Saudi Arabia almost got a college bowl game, wants an NFL game

Does anything feel more inevitable right now than a major American football game ending up in Saudi Arabia?

It might not happen next year or the year after, but by all accounts and given what else they’ve been able to pay to get there, it just feels like it’ll happen sooner or later.

In fact, they almost got the Holiday Bowl.

FOIAball first reported that the Holiday Bowl considered relocating this year’s game to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, using documents obtained through public records requests. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kirk Kenney, Mark Neville, the CEO of Sports San Diego, which puts on the Holiday Bowl, visited Saudi Arabia in June to meet with officials and discuss logistics. However, officials from the ACC, one of the game’s participating conferences (along with the Pac-12), squashed the idea.

“We are always looking at considering ideas to make us better, to keep things fresh and new and innovative,” Neville said. “This was an opportunity that came from the relationships we’ve built through decades. It was a relationship that opened this door for us, so we considered it. It would have been foolish to say, ‘No way.’ Of course, we’re going to consider this.”

Had the deal been made, an ACC team would have played a Pac-12 team on Jan. 2 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the 60,000-seat King Abdullah Sports City Stadium.

“Revenue streams are limited for us, so we’ve got to get creative,” Neville said. “This is a pretty creative way. That’s where this whole concept came from, and we pursued it. We went down the path. It takes a big idea like this, or a big event like this, it takes a lot of pieces to the puzzle to put together.

“In the end, the pieces of the puzzle just didn’t come together. And so we move on. We’re going to have a great game in San Diego.”

According to Kenney, Sports San Diego is facing a financial crunch stemming from the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 Holiday Bowls due to COVID-19. The game currently also doesn’t have a title sponsor.

The Holiday Bowl has been played in San Diego since 1978. While the game currently pays out a combined $5.9 million to participating teams, that number would have been much higher had they played in Saudi Arabia.

“How going to Saudi Arabia for the Holiday Bowl would have helped us — and, by the way, we’re not going there — it was going to help provide us some funds to keep this effort sustainable,” Neville said. “Once that door closed, we look at a bunch of other stuff. We’re always, always creating ways to make everything we do better and we’re always, always trying to create ways to make this effort sustainable in the long term. Every decision we make is to benefit San Diego, even this one.”

While we wait to see which other bowl game takes a trip to Saudi Arabia to discuss logistics, we know that the country has its sights set on something even bigger: an NFL game.

“Britain got it, Brazil got it,” Price Turki Alalshikh said Thursday, per Bloomberg.com’s David Hellier. “Hopefully, Saudi Arabia will be next.”

The NFL didn’t respond to a request for comment, according to Bloomberg. The league has never mentioned Saudi Arabia as a potential destination when discussing international games, nor is it one of the countries that has been assigned a team or teams for marketing purposes.

The NFL isn’t a partner in the Fanatics Flag Football Classic scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia next March, but they did apparently sign off on NFL players participating. That comes on the heels of the NFL announcing it wants to start its own flag football league. That’s perhaps why Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio thinks it’s in the best interest of the league to play nice with the Saudis, as they have the money and means to attract talent if they decide they want to start a rival operation of some kind.