These were England captain Leah Williamson, two-time Ballon d’Or Feminin winner Alexia Putellas, her Barcelona teammate Caroline Graham Hansen, Chelsea’s Lauren James and Farah Jefry, sold as “a leading figure shaping the development of women’s football in Saudi Arabia”.
And yet, represented by super-agent Rafaela Pimenta and having signed sponsorship deals with Adidas, Subway, Visa, Nissan, Mastercard, Motorola and La Roche-Posay, she is quietly one of the most powerful individual brands in women’s football.
Her TikTok account has almost 150,000 followers. She has been pictured with Lionel Messi, Zinedine Zidane, Karim Benzema, Luis Figo and Ronaldinho, as well as Aitana Bonmati and Putellas.
www.instagram.com/p/DJHYNp6Iv0-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Injuries and the league’s rapid improvement have meant she’s barely played in recent years, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Jefry has become the public face of the nascent Saudi women’s football – young, English-speaking, university-educated, social-media savvy and eminently sellable. It helps that as young as 16 she was promoting the merits of Vision 2030 in interviews.
“She doesn’t cover [wear a hijab, niqab or burkha] online. It’s very positive for the government. People seeing women playing football freely, not being covered as they play and being successful in that is something that sends a more powerful message about Saudi reform than probably any single thing that you could imagine.”
Yet there are now more than 1,500 registered players in Saudi Arabia, including 940 Saudi citizens. The league is broadcast by Dazn and the national women’s programme signed its first-ever sponsorship deal with Unilever in January.
It doesn’t need saying that a thriving Saudi women’s football structure is positive, but it needs contextualising.
The sense of a cultural revolution under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) comes with a well-documented trade-off – women are given more rights than ever before, but cannot criticise the rights they don’t have.
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Her charges included “opposing the laws relating to women”, “participating in several hashtags opposing these laws” and “going to the shops without wearing an abaya [traditional robe], photographing this and publishing it on Snapchat”.
“Women don’t have equal rights in Saudi Arabia,” Montague explains. “They have more rights culturally than they did 10 years ago, but they don’t have equal weight in the law.
“Having a women’s football league is for women to play, but it’s also a bat signal to the rest of the world that ‘we have changed, we have a well-funded league with a good broadcasting contract’.”
Across women’s football and women’s sport throughout Saudi Arabia under MBS, progress is often fuelled by financial or reputational gain. All players can do is enjoy benefits they never believed possible when they first kicked a football.
There is no guarantee Jefry will regain her place for Al-Ittihad or the national team, but that is of little consequence to either brands or the state itself. She is the perfect conduit to sell the dream of Saudi women’s football, and by extension women’s rights. As with so much around Saudi Arabia, reality isn’t important here.
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