Past the three-year mark for some clubs, two and a half for the league as a whole. Here is the honest assessment.
The marquee players are mostly performing. Ronaldo at Al-Nassr is statistically still elite at forty. Benzema at Al-Ittihad has had a difficult season but remains a contributor. Mahrez at Al-Ahli has been the most consistent of the original wave. Brozović, Mitrović, Otávio, Neves, Kanté, all still operating at recognisable levels.
The competitive depth has improved more than the European press has registered. The fifth and sixth-best teams in the league are now genuinely competitive in continental tournaments. The Asian Champions League has been won by a Saudi club two of the last three years. The Club World Cup will give one of these clubs a global stage by the end of next year.
The youth development has been the slowest moving piece. Saudi Arabia is building academies. The academies are producing players. The players are not yet at international level. This will take another five to ten years. The expectation that domestic Saudi talent should be visible already was always unrealistic. Football academies do not produce results in three-year windows.
The off-field development has been the most underrated piece. The broadcast rights have stabilized. The international audience has grown, particularly in MENA and Southeast Asia. The match-day production is now indistinguishable from a mid-tier European league. The stadium attendances are inconsistent but trending up.
What the project has not yet done is produce a single moment of irreversible global cultural penetration. The Saudi league still does not feel inevitable to a global audience the way the Premier League does. That moment will come. It will probably come when a Saudi club beats a top European club in a knockout fixture. We are perhaps eighteen months from that.
The European press will keep writing the failure narrative. The project will keep going. Everything I wrote a year ago still applies. Almost nothing has changed except the level on the pitch, which has continued to rise.