The first thing you notice about Ben Harburg, a man with enormous wealth at his disposal as the Managing Partner at MSA Capital, a global investment firm with over $2 billion in assets, is how unassuming he is.
Speaking to The Asian Game via Zoom on a flying visit back to Boston, rising early for the 9am video call, the 41-year-old appeared in a simple red quarter-zipped sweater – or unzipped as it was – as if he had just emerged from the gym or was about to begin a Netflix binge session.
That’s not a knock on his sartorial choices, the opposite in fact. It was casual, down-to-earth and encapsulated why Harburg has become an instant hit in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since taking ownership of the unglamorous Saudi Pro League side, Al Kholood, in July.
He is eminently relatable and connects with the common fan as well as he does with those at the top of the Saudi football food chain. Every game you can find him in t-shirt and jeans, stood with the fans in the grandstands, wanting to engage and understand the experience from their perspective.
For a man so successful, he is humble and engaging with a steely and single-minded determination to not just succeed, but change the way things are done. He respects norms and customs, but isn’t afraid to think outside the square and offer fresh ideas, or frank assessments, for how things could be done better.
It’s easy to see why fans of not just Al Kholood, but fans all across the Kingdom, have connected with him like few others before him.
“The fans have been phenomenal, digitally and physically, and a breath of fresh air,” he told The Asian Game.
“There’s a lot of toxicity in European football, and it has a much longer history, and fan bases are much more dissatisfied with the state of their club, and they’ve seen it over a much longer arc. And so, both in the digital realm as well as physically, you just get a huge amount of pushback.
“I have not experienced (that), I know it’s there, and I’m sure the honeymoon will wear off one day, but I’ve still not experienced that level of toxicity and pessimism in Saudi Arabia as I do every day in Europe.
“So that’s been really refreshing, because it’s really hard to get yourself up – we’re working 20 hours a day right now on this club – it’s really hard to get yourself up out of bed in the morning if the fans are just lacing into you online; hatred is not a great motivator, love is a much better motivator.”
He continued: “I think it’s also just because of the nature of the ecosystem in Saudi Arabia and the nature of our place in that evolutionary story, I’m allowed to, and we’re allowed to do things that Saudi ownership and certainly not presidents or Chairman, were able to do in the past there, we’re able to speak with a degree of frankness.
“And we’re able to kind of reach out to them in their element, physically ask for their feedback in a way that no-one has before. So it kind of opens some flood gates, I think, of pent up frustration amongst fans that they’re able to finally vent and someone’s going to reply to them, they’re able to speak and touch and feel (connected) in a way that they never were before.
“So I think we kind of touched a nerve clearly, and I think this transaction would already have been kind of interesting and unique, just in its own merits, just because we’re foreigners and going to a funky place in the country and into a league that has its fair share of criticism.
“But I think because of the way I was able to tap into this nerve and get people, and address something that was really missing in the ecosystem, which was a fan ownership, engagement or a relationship that has never existed before, it’s opened the floodgates of interest and support in a way I never could have anticipated.
“Of course, it all comes down to how we perform on the field, and we try to set expectations very modestly for this season. But if we can survive, the world is not going to know what hits them, because we have so much support and so much momentum behind us now that it’ll be really fun if we can start picking up some wins.”
‘Starting 10-feet below ground’
While Saudi Arabia is home to some of the biggest clubs in Asia, with their clubs entering an era where it looks like they will come to dominate continental club competitions, Al Kholood, it’s safe to say, is not one of them.
Founded in 1970 it hails from the city of Ar Rass, about 450km north of the capital Riyadh, with a population ranging from somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000; meaning it just sneaks into the list of 30 biggest cities by population in the Kingdom.
The wider Al Qassim region, however, of which Ar Rass is the third largest city, has a population of around 1.3 million, providing a bigger potential audience. It competes for that space against multiple other clubs, including Al Taawoun, Al Najma, Al Raed, Al Bukiryah, Al Arabi and Al Hazem; the latter with which they share the city of Ar Rass.
The club has spent almost its entire existence living in the lower leagues of the Saudi football pyramid, only earning its first ever promotion to the top flight Saudi Pro League ahead the 2024-25 season.
It is, by any metric, a small club from a small, remote city.
Beforehand, very few fans in Saudi Arabia had probably ever heard of the club, let alone knew much about them and that was very much reflected in the way the club was run, with minimal investment in infrastructure or community engagement in order to develop or grow the club’s profile outside its immediate fan base.
Some may have viewed the club as a negative asset, one with very little upside or growth potential, but not Harburg. All of their so-called flaws were exactly what attracted him to the club in the first place, but even then he was taken aback by just how perilous a state the club was in when he was handed the keys in July.
“A lot of the key staff resigned at the announcement of the handover, so they kind of left us with a lot of the folks that weren’t as helpful, or that we probably would not want to keep in the long term,” he explained.
“All the people that kind of knew (how things worked) and had the keys to the place ran away and then, in parallel with that, I think we’re sitting on the worst infrastructure in the entire league. So it wasn’t like we could just walk in, turn key and start practices.
“We’ve had to take drastic, urgent renovations around the facilities to get them up to code. The previous management hadn’t paid salaries for six months. So we inherited a club that was under league sanction, (and) was just about to be under FIFA sanction. It would have been better to take over, I would say, an expansion franchise, because then you’re at least starting at zero.
“Here we’re starting 10-feet below the ground, so we really had to dig ourselves out of the grave first, so it was a small miracle that we were able to field a complete squad heading into our first match.”
Officially announced as the club’s new owner on 25 July, Harburg and his team had just one month to turn this around for the start of the new season at the end of August. That was already going to be a herculean effort without the added work required to plug the holes of the sinking ship that he inherited.
It begs the question – why Al Kholood?
“We liked our club because the region we’re in is like the heartland of Saudi Arabia,” said Harburg, who also owns Spanish side Cadiz.
“Qassim region is really vibrant, really affluent. Most of the biggest conglomerates and families that are now largely Riyadh-based started in Al Qassim.
“So, there’s just this huge diaspora. Everywhere I go around Saudi Arabia, I’m meeting people that are saying, ‘I’m from Qassim, or I’m from Ar Rass’, so there’s this whole diaspora. I call them the Ar Rass mafia that I think can be activated to provide a nationwide fan base.
“And then we like the fact that it was kind of a newer club with a fresher history. There are lots of older clubs in Saudi Arabia that carry with them the weight of a lot of history, high achievement, and fans.
“Our club has played once in the SPL, it finished ninth, which we think was a significant over achievement, and it had changed its crest three times in the last couple seasons. It had, as I said, infrastructure that’s starting from zero. And so if we had inherited something that had the weight of history, a bigger fan group, existing infrastructure that already was really kind of decent, it makes it a lot harder to change things about the club.
He continued: “So almost by starting ourselves from scratch enabled us to think more out of the box in terms of how we’re going to build our infrastructure and where we take that infrastructure physically. It meant that we could change the branding, the crest, whatever we want.
“I mean, at Cadiz if I just touch the crest, the fans will murder me. Here we, we changed it first day and instantly received a huge amount of support for that. We can change the way we do business.
“So it gave us the ability to start things from scratch and have it a fresh project, rather than inheriting a lot of people, infrastructure, tradition that we would have had to of unwind or build off the back of.”
A new identity for a new era
One of the first items ticked off the list, as Harburg outlined, was a new visual identity. A new logo and brand identity was dropped just days into his tenure as new owner to largely positive reviews, although there was some pushback from those who thought the identity didn’t accurately capture the identity and soul of Ar Rass.
Harburg, as is his style, replied to many of those negative comments personally on twitter, diffusing any hint of dissent so early in his rein, committing to listening and engaging to what the fans want and if that means tweaking it again in the future, then that’s what he would do.
It might be a slightly crude way to go about it, to release a new logo and then engage the fan base, but such were the tight timelines between takeover and the start of the season, he was left with very little choice.
A new identity was needed to reflect the fresh ownership and the new journey the club was going on, creating a clean break with what came before them.
But more than just a logo, it represented a new era and a new direction for the football club. Days later they dropped a set of eclectic new kits in bold new colours that had football kit fashionistas drooling, setting the club up to be something of a future icon for football hipsters around the world, tapping into a growing market in online football fandom.
It’s something Harburg has experienced with his other club, Cadiz in Spain.
“(Cadiz) is a club that has been highly regional for the most of its existence, and we were able to take that to a level over the last four years, since I’ve been around where we went from 500,000 social media followers to 18 million,” he explained.
“We’ve had great features and documentaries made about us around the world. We’ve built fan bases and virtual fan groups in China and Nigeria and Ghana and Turkey, and elsewhere by reaching out to under addressed fan groups and populations that we felt like were high growth, rather than going to the usual suspects in Europe or even North America.
“So we did that, and we were able to get people to care about Cadiz that have no business caring about it. So in many senses, Al Kholood is something similar, where it’s a club that even most Saudis have never heard of, let alone anyone else outside of the country or region.
“And so again, we have a blank canvas to build this narrative, to build this underdog narrative, and to build this new narrative around how a club engages with it fans.”
Changing the face of Saudi football
Harburg might be the first foreign owner of a Saudi Arabian football club, but it’s not something he likes to talk about. Not the takeover as such, just his nationality.
Despite the history he has created in taking over Al Kholood, he prefers not to look at it through the lens of nationality, rather he prefers to focus on his independence, which gives him certain freedoms not afforded to many other owners in the league.
That, he explains, gives him and his club a unique advantage.
“I actually don’t like to play up the whole fact that I’m the first foreign owner,” he said.
“That’s why I think it’s almost more important to say I’m the first independent, purely financially, commercially driven, non-Government affiliated owner in the league’s history; that’s much more important. The fact that I’m foreign doesn’t matter.
“We’re actually much more nimble, because I don’t have to answer to anyone above me. There’s no board, there’s no indirect owner, there’s no one. It’s 100 percent my money, 100 percent my decision. At the end of the day, the buck stops with me and that means there’s certainly a burden there, but I can move faster.
“So for instance, on this infrastructure side, once I have the land secured, I’m just going to start construction tomorrow. I’m not going to wait for approvals and tenders to be run with multiple bidders. (If) I like a contractor, I’m going to work with him. We’re done, the price is in my budget.
“So we can move a lot faster and I think at the end of the day, that’s what’s actually going to set us apart from a lot of the clubs here. We can just do things others can’t on a timeline they can never achieve.”
With all clubs across the Saudi football pyramid now up for ‘sale’ as part of the privatisation process, Harburg can see that changing the entire dynamic of the league for the better. And he had some strong views on what was needed across the league to change its direction and drive it forward.
“My understanding is the people that are waiting in the wings to take over some of the other clubs are large families or well experienced people within the media space or elsewhere, but mostly Saudi. I think it’s all good news for the league,” he explained.
“The problem we have right now is I’m the only financially driven team and the only one where the buck financially stops with me personally, and I’m competing against four to eight clubs at the top who are have no financial accountability for their management and are able to buy a player for $80 million, and sell them for $20 (million). (They) don’t care about what the P&L looks like at the end of the year.
“In a really material way, it’s going to crush clubs like mine. And I hear other club presidents because they talk to me. I’ve reached out to all club presidents in the league, I think, and the ones that I’ve already met with in person or on the phone have been very supportive and really wonderful, welcoming people, but quietly beneath their breath (are) talking about this pain that we all deal with, which is the inflationary pricing that is a result of the price of being paid at the top.
“So just because Al Ahli or Al Nassr can pay some guy an ungodly price doesn’t mean the rest of us can do that. And yet those players come to us with dollar signs in their eyes, expecting some kind of a Saudi premium for coming to the league.
“So we’ve got to cut that Saudi premium out immediately, and certainly cut out anything that would be considered like a hardship premium. And we need to, kind of as a cartel, force prices downward. We need to act as one united league to force prices downward, not up. We can’t have this disparity where we’re all at the bottom getting dragged by the top.
He continued: “So I think privatisation can only be a good thing because hopefully it brings down the spending at the top, or reins that in, and makes that much more financially accountable, and that will actually create more parity in the league. It’ll help us bring ourselves up.
“You need a private sector approach to football, to force it to be accountable, to be sustainable, and to work at the highest levels of professionalism. I think that only happens through privatisation. So I hope they accelerate the privatisation process, and I think they will.”
By going first, Harburg is creating a blueprint for others to follow, particularly if there are other foreign entities or individuals thinking of getting involved. But, he warns, anyone thinking of joining him on this journey has to do so with the right intentions.
“To some degree, we’re paving the road for future privatisations with our own sweat and blood,” he said.
“I think our story has already awakened the world to how attractive this league is, and the financial opportunities here, and just the demand for football in Saudi Arabia.
“I think that we won’t have a problem attracting further and future investors to the Kingdom. It’ll be a matter of ensuring they’re the right types that understand the conditions in the Kingdom – it’s culture, it’s religion, it’s people, it’s history – and don’t think they can just come in like a bull in a china shop and smash things up.
“I think in some ways I was the perfect first owner for them, because I have experience running a club in Europe under similar conditions, being a smaller financial player against big boys and competing well, taking a club that’s unknown to the world. So I know how world football should work. I also know how Saudi Arabia should work and does work at its core.
“Hopefully we can find people with a similar profile for future acquisitions that don’t come in and try to just blow everything up, and take into careful consideration what really can be done, what can’t be done, and how to appeal to local fans and government officials, and just knows all the complexities of operating in a market like Saudi Arabia.”
Listen to Episode 261 of The Asian Game Podcast as we go one-on-one with Ben Harburg
