American Sports Media Keeps Getting Al Ittihad Wrong — And the Club Keeps Proving It

There's a particular kind of confidence that comes with being wrong loudly. American sports media has been doing it about Saudi football — and Al Ittihad specifically — for the better part of three years now. Not maliciously, necessarily. But consistently, and with the kind of institutional certainty that makes corrections feel almost impossible.

The good news? The club keeps winning anyway. And eventually, the coverage has to catch up.

The Default Setting: Dismissal

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2023. When high-profile names started landing in the Saudi Pro League, the dominant narrative in outlets like ESPN, The Athletic, and Bleacher Report wasn't curiosity — it was contempt. The framing was almost universal: this was a retirement tour. A money grab. A sporting backwater dressed up in oil money.

Al Ittihad, which had assembled one of the more genuinely interesting squads in world football, was largely treated as a punchline. The club's domestic dominance — multiple Saudi Pro League titles, a fanbase that fills King Abdullah Sports City with genuine, chest-thumping passion — barely registered. American audiences were told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that none of this counted because it wasn't happening in England or Spain.

That framing wasn't just lazy. It was a failure of basic sports journalism.

What They Missed (And Why It Mattered)

Here's what the Western-centric lens consistently failed to pick up on:

The tactical sophistication. Al Ittihad has operated under coaches who run complex, high-press systems. Matches in the Saudi Pro League aren't a slow walk in the park — they're competitive, physical, and increasingly well-organized. American reporters who parachuted in for a weekend, watched one game with preconceived notions, and filed a 'color piece' about the spectacle almost never engaged with the football itself.

The infrastructure story. The investment in training facilities, youth academies, and stadium upgrades at Al Ittihad isn't cosmetic. It's structural. Compare the trajectory of the club's organizational build-out to, say, what MLS expansion sides have done with similar investment windows, and you start to see a genuinely different model — one that American sports journalists are only now beginning to take seriously.

The fanbase depth. This one stings the most, because it's the easiest story to tell and the one that got ignored the longest. Al Ittihad supporters aren't passive spectators drawn in by celebrity signings. The club's identity runs deep — rooted in Jeddah, shaped by decades of rivalry with Al Ahli and Al Hilal, and expressed with the kind of tribal intensity that American sports fans would recognize immediately if they saw it in an NFL stadium. The media mostly didn't look.

The Cristiano Effect and What It Obscured

It's worth being honest about one thing: the arrival of globally famous players in Saudi Arabia did create a coverage spike. But the way that coverage was framed actually made the underlying story harder to see, not easier.

When American outlets finally showed up to cover the Saudi Pro League in force, they were covering celebrities, not football clubs. The stories were about brand value, social media followers, and the geopolitics of sports washing. Al Ittihad became a backdrop rather than a subject. The club's own history, its competitive identity, its place in the Saudi cultural landscape — all of it got swallowed by the star-driven narrative machine.

The result was a coverage cycle that managed to generate enormous volume while conveying almost no actual understanding of the institution being covered. Readers came away knowing which famous players were in Jeddah. They had no idea why Jeddah mattered.

The Reporters Who Got It Right

To be fair, not everyone dropped the ball. A handful of writers — mostly freelancers and independent journalists with genuine regional knowledge — were filing nuanced, grounded takes on Saudi football long before the major outlets showed up. They were covering Al Ittihad as a football club with its own logic, not as a vessel for broader geopolitical arguments.

Those writers largely got ignored by editors who didn't know what to do with the material. That's a structural problem, not just an individual one. American sports desks are still mostly organized around domestic leagues, with international coverage treated as a niche add-on. There's no dedicated Saudi Pro League beat at any major US outlet. There probably should be.

What's Actually Changing

Here's where it gets interesting: something is shifting, slowly but genuinely. A few things are pushing the needle.

First, American audiences are asking better questions. Partly because of social media, partly because of the growth of soccer fandom in the US, and partly because sites like this one exist to fill the gap — there's a growing segment of US sports fans who want real coverage of Al Ittihad, not just vibes-based takes from writers who've never watched a full Saudi Pro League match.

Second, the club's sustained performance is making dismissal harder to sustain. You can wave away one good season. You can't wave away a consistent pattern of domestic dominance, continental ambition, and organizational growth without starting to look like you're just not paying attention.

Third, the broader conversation about what 'global football' actually means is evolving. The Premier League's cultural dominance in American sports media has always been partly a product of marketing and English-language accessibility, not necessarily sporting merit. As that dominance gets questioned — by Saudi investment, by the growth of other leagues, by American fans who've simply found other things to care about — the gatekeeping instinct weakens.

The Standard That Should Apply

Here's a simple test for any sports journalist covering Al Ittihad: could you tell me, without Googling, who the club's all-time top scorer is? Could you describe the atmosphere at a Jeddah derby? Could you explain what the club's yellow and black colors mean to supporters who've been showing up for decades?

If the answer is no, the coverage probably reflects that. And readers — especially American fans who've done the work to actually learn about this club — can tell the difference.

Al Ittihad isn't waiting for American sports media to catch up. The club is going to keep doing what it does regardless. But for journalists who want to cover global football with any credibility going forward, the blind spot is getting harder to maintain. The story is right there. It always was.