“This,” barks the voice from the touchline, “is reality!” The speaker, his voice rising, is a man best remembered as one of the toughest full-backs of his era, a European club champion with Real Madrid, an unyielding warrior in the jersey of Spain. He’s Michel Salgado, now in his late 40s, still lean, still wearing his hair long, and, in his new coaching role, fixed on a target 10 years in the future.
The ‘reality’ he’s referencing, on a hot September afternoon in Salou, on Spain’s northern Mediterranean coast, is a chastening defeat for the players he now coaches. They are Saudi Arabia’s under-16 team, rich in talent but, during this beginning-of-term assignment, second best to their Croatian contemporaries.
It’s only a friendly international and the fixture is partly designed to be a little punishing. What’s important beyond a 90-minute dose of immediate reality is a dream that’s just starting. These Saudi players, barely into their teens, are embarking on a privileged adventure. They’ll be calling Salou their home for the next two years, and the hope is that, for several of them, it will be the key formative experience in putting them at the centre of football’s greatest show in 2034, when Saudi Arabia will almost certainly be hosting the men’s World Cup.
These are the Future Falcons, latest initiates to a bold, innovative and well-resourced project entering its sixth year. Salgado has joined a distinguished line of coaches and experts involved, appointed in the summer as chief coach of this, the scheme’s most junior cohort. The friendly against Croatia’s under-16s, where The National joined a smattering of scouts and coaches in the largely private audience, would be a first threshold moment of many.
The 14 and 15-year-old Saudis lining up for the national anthem, working out the shapes and patterns of high-level youth football, and weathering some thumping Croatian tackles, had only recently touched down in Spain, ready to become pioneers for a new chapter in the Future Falcons story.
It’s a story initially launched by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry for Sport, and since 2020, expanded under the watch of the Saudi Football Federation. So far, around 230 promising teenagers have been awarded, or graduated from, individual scholarships to a programme, which effectively enrolls them in a super-academy staffed by coaches and specialists with extensive experience of the world game, and by highly qualified teachers for the classrooms where these aspiring sportsmen continue their academic education during the nine-month seasons they spend in Europe.
“It’s about the whole experience, of living and studying,” says Ghassan Felemban, General Director of the Future Falcons. “We need to make them learn so they are equipped not just for football but for life. Statistics show that maybe only four per cent will make it to serious football.”
He’s referring here to the typical, global ratio of players identified at under-16 level as having potential for professional careers. It’s an age at which talent has usually established itself convincingly enough for a footballer to dream big but young enough that the hurdles ahead are still multiple. It’s an age group the Future Falcons Salou headquarters, whose facilities are sought out by leading European clubs and national associations, has integrated for the first time this year, the aim that these boys get an early start on the fast-track and also learn from those Future Falcons of 17, 18 and 19 based at the site.
General Director of the Future Falcons
Already there are role models to look up to. Since the Future Falcons programme began, several players have graduated to clubs in the Saudi Pro League that, with its elevated spending on transfers and especially on foreign stars, has been both a blessing but also a potential impediment to ambitious young Saudi players in recent years. With every Cristiano Ronaldo or Karim Benzema who lands in Riyadh or Jeddah, there’s an icon to admire; but there are also less first-team minutes available to a promising Saudi striker at Al Nassr or Al Ittihad.
It’s a topic the head of Saudi Arabia’s senior Falcons, Roberto Mancini, regularly raises. “I’m having to pick players who are on the bench at their clubs,” Mancini complained during this month’s World Cup qualifiers.
Which is why Mancini can be encouraged by the gradual release of that supposed bottleneck in the domestic league. Slowly but perceptibly, a Saudi talent pool that has traditionally stayed at home is changing. Saud Abdulhamid, the 25-year-old right-back with 38 caps, joined Roma last month and although he is already on his second head coach there – following the sacking of Daniele De Rossi – Abdulhamid will shortly make history by becoming the first Saudi to play in Italy’s Serie A.
More significant are the thresholds Abdulmalik Al Jaber is striding across, week after week. He is 20, he joined Zeljenicar, the five-time Bosnian champions, last year, and has established himself in the first-team and as a favourite among fans. Al Jaber has two goals already this season from central midfield. Above all, he’s a Future Falcons graduate, a pathfinder for all the kids following in his footsteps in Salou.
Of Al Jaber, we will hear more in the years to come, believes Romeo Jozak, technical director of the Future Falcons. “He’s at a level where he should soon be ready to take the next step,” he says, “which is to move up to a stronger European league, and he’s got the personality to take that on. Abdulmalik could have signed for Al Nassr, but he said ‘I want to stay on and play in Europe’. He wants to be confronted with challenges. I’ve seen him playing through the rain and the fog and he endures it.”
All of which is part of the learning curve Jozak, a Croatian with vast experience working in football in the Middle East and Europe, is guiding the Future Falcons along. While they are provided with high-class coaching and physical conditioning, they also get to test themselves against elite-level contemporaries. The older age groups on the programme play in the Abtal Cup, a tournament that invites under-19 teams from leading clubs across Europe to compete against their Saudi contemporaries and one another. The Future Falcons reached the semi-finals last season, beating Roma to reach the last four.
But it’s not the game-by-game results that count most, but what Felemban calls “the process, the hard work, and dedication – we are in the process to one day be competing with the top national teams.”
Over his five years involved in the project, he has come to recognise the regular ups and downs of the learning curve. Teeangers arrive in Salou boosted by being chosen for scholarships but inevitably there’s naivety and sudden nerves.
“I like to watch closely the first match they play once they’ve arrived here,” Felemban says. “You look at the hands of players beforehand and you see them shaking. I’ve lived that. Many have never travelled outside the country, at least without their families. Some will have come in thinking, ‘Hey, I’ll be playing alongside Cristiano in two years’ and they will have a wake-up call from the football world, see that they’re not the best. I try to choose a strong opponent, like Croatia were, for the first game. Six weeks after that you see things change entirely. That’s experience.”
It’s the reality Salgado was reminding his wide-eyed 14 and 15 year-olds about on their debut outing. “We’re lacking competition,” the Spaniard acknowledges after his animated afternoon on the touchline. Jozak sat watching from the grandstands, approving of Salgado’s passion and his skill at focusing his players. And the Croatian gently corrects The National’s description of Salgado as “tough”. “I’d rather say ‘firm’,” suggests Jozak.
Jozak likes the make-up of this youngest-ever cohort of Future Falcons. “There’s good quality there and a solid squad,” he says, and he sees their integration into the programme as a major step forward in building a pathway to greater success, ultimately, for the senior national team. He believes there is talent in the kingdom that still goes “undiscovered” and is adamant that, however fast the growth, however high the star-magnet quality of the Pro League, having more Saudi players learning and then playing professionally in Europe is vital.
Future Falcons technical director
“It’s true of all sports that national teams are strengthened when their players are at clubs in the strongest leagues,” says Jozak, “whether you’re talking about the Croatian basketball team and its NBA players or the teams that do well at football World Cups.” Argentina won the last World Cup with a squad where just two of their 26 players were employed outside Europe – a tournament Argentina began, memorably, with a defeat to Saudi Arabia.
That was a heady moment in Saudi football history, but it was a moment, insufficient to push the senior Falcons into the knockout rounds, a stage Saudi Arabia have reached just once in five World Cup tournaments. Felemban surveys that history and is convinced that giving the next generation a more worldly platform will break the existing glass ceilings at national team level.
He also points to a detail of that famous 2-1 win over Argentina at Qatar 2022. Its star was Salem Al Dawsari, serial Pro League winner and Asian champion with Al Hilal and AFC Player of the Year in 2022, but in his own way also the beneficiary of the kind of exposure the next generation of Saudi players are gaining in Salou. Back in 2018, before the Future Falcons became a reality, a group of 13 Saudi professionals were sent by the Saudi Federation to spend six months with first and second-division clubs in Spain.
Few played many first-team minutes, but Al Dawsari had an encouraging cameo appearance for Villarreal against Real Madrid and beyond that, says Felemban, it was widely observed that the winger returned from his stay greatly matured and with his game sharpened. “He changed mentally and physically, and became stronger as a player.”
Apply a far more concentrated version of that experience to younger footballers, and, the theory goes, the Falcons of the next decade can really soar. Jozak sets an ambitious target of having “80 to 90 per cent” of the Saudi Arabia national squad “based in Europe by 2034” – or at least that that sort of proportion of them are by then in demand from European clubs.
That’s 10 years away, but it’s the key date on the horizon, Fifa all but having rubber stamped Saudi Arabia as the site of the 25th World Cup. And 2034 is a year to stoke the imaginations of the kids now settling into the rhythms of daily practice, to Salgado’s firm guidance, to their school timetable and their game days in Salou, where performance levels have already risen higher than against Croatia.
“In 2034,” as Felemban points out, “these 14 and 15 year olds will be 24 and 25. At the last three World Cups, the average age of the teams in the final was 25 to 29.” The Future Falcons directors have done their maths. It’s now up to the fledglings to spread their wings as far as they can.
