A biting wind enveloped the Riyadh night on this last evening of February. An unusually cool breeze, but not enough to deter Al-Bairaq's female football players from training on the artificial turf of a private school in the north-west of the Saudi capital. 14 players, ranging from teenagers to 30-somethings, had rented the equipment (at a cost of over €100 per two hours) for a final training session before a tournament in Jeddah in early March. Warmly dressed, with most wearing leggings under their shorts, they played a series of football tennis (a training exercise involving a small tennis match) games and a seven-on-seven match, blue training vests against fluorescent yellow ones. At 10 pm, those in less of a hurry took the time to enjoy a coffee and a pastry handed out by their two coaches.

As the stadium's goalkeeper prepared to switch off the floodlights, 24-year-old Sarah Ben Saleem finished unlacing her cleats. The petite striker was wearing Paris Saint-Germain shorts. "Who doesn't love that team?" gushed the business school student in perfect English. She spent part of her childhood in New York, where she was interested in basketball. For the past year, however, football has been her passion. Until recently, she recalled, not all parents allowed their daughters to play this sport. Hers, who are "not too strict," didn't dissuade her, even if her mother wondered what the neighborhood and friends would think. "She comes from a generation where women weren't even allowed to take off their abaya." The young woman wants to believe that "everything has changed" in this rigorist country in which homosexuality and relationships outside marriage are repressed. "We can do what we want, just like men, thank God. Saudi Arabia has always been a football country for men, but now it's a football country for women, too." With a few nuances.

In 2023, when the Saudi Sovereign Public Investment Fund, in charge of financing Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 project to prepare the kingdom for the post-oil era, decided to invest massively in sports, it invested lavishly in four clubs in the Saudi Pro League (SPL), the local footballing elite. These clubs then spent hundreds of millions of euros to attract international stars but much less on their women's teams. It was only a matter of time, according to Ben Saleem. An optimist, she predicted that women's football would become "very strong within the next two years." That remains to be seen. For now, the majority of top-level, professional women footballers have their families' blessing, but things are more difficult for others: They prefer to keep their guilty passion a secret from their parents, with only their first name appearing on the back of their shirts for the sake of discretion. Better for them to remain out of the spotlight to indulge in their favorite sport.

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