line, to act as a showpiece when the kingdom hosts the World Cup in 2034.

James Montague visited the remote city of Tabuk to find out more about the so-far secretive club…

Tabuk, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

It wasn’t until late afternoon, when the shadows grew long enough to offer some protection from the insane August heat, that the thousands started arriving at the King Khalid Sports City Stadium.

An hour earlier, the car park and concourses of the old but charismatic stadium surrounded by desert on the outskirts of Tabuk, a city of just over half a million people in the remote north west of Saudi Arabia close to the Jordanian border, had been empty.

Now there was life. Street food stalls and pop-up coffee shops and merch stands and games. Fathers wearing white thobes waited as their daughters got their faces painted. Women in black abayas with niqabs covering their faces worked as volunteers, pointing fans towards the tight security at the stadium entrance. Groups of excitable teenage boys waited their turn to play EA FC on a bank of massive flat screen TVs. It was Tuesday night and it felt more like a low-key music festival than the build-up to a football match.

The match against Al Jandal was officially a 10,000 sell-out, something that had not happened before, in part because there had not been much success for the fans to get excited about. This was a game in the Saudi First League, the country’s second division. Al Suqoor, ‘The Falcons’ in Arabic, was founded in 1965 and had spent almost all of its six-decade history bouncing between the third and fourth tier of Saudi football. They had never played in Saudi Arabia’s elite league. In the past, Al Suqoor would be lucky if a few dozen fans attended. But the team was no longer called Al Suqoor and no longer wore their traditional gold, black and white shirts. They were now known as NEOM Sports Club, named after their new owners, the $1.5trillion real estate mega project being built in virtual secrecy down the road.

NEOM was entirely owned by the Public Investment Fund. It was a project of breathless ambition, or hubris, depending on who you spoke to. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman announced it in 2017, a high-tech series of developments covering 27,000 square kilometres of Tabuk province bordering on Saudi Arabia’s pristine and undeveloped Red Sea coastline. It was virgin land, the developers said, to build the settlement of the future. At its centre was The Line, a proposed 170-kilometre-long ‘cognitive city’, built — in the spirit of nominative determinism — in a straight line. AI would monitor everything and use the data to predict and satisfy the needs of the city’s proposed nine million citizens.

There would be no roads or currency and the project would be staffed by robot servants and flying cars. MBS had said that The Line would usher in “a civilisational revolution that puts humans first”. The whole NEOM mega project had become one of the most important elements of MBS’s economic and social revolution, as well as Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the 2034 World Cup, which would be rubber-stamped by FIFA a few months from now.

The 2034 bid document stated that one of the stadiums would be in NEOM, built at the top of The Line, half a kilometre off the ground, taller even than the Empire State Building. The early concept designs for the stadium showed layered, tessellating shells glowing neon blue. It looked like an arena a player might be able to choose in Rocket League.

So, if NEOM was to be a world-class city with a World Cup stadium, it also needed a world-class football team. The most efficient way of achieving that was to find a club that had already been established and one that inhabited a sort of Goldilocks zone: not too big so that the existing fans would complain about the eradication of its history, but not too small, otherwise it would take too long to reach the top of the Saudi football pyramid. And NEOM was on a tight timeline. A suitable candidate was scouted in the nearest big city to the project, which was Tabuk. In the summer of 2023, Al Suqoor was purchased and then moulded in NEOM’s image. The club’s old badge – a falcon in profile – was replaced by NEOM’s corporate logo.

لايـق عـلـيـنـا 😎🆕#نادي_نيوم_الرياضي pic.twitter.com/q1LL6FqMsv

— نادي نيوم الرياضي (@NEOMSportsClub) April 22, 2025

Outside the stadium, volunteers handed out hundreds of NEOM SC’s blue flags and scarves, the club’s new corporate brand-aligned colours. It wasn’t just football either. NEOM had an entire sports division, with diverse investments in Formula E and Indian Premier League cricket, among others. Sport was, according to the corporate blurb, pivotal to promoting and anchoring Brand NEOM.

NEOM’s corporate symbol and colour palette was everywhere.

“We are here to cheer,” said Faris, a former youth player of Al Suqoor who, at 18, had given up on his dream of playing football. He felt no loss for his old club and was now all in for NEOM SC. He was part of ‘The NEOM Unit’ – previously known as ‘Al Suqoor Unit’ – a group of eight friends who would lead the chants in the crowd with their songs and tabla hand drums. They gathered around with their instruments as Faris spoke.

“I was a player for Al Suqoor, and when they got bought by NEOM, I switched to being a fan. I don’t play anymore. I’m too fat. This is the best thing I can do for my team to be better. We will make a dangerous noise today. And we will win!”

As the desert light dissolved and dissipated, turning the sky the colour of warmed honey before blackening entirely, a nearby minaret announced the maghrib prayer. The concourses of the stadium were filled with men and boys praying. In the absence of prayer mats, the NEOM flags being handed out for free were used instead.

Like Newcastle United, the club now had a legitimate claim to be the richest in the world. Both were effectively bankrolled from money that originated from the same source. In little over 12 months, tens of millions of Saudi riyals had been poured into the project. A whole new management structure was brought in as the club signed top Saudi and international players, who had no business playing in the second tier of Saudi football for a rebranded team in a remote corner of the country.

Saudi national team captain Salman al Faraj arrived from Al Hilal. Egyptian international and Al Ittihad captain Ahmed Hegazy was persuaded to join him. Brazilian coach Pericles Chamusca had been in charge of Saudi Pro League side Al Taawoun FC, before he too was convinced to sign for NEOM SC. Pericles had been coaching in Saudi since 2018 and had acclimatised well to the Kingdom, which might have explained why he wore a blazer and tie in the stifling heat as he ran the players through their final warm-up routine on the pitch.

Pericles Chamusca (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

Trying to find out anything about NEOM, either the mega-development or the football team, was hard work. The building site itself was inaccessible thanks to its remote location, but also by design. There had been several bad news stories in recent years. It was nearly impossible to visit the site and NEOM Sports Club shared some of that secrecy, at least initially. There was no phone number or other contact details on the club’s website. So I turned up. Once in the stadium, an official quickly grabbed me and asked who I was and what I was doing. They escorted me out to the car park. At first, I thought I was being thrown out, but they instead politely showed me into a lift.

When the doors opened, I was standing in NEOM Sports Club’s VVIP room. A lavish buffet of Arabic food, dates and chocolate cakes skirted the room. Waiters weaved around, serving cardamom-scented Arabic coffee in tiny porcelain cups. The deputy governor of Tabuk, a member of the Saud royal family, had just arrived, as had Olympiacos sporting director and 1998 World Cup winner Christian Karembeu. He was wearing a NEOM-branded polo shirt and was the guest of Kyriakos Dourekas, NEOM SC’s new sporting director, who had been poached from Nottingham Forest, whose billionaire owner Evangelos Marinakis also owned Olympiacos.

Moaath Alohali strode forward and warmly introduced himself. Moaath was the acting CEO of NEOM SC, although I recognised him from somewhere else. He once held the same position at Al Ettifaq, a Saudi Pro League team from Dammam, his home city on the country’s oil-rich Persian Gulf coast. Famously, he had recruited Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard as coach. Moaath was in the photos, in a white thobe, smiling as the players signed their lucrative new contracts.

He was in Tabuk with his boss, Meshari al Motairi, the chairman of NEOM SC. Meshari al Motairi was a man of influence. He was not a member of the House of Saud but did have one of the most powerful jobs at NEOM, as executive director of government affairs. It highlighted just how important those in charge viewed the football club to NEOM’s future. “This is part of the revolution led by His Royal Highness (Mohammed bin Salman),” he explained when we finally spoke. “We’re trying to add new DNA to this club by building the structure, so (it) can compete with the big clubs in the Kingdom.”

Al Motairi had never given an interview to a Western journalist before. He made it clear this was very much out of choice. But once we began to talk, he was open about why NEOM had bought what was then a third division football club. “Sport, it’s a big attraction. Imagine Barcelona,” he said. “I was there a few months ago and I met many people. They said Barcelona as a city before the (1992 Summer) Olympics, it’s not Barcelona after the Olympics. Sport, how can I say? It fills the dots… It’s an accelerator for a lot of things.”

The players and staff, he said, had not just been attracted by the money to play in Tabuk, but NEOM’s vision. “I think the most important thing that attracted all of them is NEOM, NEOM as a project,” he said.

The project.

It was a phrase I would hear a lot over the next weeks and months. And the project, essentially, was to build one of the world’s biggest football clubs from scratch. The first stage was to incubate it in Tabuk, here at the King Khalid Sports City Stadium, and then transplant it to The Line a decade from now, just in time for the 2034 World Cup. The club was on a tight schedule. Promotion to the SPL this year was a necessity, followed by the league and continental titles in subsequent seasons.

Where do you see NEOM SC in five years, I asked. “The (Club) World Cup,” he replied quickly. “We don’t believe this word ‘impossible’. Everything is possible. We need to work hard, double time, and we will reach it.”

The final call to prayer for the day rang out and, like the fans down in the concourses, the men in the most expensive seats in the house prayed, too, near to the buffet, portraits of King Salman and MBS hanging from the wall above.

The NEOM Unit had already been singing for over an hour when the match kicked off, a swirling, joyous noise that pulsed and swelled like the waves of a gentle sea. Even the security guards and policemen who surrounded them joined in with the dancing and singing. The noise only stopped — for the briefest of moments — when NEOM SC scored, which was four times. Pericles Chamusca’s side dismantled Al Jandal with ease.

برجالنا .. الحلم واقع 🏆#نادي_نيوم_الرياضي pic.twitter.com/TSI1o5J3eK

— نادي نيوم الرياضي (@NEOMSportsClub) April 29, 2025

Romarinho, a Brazilian player who was considered one of the best in the SPL last season, scored twice as they won 4-0. The VVIPS and the NEOM Unit applauded the players and Pericles as they came off the pitch, all with the same inevitable conclusion: this season, and in the seasons to come, NEOM would sweep all before them.

“It’s clear in our strategy that we will be there within 10 years, max,” Moaath said of NEOM SC’s move to the state-of-the-art World Cup stadium that was going to be built on top of The Line, a brand-new old club on old-brand-new land.

The problem was that The Line perhaps wasn’t being built on virgin land after all.

This is an extract from Engulfed: How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and the World (Blink) by James Montague.

(Top photo: A model of the proposed NEOM Stadium; by Wang Dongzhen/Xinhua via Getty Images)

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