At 41 years of age, Ben Harburg has done it all, from living in Africa, North America, Europe and Asia to co-founding one of the biggest commodity trading companies in China to racking up $2 billion in assets managed as a Managing Partner at MSA Capital. But today, he’s focused on one thing in particular – Saudi Pro League club Al-Khodood – having become the first-ever foreign investor in the history of Saudi football after purchasing 100% of the club in July.
“I mean, we knew what we were getting into,” stated Harburg in an exclusive Joy News interview. “Again, we knew the quality of the infrastructure was even worse than what we expected, but it is what it is, and we know that building new infrastructure was going to take time, and certainly not be done by the time we took over the club. But I have a plan and a process, and hopefully we’ll be able to make announcements about it soon to have a significantly new infrastructure in place within a very short period of time on multiple levels at the stadium level as well as at the training center level. I think we could finish this campaign going into next season with new infrastructure across the board, which is really my objective. That’s what I’m working towards, and that was always gonna take 6 to 12 months, regardless of when we took over the club.”
Born in Colorado, Harburg enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood that saw him bounce around from Michigan to Switzerland to Egypt thanks to his father’s work as an air force pilot, but it was during his residence in Spain where he became acquainted with the beautiful game. Similarly to the likes of Lalas Abubakar and James Richardson, Harburg took a liking to football during his teenage years after attending a Cadiz match in 1997. Fast-forward a quarter-century, and Harburg made his first sporting investment after purchasing a 6.5% stake in the Spanish club in October 2021.
Pretty soon though, he realized that he wanted to own an entire club, and he wanted to make history by blazing the trail as the first ever independent and purely financially driven owner in the history of Saudi football. And ever since purchasing Al-Khodood, he’s been able to make the most of his international background, which has seen him work in Berlin, Dubai, Southeast Asia, China and various other locations, as well as pursue Islamic Studies in the academic field, and ingratiate himself into his new fanbase. He’s done so not just with smart investments, but by regularly tweeting in Arabic and interacting with every single one of his team’s supporters.
“It’s not to prove any point, I would do this anywhere I would go, and so with Cadiz, and I haven’t tweeted as much in Spanish just because I’m so busy with Al-Khodood recently, but if you go back and look at my historic tweets, I tweet in Spanish and Spain as well. So my view is you should be talking to your fans and your club members in their language. You know, an American owner who comes in and takes over a team in Italy and tweets in English is an idiot. First off, no one’s even gonna read it, so you’re not going to get any engagement, let alone that you look like an ugly American or something. So for me, it’s less about proving anything.”
After kicking off the 2025/26 season with a 2-1 loss at an Al-Ettifaq side captained by Georginio Wijnaldum, Al-Khodood fell 2-0 to an Al-Nassr side featuring the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Joao Felix, Kingsley Coman, Sadio Mane and more. However, they have since bounced back with league wins vs. Damac and Al-Shabab and a cup win at Al-Bukiryay, and they’ll be looking to make it four wins on the bounce when they take on Al-Najma at home on Friday.
“It’s interesting what’s been happening in Saudi Arabia because people are like, ‘Oh, you’re doing all this stuff to kind of integrate yourself with the local community. Actually, this is my standard playbook, and a few fans, rightly, have called me out and been like, you know, ‘What he’s doing isn’t all that big a deal. He’s just the only one doing it, and so everyone’s going crazy about it.’ And that’s the reality — I’m just doing what I would do in any other club. And it just so happens that the ecosystem is so starved for someone to do that, for an owner that tweets this way, and that engages with fans in the way that I do that it seems more groundbreaking, but it’s actually my standard operating procedure. Nobody coached me on this.”
“I didn’t go into this with some strategic plan that I was gonna tweet in Arabic and stoop to the fans’ level, and they’re like, ‘This is just what I love to do, what I would do anyway. I always say to people that football is probably not a way to get super rich. If it’s done well, you can kind of preserve your wealth and maybe grow it slightly, but it’s not a highly lucrative asset class. And as a result of that, it’s critical that you have a really strong relationship with your fans, because if you don’t have a big fan base, and there’s not a lot of people filling the stadiums, and these people don’t have a strong bond with you, there’s really no reason to do this. Like, there’s a lot better ways to spend your time and money. And so, for me, I want to get to know our fans, I want them to tell me how they feel, I want to make them happy, and it can go sour very fast if you’re not winning. It can still go very negative very quickly, but at least in this dynamic, I’ve tried to set a standard, which is win or lose, you’re part of the club, we would value you, we want you to feel like we listen to you, and I think that’ll buy us some sympathy and some patience if and when things don’t go well.”
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