Star or stooge? Saudi Arabia has found its first footballing poster girl ...Middle East

To give some much-needed free advertising to the world’s second biggest food and drinks brand, Pepsi recently announced five footballers as “female global ambassadors”.

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”.

A 22-year-old attacking midfielder for Al-Ittihad – playing only 55 minutes in last season’s Saudi Women’s Premier League – Jefry is an obvious outlier against four of the world’s leading players.

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 total of 551,000 Instagram followers – up 45,000 in the past fortnight alone – is more than Millie Bright (452k) and Beth Mead (548k), making her the most popular Arab women’s player.

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.

At 18, Jefry became the first Saudi athlete Adidas brand ambassador in any sport, having top-scored for Jeddah Eagles the season before the Saudi Women’s Premier League was launched. Jeddah were then subsumed into Al-Ittihad. In 2022 she played in the first Saudi women’s national team match, a 2-0 win in the Maldives, although she hasn’t played internationally since.

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’s the perfect front woman for Saudi Arabia in the 21st century,” James Montague, author of Engulfed: How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and the World tells The i Paper.

“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.”

Women were first allowed into Saudi Arabian football stadiums in 2018, and women’s football has largely been an undercover operation for the past 20 years.

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.

At youth level, more than 70,000 female players participated in 2023 according to a report by Neom, the company behind the controversial planned megacity of the same name and a newly promoted SWPL side.

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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In May 2024, activist Manahel al-Otaibi was jailed for 11 years over her clothing choices and online posts, which Saudi diplomats labelled “terrorism offences”.

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”.

And in 2022, Leeds University student Salma al-Shehab was sentenced to 34 years in prison for posting tweets in support of women’s rights, although she was released in February of this year. More recent sentences for social media posts include Fatima al-Shawarbi (30 years), Sukaynah al-Aithan (40 years) and Nourah al-Qahtani (45 years).

“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.

“There’s still a guardianship system that needs to be dismantled, and it has come a long way in those 10 years. But asking for those changes are more dangerous now than they were even in the most conservative periods of Saudi history.

“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’.”

And so by promoting Saudi Arabia’s perceived openness, by playing the sport she loves and taking lucrative sponsorship deals to do it, Jefry leaves herself open to suggestions that she is reputation-laundering for a regime that Amnesty International has shown repeatedly violates its citizens’ human rights.

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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