Ben Harburg On Al-Kholood And Investing In Football Clubs | OneFootball

From Cristiano Ronaldo to Karim Benzema, from Kingsley Coman to Roberto Firmino, the Saudi Pro League has been able to attract a treasure trove of big-name footballers from abroad in recent years, but it hasn’t yet managed to bring in an American player. Instead, the first American to make his mark in the Saudi top-flight isn’t a player, but an investor: Ben Harburg.

Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Harburg moved from Michigan to Switzerland to Egypt during his adolescence, but it was during his time in El Puerto de Santa María where, after attending a Cádiz match in 1997, Harburg fell in love with football. Similarly to the likes of James Richardson and Lalas Abubakar, Harburg became enamored with the beautiful game as a teenager, setting the foundations for what would prove to be a historic undertaking.

He used his Fulbright Scholarship to pursue Islamic studies and oriental philology during his time at the Freie Universität Berlin before becoming a Neubauer Scholar at Tufts University, followed by stints in Berlin and Dubai. Harburg has bounced around from areas far and wide, like Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East and China, where he co-founded one of the largest commodity trading companies in Asia, before selling out of commodities in 2010 and putting all of his money in venture capital and technology.

As a Managing Partner at MSA Capital, a global investment firm with over $2 billion in assets under management, Harburg has administered strategic investments into global giants like Palantir, Uber, and Airbnb. But recently, he’s made his investment portfolio far more sports-related. After coming across the Netflix series Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Harburg decided that he wanted to own a football club. He plugged all 80 teams in Spain’s top three divisions into an Excel spreadsheet, evaluated major criteria like GDP per capita, size of the fanbase, and the size of the stadium, and found that Cadiz was the best value-for-dollar option. It’s why, in October 2021, he purchased a 6.5% stake in the same club that caused him to fall in love with football. Nearly four years after that, Harburg decided to purchase 100% of Al-Kholood, becoming the first foreign owner in Saudi football history as well as the first independent and purely financially driven owner in the league’s history.

“A typical day for me is just non-stop calls with everyone, and working inside of our groups on first-team operations, sponsorship and commercial partner organization discussions, working with our retail and commercial team and the merchandising guys, and working with our sporting direction,” stated Harburg.

“I’m thinking about the lessons learned from previous windows, and what we’re gonna do in the next window, dealing with our current players and the issues that pop up with them every day, thinking on the academy side. That’s kind of all internal, and then a huge amount of external meetings around meeting with people at the Saudi Football Federation and the Ministry of Sport and other club administrators, as well as potential partners of the technology side, content side, or the marketing side.”

As his taxi driver wheels him across Boston, Harburg showcases the humility of a man who knows the size of his challenge, and the confidence of a man who knows that he’s ready to be a trailblazer. Whereas Saudi teams are typically owned by the government or government-affiliated enterprises, Harburg doesn’t have that limitless affluence. He can’t afford to blow through billions of dollars on a whim; he needs to be accountable for his money.

“Right now it’s a little bit odd, because we’re kind of in a little bit of an administrative break as we don’t have any matches until the 17th of October, and some of our players went away for a few days. We’re potentially looking at new club acquisitions, we spend a huge amount of our time on hiring and recruitment, because we’re building not only at the group level, or at the club level, but also the group level. We’re bringing in people who are going to help run multiple clubs, not just the singular one that we’re focused on at that moment. It’s pretty busy, with a lot of media, but the fun stuff for me is engaging with our fans. I’ve been really spending time in the community, going to schools, hospitals, and academies, having meetups with the fans at night, hosting dinners, hosting receptions, and trying to put in place the infrastructure for fan groups, and really just trying to build a loyal cult following for something that didn’t exist 2-3 months ago.”

Having finished ninth in their first-ever Saudi Pro League season, Al-Kholood kicked off the 2025 with a 2-1 defeat at Al-Ettifaq, before losing 2-0 at an Al-Nassr side featuring the likes of Joao Felix, Sadio Mane, Marcelo Brozovic and Ronaldo and Coman. Since then, however, they have won 2-1 against Damac and Al-Shabab in the league and 2-1 against Al-Bukiryah in the cup, and they’ll be looking to make it four wins in a row as they host Al-Najma on Friday. Harburg will be watching closely, aware that, if he does enjoy widespread success with Al-Kholood, then it might not be much longer before he adds yet another club to his ownership circle.

“I’d say never say never. We’re definitely on the hunt for interesting transactions, or things that we think are really compelling valuations, or synergistic with what we’re doing right now. And so, I wouldn’t be surprised to see our names associated with other transactions in the short to near term.”