All you need to know about Al-Hilal – The club ready to offer £600 million for a year of Kylian Mbappe’s services

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Al-Hilal are making waves this summer transfer window following the eye-watering £259 million offer for the superstar French forward, Kylian Mbappe.

The offer comes with an even more ludicrous salary offer of £600 million for just a one-year contract for the 24-year-old according to James Benge of CBS Sport.

But just who are Al-Hilal and more importantly where on earth is this money coming from and could the Frenchman really make the move to the Middle East?

Al-Hilal fact file

The club are currently managed by former Sporting Lisbon head coach, Jorge Jesus. The 69-year-old was reappointed as the club’s manager following a spell at the club in 2018-2019. The Saudi side plays their home games at the Al-Hilal stadium, which is nicknamed The Blue Jewel and has a capacity of 35,000.

The club, as well as three other clubs, are owned by PIF (Public Investment Fund). The name PIF may sound familiar, as they are the company that took an 80% stake in Newcastle United.

The PIF owns not just Al-Hilal but also Al-Ahli, Al-Nassr, and Al-Ittihad, clubs that have made some interesting signings since the turn of the calendar year.

The club have seemingly acquired the wealth from the PIF which has close links to the Saudi Arabian government. The PIF itself is essentially a massive savings account for the country of Saudi Arabia according to the BBC and, due to the masses amount of oil coming from the Middle East, there is an extraordinary amount of money available.

Could Mbappe really make the move?

Such is the wealth of Al-Hilal, they are offering extraordinary sums of money to the Frenchman but there’s seemingly a caveat. The player would only sign a one-year deal with the Saudi side and then move to Real Madrid for free.

Normally, this would be out of the question for a side about to spend nearly a billion pounds on a single player (wages + transfer fee) but this is ideal for the league itself.

Were Mbappe to make the move and score the goals you’d expect him to then the eyes on the division would be plentiful, so much so that the deal to sign the Frenchman may well be the Kickstarter to agree a deal with one of the big television broadcasters.

This, in theory, would start a revolution and make the league one of the top 10 in the world, which was PIF’s aim from the start according to The Sun.