When Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Riyadh, the number attached to his contract was hard to write, let alone picture. The question that followed wasn't really about football. It was about wages: how does a person get paid that much for kicking a ball, while someone who builds a wall or repairs your car earns a fraction of it?
The question sounds simple. But it contains the whole debate about Saudi economic development.
Wages are not a moral verdict
The naive answer is that wages reflect effort, or need, or moral importance. But these answers don't survive contact with reality. The nurse who works consecutive nights deserves more than any footballer, but she doesn't earn more. The engineer who designs a bridge used by thousands daily earns less than a corporate lawyer nobody's heard of.
Wages don't reflect moral desert. And that's probably fine, because if they did, we'd need a government committee sitting every day to decide who deserves what. That's a different kind of disaster.
What wages reflect in a functioning market is one thing: marginal productivity. In simpler terms: what does this person add to the organization or market compared to their absence? Ronaldo adds watched matches, advertising deals, contracts, and visitors who fly to Riyadh specifically to see him. This isn't an opinion. It's a number you can measure in broadcast deals, ticket prices, and sponsorship revenue.
When the signal gets distorted
A free market, when it works properly, gives you a clean signal: this person is highly valued because what they do is rare and many people want it. And that signal tells everyone what to study, where to invest their time. When a thousand young people see that AI programmers earn high salaries, some of them decide to study programming. This isn't central planning. It's spontaneous coordination between millions of individual decisions.
But when the signal gets mixed and distorted, when someone earns a lot not because the market needs them but because a top-down decision made it so, the information gets corrupted. A young person choosing their career path can no longer read reality accurately.
The social stigma and its cost
In Saudi Arabia, for many years, the message from society was clear: a university degree is the beginning and the end. A PhD is better. A government job is best of all. Technical and trade professions carried an unspoken social stigma. Someone working in electrical work, plumbing, or mechanics was viewed differently, regardless of their actual income or real value to the economy.
This stigma has a steep cost. Not just because it wastes talent and pushes people toward paths they don't want, but because it creates a structural mismatch in the labor market: a surplus of certain skills and a severe shortage of others.
What's happening in Saudi Arabia today, for the first time in a long while, is that wages in some technical professions are starting to send a different message. The skilled technician in renewable energy, the production manager in a factory, the industrial automation specialist — these people are finding offers today that didn't exist ten years ago. Not because anyone issued a decree, but because the market grew and needed them.
Wages at the end of the day are not just numbers on a payslip. They're a message the market sends to everyone watching. The question we should be asking isn't only "who earns more?" but "is the signal reaching our young people today honest, and does it reflect what the economy actually needs?"