The Empty Chair in Jeddah: Al-Ahli and the Power Crisis Nobody Names

In Jeddah, on a weekend evening, I sat in the stands of King Abdullah Sports City and watched an empty seat. Not an absent fan's seat, not a late official's seat. It was the seat in the executive area where Al-Ahli's sporting director should have been sitting — the person responsible for the squad, for transfer strategy, for the thread connecting the boardroom to the coaching staff. That seat was empty, and it had been emptied twice within a stretch of time so short that if you blinked, you would think no one had ever sat there.

I am writing this not to retell a news item. The news is simple: a sporting director departs, a successor takes over, and the successor also departs after a short spell. The news ends there. But I have spent fifty years sitting in different stands, from Belgrade in 2026 to Beijing today, and I have learned one thing: news is just noise. The truth lies in the silence after the noise.

The empty chair in Jeddah is such a silence.

It took me thirty years to understand that golden boys do not rise up; it is the layer of our expectation that begins to crack. And here, at Al-Ahli, the cracking layer is not on the face of some young player. It is cracking across the executive machinery of a club backed by state resources, expected to win, invested in to win, and now fumbling to find someone who can sit in a chair nobody wants to occupy for long.

What caught my attention was not that two sporting directors left. What caught my attention was the reason given for the second departure: the man was not granted the full authority the job demands.

That sentence, if you skim, will pass you by. If you stop, it opens a whole structure. It turns a personnel story into an organisational-design story. And in modern football, where money has flattened the talent gap between big clubs, organisational design is the last remaining competitive edge.

I want to tell you this story the way I always tell it: starting from a small detail, expanding until you see an entire system questioning itself.

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Context: A Club Built on Expectation

Al-Ahli is not a small club. It is one of the oldest and most storied teams in Saudi football, based in Jeddah, the port city on the Red Sea where ships from Africa, India and the Arabian Peninsula have docked for centuries. Jeddah is a city of intersections, and Al-Ahli carries that character: a club loved by the urban middle class, seen as a symbol of openness in a country changing faster than anyone could have imagined.

In 2026, when Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund took majority stakes in the country's four biggest clubs, including Al-Ahli, football here turned a different page. You did not need to be an expert to see it. You only needed to look at the transfer list. World-class stars, European title-winning coaches, contracts that made long-established leagues jealous — all arrived within two summer windows.

But money does not automatically buy stability. This is something I have observed across decades, from when English football entered the Premier League era to when China poured money into its own clubs in the 2010s. Money creates expectation, and expectation creates pressure. Pressure, if not channelled by structure, will find somewhere to discharge itself.

At Al-Ahli, the pressure discharged at the executive layer.

The story begins with Roi Pedro, the club's sporting director. According to Saudi media reports, Pedro left his position amid accusations concerning his administrative work and some contractual files. He denied all accusations, said he had worked with full dedication and respect, and stated that his relationship with Al-Ahli ended by mutual consent.

At the same time, media cited poor results and mounting fan discontent as drivers behind the decision to change.

Then Osama Hawsawi was brought in. Hawsawi was no stranger. A former international, a familiar face in Saudi football, entering his post-playing phase with the hope of converting on-pitch credibility into executive capability. He took the sporting director's chair.

Then he left it.

After a very short time.

According to Okaz, the reason was that Hawsawi was not granted the full authority the job demands. According to Al-Riyadiah, he resigned after a short spell in the role, amid a clash of views with management over a number of decisions concerning the first team.

I read those two lines and stopped for a long while. Because between those two lines there is a gap larger than a news item.

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What the Report Says and What It Does Not

I want to begin this section with a professional confession.

When I was young, I believed in headlines. I believed that if a major outlet put a certain word at the top of the page, that word must carry weight. It took me years, and several challenges from my own colleagues, to understand something simple: the headline is a product of the newsroom; the body is a product of the event. The two do not always point the same way.

The article I am analysing here is a near-perfect example of that phenomenon.

The headline speaks of "corruption allegations".

What does the body speak of?

The body speaks of accusations targeting an individual's administrative work and some contractual files. The body speaks of that individual denying all accusations. The body speaks of mutual consent. The body names no investigating authority, references no proceeding, contains no official club statement, cites no legal document.

In other words: the headline's evidentiary strength far exceeds the body's evidentiary strength.

This is the single most important thing to remember when reading any report about Al-Ahli during this period: the word "corruption" appears at the headline level, while the body supplies only contested accusations and a categorical denial.

I am not writing this to defend anyone. I am writing this because I have witnessed too many cases in which the public remembers the headline and forgets the body. Headlines live in collective memory. Bodies die in archives.

So what does the body actually say?

It says Al-Ahli is unstable.

It says two men in succession who occupied the sporting director's chair left within a short span.

It says the second left because he lacked sufficient authority.

And it says the club's management must now reorganise its sporting structure within a narrow window, while competitions roll on, while the team still cries out for clear decisions on first-team matters.

I read that last line over and over.

"The team is crying out for clear decisions on first-team matters."

If you have ever worked inside a struggling organisation, you recognise the shape of that sentence. It is not a comment. It is a sigh, typed out.

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Analysis: When Authority Is Stolen in Silence

I want to reconstruct this story in a different way. Not chronologically, but by the sequence of power.

In modern football, the sporting director is a strange title. It did not exist forty years ago. When I started in sports journalism in Belgrade in 2026, clubs were run by a board and a coach. The coach picked players. The board signed contracts. Everything was simple to the point of crudeness.

Then football became an industry. Transfers became a financial market. Players became depreciating assets. And a new need emerged: someone to sit between the board and the coach, someone who understood football but also understood contracts, someone who could talk to an agent in the morning and a coach in the afternoon.

The sporting director was born from that need.

But here is the problem: a new title does not automatically carry power. Power does not live in a name. Power lives in what you are permitted to decide without asking anyone.

And that is precisely Al-Ahli's crack.

When Okaz reported that Hawsawi left because he was not granted the authority the job demands, it was describing an organisational-design fault. Not a personal conflict. Not an ego dispute. A design fault.

I have seen this model before. In China, through the 2010s, as clubs poured money into big contracts, I watched sporting directors hired with grand job descriptions, then progressively stripped of authority piece by piece, until they became people who signed paperwork rather than people who made decisions. They left. The club hired again, with the same job description, and the same ending.

This is what I call the "suspended-authority loop". The club wants a sporting director. But the club does not want to hand over the decision rights the title requires. The result is a role that cannot function, yet always finds a taker, because the title's prestige remains attractive enough.

And once this loop begins, it reproduces itself.

Look at the speed. The first departed. The second took over. The second departed after a short time. The obvious question is: if the problem lies with individuals, why did two different individuals fail so quickly? The better question is: if the problem lies with the role, does changing the person solve anything?

The answer, in my experience, is no.

And this is why I say this story is not about the Al-Ahli of Pedro or Hawsawi, but about the Al-Ahli of the third man.

Because the third man will walk into the same room, sit in the same chair, sign the same kind of papers, and face the same unanswered question: who actually decides?

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The Gap Between Results and Responsibility

Now I want to discuss a concept I consider the strongest analytical tool in this case. I call it "accountability displacement".

When a team underperforms, pressure looks for somewhere to discharge. At most clubs, that place is the bench. The coach is sacked, a new coach arrives, and the club feels it has done something.

But at Al-Ahli, the pressure discharged at the executive layer. No coach was sacked in this story. What does that mean?

It means the current coaching staff holds a stronger position than the sporting function. In a club with poor results, the coach is usually sacrificed first. Here, they sacrificed the sporting director.

This is a meaningful governance signal. It suggests power is concentrated somewhere above the sporting director — perhaps in the board, perhaps with the coach, perhaps both. And it suggests the sporting director's post is being used as a pressure-release valve.

Pressure valves have one property: they do not fix the problem, they postpone it.

If results do not improve, the cycle will return. But next time, it may target the coach. Or the players. Or the board. People say the team cries out for clear decisions on first-team matters — and that line, read carefully, is a warning about what is stalled.

What can stall inside a football club?

Contract renewals. Transfer targets. Decisions about who stays, who leaves, who is promoted, who is demoted. These decisions belong to the sporting director. When the chair is empty, they hang. And when they hang, they begin to rot.

I have seen this in many places. A player enters the final year of his contract, and instead of being renewed early, he waits. His agent starts listening to offers elsewhere. His transfer value drops. And the club loses an asset that would have taken only a signature to keep.

These losses do not show up on the scoreboard. They do not show up in the news. They show up on the balance sheet, two years later, when people ask why a wealthy club had to buy back positions it should already have had.

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Contractual Files: The Most Important Phrase in the Whole Story

There is one phrase in the report I want to pause on for a long while.

"Some contractual files."

This is the phrase the accusations target. And it is the most technically loaded phrase in the entire story.

Why? Because "contractual files" is not a performance concept. It is a documentation concept. It points to contract negotiation, renewal, player registration, or agent commissions. It points to paperwork.

And when a dispute moves from the performance layer to the paperwork layer, the severity changes in kind.

I am not saying the accusations are true. I am saying the language of the accusations matters more than their content at this stage. Because language tells us where the dispute is happening.

A dispute about results is a dispute about opinion. You can argue. A dispute about contractual files is a dispute about fact. You cannot argue about whether a stamp was placed in the right spot.

In Saudi football, as in football elsewhere, phrases like "contractual files" often surface in the context of agent commissions, undocumented side agreements, or renewal terms negotiated without full board visibility. I say this as a pattern observation, not as a claim about this specific case. I have no evidence. And I will not invent evidence.

But I can point to something observable: a club that cannot keep a sporting director for a meaningful duration is a club prone to unforced transfer errors. Inflated fees. Wage-structure drift. Contract lengths shortened by short-term pressure.

These are losses nobody reports. There are no headlines for them. But they accumulate, season after season, until a club invested with hundreds of millions of dollars realises it is still missing a top-class centre-back and a creative midfielder, and nobody knows why.

I know why. Nobody was responsible.

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There Is Not a Single Number in This Story

This is something I must state clearly, because in my profession, the silence of numbers is itself information.

Throughout this story, there is not one financial figure.

No broadcasting revenue. No commercial revenue. No wage bill. No net debt. No transfer fees. No squad market value.

For an analyst, this is a large gap. But for a journalist, it is information. It tells us this story has not been verified at the financial layer. It sits at the administrative layer.

And the administrative layer, in modern football, is the least verifiable of all.

You can look up a striker's goal tally in three clicks. You can look up a team's possession share in five clicks. But you cannot look up who signed which clause in a contract at a club in Jeddah. Those documents sit in drawers. And drawers do not have an API.

This is why I always tell younger colleagues: when you have no data, do not invent data. Analyse structure. Analyse power. Analyse what is said and what is omitted.

In this case, what is omitted is the entire financial picture. And that means we are analysing a governance crisis without knowing its scale.

The accusations could be a procedural disagreement. They could also be material misconduct. Both are consistent with the text we have. And anyone who tells you they know the answer for certain is selling you a belief, not a fact.

It took me thirty years to understand that golden boys do not rise up; it is the layer of our expectation that begins to crack. Here, the layer is cracking on the facade of a club. And the first thing you see when the paint cracks is not the truth. It is the darkness underneath.

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League Context: When Stability Becomes a Competitive Advantage

I want to place this story in the broader context of the Saudi Pro League, because a club never exists alone.

The Saudi Pro League today is a strange competition on the world football map. It has money. It has stars. It has global attention. But it is in a phase I call "compression". Everything happens faster than normal. A club can change its entire appearance in one summer. And that means pressure is compressed too.

In a league where several clubs are backed by the same source of resources, the talent gap on the pitch narrows. When the talent gap narrows, the deciding factor becomes organisational quality. Who recruits better. Who renews contracts at the right time. Who maintains structural stability through difficult periods.

This is why two successive departures from the sporting director post are not merely negative PR. They are a measurable competitive disadvantage.

Imagine two clubs competing for a continental spot. Both have money. Both have stars. But one has a stable sporting director who has been tracking transfer targets for six months. The other is reorganising its sporting structure in a narrow window. Who would you back?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a question the clubs themselves must answer through their actions.

What Al-Ahli is going through is a form of competitive disadvantage I call "invisible disadvantage". It does not appear in the table. It does not appear in statistics. It appears in delayed decisions, missed targets, players who left when they should have stayed.

And it appears somewhere else too: in the minds of agents.

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Agents Always Know First

This is an observation I drew from years of talking to people in the player-representation business. They read organisations better than any journalist. Because they have a financial incentive to read correctly.

When a club loses its sporting director, agents know immediately. When a club loses two sporting directors in a short span, agents know something else: this club is weak at the negotiating table.

A functioning sporting director is a cost-control institution. He is the one who says no to an inflated fee. He is the one who understands a player's market value and has enough time to wait for a better deal. He is the one with a long-term plan, unshaken by one disappointing season.

When that chair is empty, negotiating power shifts. Toward the agent. Toward the selling club. Toward anyone who is not in crisis.

And here is the risk I call the "panic premium". A club pressured by fan discontent will need a visible signing, as quickly as possible, regardless of whether that signing fits sporting needs. This is how wealthy clubs become less wealthy.

I have seen this in many countries. A club buys a famous striker to placate the stands, while the real problem sits in defence. The striker scores seven in a season. The club still loses. The fans are still unhappy. And now the club has a long-term contract with a player who no longer fits the new tactical plan.

This is how a governance crisis becomes a financial crisis. Not in a day. But over two or three years.

And in a league operating at the speed of the Saudi Pro League, two or three years can be an entire competitive cycle of a generation of players.

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The Contrarian Angle: Where I Could Be Wrong

This is the section I always write, because a journalist who does not question himself is a journalist selling belief.

I have argued that Al-Ahli's problem is an organisational-design fault. But there are other explanations, and I want to put them on the table.

Possibility one: the headline is right. Perhaps an investigation is underway that media have not been permitted to report in full. Perhaps the contractual-file accusations are the tip of something larger. In that case, the departures of two sporting directors are not a design fault but a purge. And my analysis would have to be rewritten from scratch.

I do not rule this out. I only say that on the information available, no evidence supports it at the documentary layer. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Possibility two: Al-Ahli is right, and the sporting directors were wrong. Perhaps both Pedro and Hawsawi lacked the capability for the role. Perhaps they lacked experience, connections, or the ability to work in a demanding environment. In that case, their departures were correct decisions, and the problem lies not in structure but in recruitment.

This is a possibility I must seriously consider, because I have seen many former players enter executive roles and fail. Credibility on the pitch does not translate into negotiating capability. Experience in the dressing room does not translate into experience in the boardroom.

But if both men lacked capability, the next question is: who hired them? And why was the second hired after only a short span?

Possibility three, and this is the one I find most interesting: the Saudi Pro League's club model does not need a sporting director in the traditional sense. In a system where decision rights sit at the very top — with the investment fund, with senior management — the sporting director role may become an unnecessary post. A relic of European football imported without enough soil to take root.

If that is true, then Al-Ahli is not in crisis. Al-Ahli is being honest. And what we are seeing is not the failure of a club, but the failure of an imported job title that was never localised.

This is the hypothesis I hold most cautiously, because it requires understanding the real power structure inside Saudi clubs — something I have no access to. But it deserves to be on the table, because if it is right, every analysis of Al-Ahli over the next three years will have to be rewritten within a completely different framework.

An empty stadium does not take away the shouting; it only makes us hear more clearly the sigh of the coaching bench. At Al-Ahli, the sigh is not coming from the bench. It is coming from the corridor.

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Why This Story Matters Beyond Jeddah

There is a question I always ask when analysing a club: what does this story mean beyond that club?

With Al-Ahli, the answer is yes, and it matters at three layers.

Layer one is the labour market. In football, executive positions form a small, closed, closely watched market. The best people know each other. When a famous club becomes known for not granting its sporting director enough authority, top candidates hear about it. And they do not apply.

This means Al-Ahli may be forced to recruit downward in seniority. Or to recruit fast instead of correctly. Both are observable outcomes, and both reinforce the structural-problem thesis.

Layer two is the market signal. A club weak in sporting management is a club vulnerable in the transfer market. Other clubs know this. Direct rivals know this. Within one transfer window, internal instability can be exploited in ways that never appear in the press.

Layer three is industry governance. When a club backed by state resources has governance problems, the question is not only for that club. It is for the entire investment portfolio. If one club can lose two sporting directors in a short span, what is the quality of governance at the other clubs in the same portfolio?

This is not a question for journalists. It is a question for auditors.

Moscow taught me that the German national team never dies; it simply gets lost inside the very trophy it once treated as territory. I learned that in a studio in Russia in 2026, when I told the entire crew that Germany would be eliminated in the group stage and was laughed at. I was right. But the lesson I kept was not that I was right. The lesson I kept was: big organisations do not collapse because they are weak. They collapse because they believe they are strong.

Al-Ahli is a big organisation. And the question I want to pose is not whether it will collapse. The question is whether it knows where it stands on its own power map.

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What to Watch in the Coming Weeks

I am not writing this to conclude. I am writing this to set out the markers I will be tracking, and to invite you to track them with me.

First: how Al-Ahli announces its next sporting director.

If they announce a name alongside a clear statement of the role's authority, that is a positive sign. It means the club has heard the problem and is fixing it at the design layer. If they announce a name with nothing attached, the loop continues. And the next man will leave within the same span.

Second: any official club statement on the accusations.

Silence in this case has two readings. Silence can signal an internal process underway. Silence can also signal an organisation that does not know what it is being accused of. Only time will separate the two.

Third: short-term transfer activity.

If Al-Ahli makes a major signing within weeks, in a non-priority position, that is a sign of fan-appeasement logic. If they are patient and wait for the structure to settle, that is a sign of an organisation maturing.

Fourth: the coach's position.

If the coach begins appearing in press conferences with comments on administrative matters, it means pressure is moving from the corridor down to the bench. And in football, when pressure moves down to the bench, it tends to stay there for a long time.

Fifth, and perhaps most important: the sequence of on-pitch results.

If results do not improve, the cycle returns. It will find a new victim. And if that victim is the coach or the players, we will know the problem never lay at the executive layer. It was only placed there temporarily, because that is the easiest place to change.

There are no great prophecies, only an old man weathered enough to see the crack the crowd deliberately ignores. I do not claim to see Al-Ahli's future. I only claim that I see a crack, and I know where that crack will travel if it is not sealed.

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What I Actually Think

I want to end this piece with something other than a prediction.

Because after fifty years in this trade, I have learned that correct predictions are not what I carry with me. The right questions are what I carry.

The question I carry from Jeddah is this: a club can buy everything except stability. So where does stability come from?

It does not come from money. Money can buy a good sporting director, but not a clear definition of his authority. Money can buy a top-class coach, but not patience. Money can buy a star, but not a structure.

Stability comes from an organisation knowing who it is and who is permitted to decide what. This is something that cannot be bought. It can only be built. And it is built through difficult conversations, clear documents, unambiguous definitions.

Al-Ahli has enough money to buy any player. What it needs now is a conversation about authority.

And that conversation, in my experience, is the hardest conversation in football. Because it requires those currently holding power to state exactly how much they will give away. Very few have the courage to do so.

We go to stadiums to witness victory, but I only want to stay to read the face of a hero questioning himself. In Jeddah, that hero may be the next sporting director. And he will walk into a room I have seen before. All I hope is that the room now has an extra desk, an extra chair, and a clear definition of who is allowed to put pen to paper.

If not, that chair will be empty again. And we will be back in the stands, counting the silences.

They call the uprising of young men an act of indiscipline; I call it a contract rewriting its own clauses. At Al-Ahli, nobody rebels. People simply leave. But a departure, inside an organisation that reads signals, is a contract rewriting its own terms — the terms of authority, of responsibility, and of who actually sits at the head of the table.

Whether the club hears that, I do not yet know. But I will be here, watching. Because that is my job. And because after fifty years, I still believe football is a way of reading people — and nothing reveals an organisation's nature more clearly than how it handles an empty chair.