One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Can Saudi Arabia have a more sustainable good time at the 2026 World Cup?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group H preview. You can also read previews of Cape Verde, Uruguay and Spain.
Can Saudi Arabia have a more sustainable good time at the 2026 World Cup?
At the last World Cup, Saudi Arabia pulled off one of the Potemkin results in the tournament’s history, a shock 2-1 victory over Argentina.
It was a result that seemed to indicate a wobbliness in Argentina and a genuine strength from a Saudi Arabia team that had failed to do much at the previous tournament.
But if you looked past the beautiful, freshly painted model village of the final score, you could see the hastily assembled fake houses and actors posing as happy peasants that was the performance.1For what it’s worth, the idea of Potemkin village is probably fictional, which is what most experts on Potemkin and 19th century Russia believe. But it is a wonderfully useful colloquial metaphor for a false facade, so I’m not about to give it up just because it’s built on a false premise.
Saudi Arabia did not actually play particularly well in that match, the win was largely thanks to a lack of discipline in Argentina’s running and two wonder strikes in the course of five minutes in the second half. FotMob’s match stats have Argentina amassing 15 shots and 2.26 expected goals to just three shots and 0.15 expected goals for Saudi Arabia. Those stats don’t account for the three times Argentina put the ball in the back of the net for goals called back for offsides.
A World Cup win against Argentina is forever. No one can take that away from Saudi Arabia. But there was nothing in that performance that you could point to and say “They can do that again and continue to win.”
As is often the case in this sport, it turned out that it was the performance, not the result, which was replicable. Saudi Arabia followed their historic win with fairly lifeless losses to Poland and then Mexico. Despite beating the eventual champions, they were eliminated in the group stage.
For 2026 to go better, they will need to find a way to not only luck into a result, but also to play well across 270 minutes of soccer.
One reason for optimism is that Saudi Arabia is that they are now an experienced, World Cup tested squad. Team captain Salem Al-Dawsari, scorer of the bolt of lightning winner against Argentina, will lead the team in his third World Cup this year, and key players like Saleh Al-Shehri are back for the second tournament after playing major roles in 2022. The core of the squad knows what a World Cup is like.
More broadly, there is an argument that the recent influx of top-level and/or ex-top-level global talent into Saudi Arabia might have helped raise the national team’s level in the four years between tournaments. Almost the entire squad plays club soccer for one of the big teams that you have likely heard of because they spent a ridiculous amount of money on an aging Premier League star — Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal, Al-Ittihad, and Al-Ahli.2Neither here nor there, really, but there are a ton of teams named Al-Ahli across the Arabic-speaking world, largely because the name translates to “National,” making it roughly equivalent to how there are lots of teams in South America named “Nacional” or some variation of that. Anyways Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli are probably the second biggest Al-Ahly, behind the one from Egypt but that one is Romanized with a “y.” Is this useful information? Probably not.
Sure, the Chinese Super League gold rush of the 2010s didn’t translate to better performances for China’s national team, but that is largely because China didn’t have a competitive national team to start with. Saudi Arabia were consistently okay before their clubs started paying billions of dollars to bring in aging superstars. Playing alongside the people who have landed in Saudi Arabia over the past half-decade — Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Sadio Mané — is hypothetically a beneficial learning experience for players who were already decent. At a baseline level, the kinds of players in the league now mean that the Saudi Arabia players are playing at a respectable level in their day-to-day lives.
Does any of this mean that Saudi Arabia will be able to string a couple of real performances together in the United States? Probably not: They struggled through qualifying and only made it to the United States thanks to scoring more goals than Iraq in a final playoff round-robin.
But with a more experienced team, it’s possible that the 2026 version of Saudi Arabia might play the kind of soccer that makes a shock upset more than a freak result.
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