Belgium-based loan stars poised for key roles in Herve Renard's Saudi Arabia World Cup rescue mission

As he packs his suitcases in his well-appointed Cannes home, bound for his second adventure in Saudi Arabia, Herve Renard plots the various scouting trips ahead of him. As the head coach of the Saudi national team, targeting a place at the 2026 World Cup, his road map looks distinct from the last time he was steering the country towards football’s biggest event.

The reappointment of Renard, Saudi Arabia’s manager up to and at Qatar 2022, following the departure of Roberto Mancini last week, has a clear logic. He knows the territory; he knows many of the players very well indeed.

He and they celebrated, together, one of the Green Falcons’ most resonant results, the 2-1 victory, from a goal down at half time, over Lionel Messi’s Argentina at the beginning of a World Cup tournament that finished with Messi lifting the trophy.

That match alone is a great endorsement of the manager, an achievement all the more vividly remembered by millions of fans because there is footage, filmed for documentary purposes, of Renard’s urgent and evidently fruitful team-talk during the half time interval at the Lusail Stadium.

Renard will need to be very quickly at his stirring, motivating best when he reintroduces himself to some of those players and greets fresher faces ahead of a long trip to Australia. The qualifier against the Socceroos may not quite be make-or-break, but has a good deal hanging on it.

The Saudis sit only third in their group, beneath Australia, going into the game that marks the halfway stage of phase three of Asian qualifying. Only the top two finishers are guaranteed a ticket to the expanded World Cup in North America; teams in fourth or fifth must endure a further round of high-jeopardy mini-groups and, after that, a possible play-off lifeline.

Mancini’s reign abruptly ended because it had trailed off with just one win in his last five matches. The practical legacy is that Renard is staring at a potential crisis, measured out in long-haul journeys: Australia away in Melbourne; a meeting with stubborn Indonesia, away, five days later; a trip to runaway group leaders Japan still to come.

In and around those matches, Renard will make fact-finding trips of the sort he never needed in his previous stint as Saudi coach. Then, he picked his squads entirely from players at Saudi clubs. Expeditions to check on the form of players never took him outside the Arabian peninsula.

Times have changed. On his map now are Italy, where Saud Abdulhamid, the experienced right-back, is at Roma following a summer move, although not enjoying as much first-team action as he’d like. More fruitful are the deals that took the winger Marwan Al Sahafi and the midfielder Faisal Al Ghamdi on loans from Al Ittihad to Beerschot, who were newly promoted to the top tier of Belgian football.

Their pathway had been eased by the fact that Beerschot, based in Antwerp, is majority-owned by Abdullah bin Mosaad Al Saud, a Saudi, but their challenges were still steep, joining a team that by the time they had cleared the visa hurdles to register, had lost the opening two matches of the league season 3-0.

“Opinions on them were positive,” reported the Beerschot manager, Dirk Kuyt, the former Liverpool and Netherlands striker, who had asked for assessments of the young Saudi footballers from European players he knows in the Pro League.

Kuyt has now seen enough with his own eyes to now know those validations were correct. Beerschot remain at the bottom of Belgium’s top division, but Al Sahafi, 20, has already provided supporters with their best night yet of the season.

He scored both goals a two weeks ago in a 2-1 win over Anderlecht, the most storied of Belgian clubs, the first after an eye-catching piece of skill to bring a long pass under control with his heel, ahead of a composed, left-footed drive to finish.

His second would follow a mazy, pacey solo run that put some Belgian watchers of a certain age in mind of very famous Saudi goal: Saeed Al Owairan’s at the 1994 World Cup, a virtuoso strike in Washington DC against Belgium that secured Saudi Arabia’s progress to the knockout phase of the event, a unique milestone in the national team’s history.

Al Sahafi was delighted with his breakthrough moments. “I’m gaining a lot of confidence here,” he said, setting himself a target of “more than 10 goals for the season.”

Both he and Al Ghamdi, 23, have established themselves firmly in the Beerschot starting XI. That gives them a rhythm, a match-fitness that more senior Saudi internationals are currently lacking.

As Mancini complained long and loud during his underwhelming time as national coach, first-team opportunities for leading Saudi talents with the bigger Saudi clubs now come at a higher premium since, last year, several of the top clubs had their transfer budgets boosted by sovereign wealth and limits on the number of foreign signings were eased.

The influx of overseas stars has been transformative. The Pro League of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Riyad Mahrez is a very different landscape from the one Renard surveyed as Falcons’ manager from 2019 to early 2023.

The Al Hilal around which he used to base his trusted core for the national side is now dominated by foreign players. Several Al Hilal men who were among Renard’s preferred choices are struggling for playing minutes. Midfielder Mohamed Kanno has started just one league game this term; likewise defender Hassan Tambakti.

When Renard was last in charge of Saudi Arabia, Al Hilal were also the reigning Asian Champions League holders; they are no longer that. Nor are the Falcons the ferocious force they were when, three years ago, Renard was guiding them through qualifying for World Cup 2022.

Then, as now, they grouped with Japan and Australia. Renard’s Saudi Arabia topped that group, dropping just seven points from their 10 games. This autumn under Mancini, they have dropped as many points in four games, lost in Jeddah to Japan and failed to score at home against Bahrain.

So Renard has a rescue mission to mount. Soon enough, his plans for it will take him to a rendezvous at the Botanic Sanctuary hotel in Antwerp, Belgium, where Al Sahafi and Al Ghambi are currently guests while they seek a more permanent base for their intrepid bids to make an impact in European club football. And, Renard hopes, a real impact for his new-look Saudi Arabia.