Less than a decade ago, Bayan Sadagah wouldn’t have been able to sit in the stands at a football match in Saudi Arabia. Female spectators were barred from the kingdom’s stadiums until 2018, and the prospect of women playing professionally seemed unthinkable. Yet today, Sadagah wears the colors of one of Saudi’s biggest clubs, Al-Ittihad in Jeddah.

The 31-year-old is a leading figure in the Saudi Women’s Premier League, started in 2022 as part of a wider push to develop the women’s game in the country. The path to the professional ranks was far from straightforward. Growing up in Jeddah, Sadagah played with cousins at home before she moved to Egypt, where she joined a club coached by members of the country’s women’s national team. Returning to Saudi Arabia, she found there was nowhere to play. “We came back,” Sadagah says, “and we knew we’re not going to have a field to play on.”

In 2017, after years of struggling to find pitch space, Sadagah and a group of teammates founded the Jeddah Eagles, an amateur team that would later feed into the country’s emerging professional structure, backed by the state. “I still remember the moment one of my teammates was like, ‘I heard a rumor that they’re going to open the Saudi national team in two years.’ And I laughed,” Sadagah recalls, having now made more than 20 appearances for that team. “I know what it feels like to love football but not know where it could take you.”Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 program, Saudi Arabia is aiming to diversify its economy and society. Sports make up a central part of that effort, with investment designed to develop homegrown talent and also establish the kingdom as a global destination for international sporting events. Hosting the 2034 FIFA World Cup is a major piece of that ambition.

So was supporting the women’s football leagues at all levels. Now more than 1,000 licensed coaches are dedicated to women’s clubs in Saudi Arabia, up from about 100 in 2021, and almost 50,000 girls take part in the schools league, according to FIFA. The number of women’s clubs has risen more than 50% from 2021 to 2024, according to figures from the Saudi Arabian Football Federation. Meanwhile, prize money has started growing too: Riyadh’s Al-Nassr women’s club received 2 million Saudi riyals ($531,000) for winning the 2025-26 title, a fourfold increase since its inaugural season; Jeddah’s Al-Ahli received 1.5 million riyals for placing runner-up.

Building Saudi Arabia’s women’s league has also meant recruiting international talent. Ashleigh Plumptre, an England-born defender who came through the academy at Leicester and later played for Notts County, was scouted by Al-Ittihad and is currently in her fourth season in the Saudi league. “At first, I completely dismissed it,” recalls the 28-year-old. “What is there for me out in Saudi?”

Saudi clubs can offer players a combination of salaries, benefits and tax advantages that can make a move to a nascent league in a country with a dismal human-rights record financially attractive. There’s the draw of zero income tax, as well as expat packages that cover accommodation and transportation, says Christina Philippou, an associate professor in accounting and sport finance at the University of Portsmouth.

Saudi Arabia’s best female players are guaranteed a minimum monthly salary of 10,800 riyals, while reports have put some overseas players’ annual packages for playing in the kingdom at $60,000 to $120,000. By comparison, senior women’s league players, age 23 and over, in the UK have a salary floor of £40,000 ($53,000) per year. In Germany the average annual salary was roughly €48,000 ($63,000) in 2023, according to the German Football Association. “It obviously helps with recruitment,” Philippou says. The real challenge in Saudi Arabia, she argues, is encouraging the huge interest in men’s football to flow into the women’s game, with little precedent.

Despite recent legal reforms, Saudi women still face significant economic and social restrictions under , the country’s male guardianship system. According to the World Economic Forum’s latest , Saudi Arabia ranks No. 132 out of 148 countries for overall gender equality. Female footballers around the world have previously raised concerns about the sport’s links to Saudi Arabia. In 2024, 135 players signed a petition urging FIFA to terminate its sponsorship agreement with state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. The petition cited the country’s poor human-rights record, particularly its treatment of women and LGBTQ people.

And in recent weeks, much of the Vision 2030 project has been seriously challenged, as renewed Houthi attacks from Yemen have heightened security concerns and threatened Saudi Arabia’s carefully cultivated image as a safe destination for tourists and investors. The recent attacks have resulted in 19 casualties. At the same time, financial pressures have forced a scaling back of some of the program’s most ambitious projects, including the futuristic Neom development.

While Sadagah’s family has been supportive of her dream to play football, she’s still amazed that she’s able to fulfill those goals in her home country. “It’s so surreal, I can’t believe this is actually happening to me,” she says. “Sometimes I have to zoom out and just take a step back and realize where we came from and where we are right now.”

League rules require each club in the top division to have at least 15 Saudi professional players, while teams can as many as six foreign players; five foreigners are allowed to be on the pitch at once. The league’s relative infancy has also made it harder to build a fan base. “Attendance is obviously very low,” Plumptre says, adding that she helped organize trips for schools to watch some of Al-Ittihad’s top players. “Young people, and even young boys, come to the games and witness something that they haven’t seen in their country ever before.”

With smaller crowds comes little of the fervor reserved for the more established women’s leagues of Europe, the US and South America. But the developments in Saudi Arabia could help catalyze similar progress elsewhere in the region, Philippou says. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates already have established women’s programs. “If the interest in internal sport continues, then I don’t see why we’re not going to see more development,” she says. “You’ve got essentially a blueprint in the Saudi model that you can semireplicate in the region.”

Sadagah, too, is optimistic: “I hope this means younger girls can have bigger dreams than we did.”