Dan Bardell checks in on Ollie Watkins after his Aston Villa exit, from his start at Al-Hilal and bold claim about the standard of Saudi football to an England omission which could tell us far more about where the 30-year-old now sees his career heading.
It has been a few weeks now since Ollie Watkins left Aston Villa for Al-Hilal and, more than anything, I have found it strange how little I have seen of him since he went. That isn't a criticism of Watkins or even necessarily of the Saudi Pro League, it is just the reality of consuming football in this country because most of the other major players who left Villa during the summer are still appearing on my television every weekend. I watched Morgan Rogers and Emi Martínez struggle for Chelsea at Brentford on Friday, I watched Youri Tielemans toil for Manchester United against Fulham and I have seen Ezri Konsa playing for Arsenal a few times. They have all left Villa, which still takes some getting used to after everything that group achieved together, but they haven't really disappeared from my footballing life. Watkins has.
That was what made me want to have a look at how he has actually been getting on since moving to Saudi Arabia because he was such a huge part of Villa for six years and I still have an interest in what happens to him, even if I'm not suddenly going to start watching Al-Hilal every week. He has started scoring goals, which will surprise absolutely nobody who watched him regularly at Villa, and I suspect there will be plenty more because whatever anybody thinks about the circumstances of his departure, Watkins remains an excellent striker who spent years proving himself at Premier League level.
There is probably a temptation whenever a player makes a move like this to judge how well it is going by looking at the goals column, but I'm not particularly interested in doing that with Watkins. If he scores 25 or 30 goals this season, what exactly would it tell us about him that we didn't already know? He scored 91 Premier League goals for Villa and 108 in all competitions, performed in Europe and became an established England international. He should score goals in Saudi Arabia and I'd actually be far more surprised if he didn't.
Watkins himself clearly sees the standard rather differently. After scoring on his Al-Hilal debut against Al-Ahli, he said: “The level I saw here today was honestly of Premier League quality.” He described the game as extremely physical and said the quality had been very high.
I'm sorry, but I'm not having that.
I've watched Watkins play Premier League football every week for six years and I don't believe the Saudi Pro League is of the same standard. It doesn't suddenly become true because some extremely good footballers have moved there or because Al-Hilal beat Manchester City at the Club World Cup, which Watkins has actually cited as something that opened his eyes to Saudi football before making the move. Al-Hilal are obviously a very good side containing some excellent players, but that isn't the same thing as saying the overall level of the competition is equivalent to the Premier League.
I don't really blame Watkins for talking it up either. What else is he supposed to say immediately after signing? He isn't going to arrive, take the money and then tell everybody the league isn't very good. He is representing Al-Hilal now and naturally he is going to be positive about the club and the competition he has joined. I just don't think we have to pretend along with him.
Watkins has spoken a little more about why he wanted the move and described it as a new challenge for himself and his family, having spent their whole lives in the UK, while also talking about experiencing a different culture and wanting to win trophies with Al-Hilal. I don't doubt any of that and I'm sure living somewhere completely different with your family can be an exciting experience, but I also don't think we need to dance around the obvious motivation when elite footballers move to Saudi Arabia.
It's money.
That doesn't make Watkins a bad person and it doesn't make the decision wrong. If somebody offered me an extraordinary amount of money to do my job somewhere else, I'd have to think very seriously about it as well. Football careers are short, Watkins is 30 and the sums available in Saudi Arabia can completely change the financial future of generations of a family. He was still capable of playing at a very high level in Europe, though, which is why I don't accept the sporting argument in quite the same way. He made a financial decision at this stage of his career and he is perfectly entitled to do that.
What has happened with England since he went is therefore much more interesting to me than however many goals he ends up scoring for Al-Hilal.
Thomas Tuchel has now named his latest England squad and Watkins isn't in it. Personally, I think there is a very good chance that means his international career is over. Nobody can state that definitively unless Tuchel or Watkins does, but when you look at his age, the move he has made and, most importantly, how little Tuchel used him at the World Cup even when he was still playing Premier League football for Villa, it is difficult for me to see the route back.
That is quite a significant development when you consider where Watkins was relatively recently. This is somebody who has played 24 times for England and whose international career will always include that extraordinary winner against the Netherlands in the semi-final of Euro 2024. Whatever happens from here, nobody can take that moment away from him.
But I also wonder whether Watkins had already reached the same conclusion about England before he agreed to join Al-Hilal.
He had just been to a World Cup and discovered exactly where he stood in Tuchel's thinking. If he came away from that tournament believing that, at 30, he was unlikely to have a meaningful England role going forward, then perhaps the calculation over Saudi Arabia became considerably easier. One of the obvious reasons for staying in the Premier League would have been protecting his England place, but there isn't much of a place to protect if the manager has already decided other forwards are ahead of you.
Watkins must also have understood that moving to Saudi Arabia was unlikely to improve his international prospects. The fact he has been omitted from the first squad since making the move therefore cannot come as an enormous shock to him. Perhaps he was completely comfortable with that trade-off. If England was already disappearing over the horizon, he had a decision to make about what he wanted the next few years of his career to look like and chose the enormous financial opportunity in front of him.
There is still some disappointment for me in how his Villa career finished because I'm not going to rewrite what happened around Brighton. Watkins making himself unavailable for that opening game wasn't how I wanted six years of brilliant service to end, and clearly Unai Emery wasn't particularly impressed either at the time. Watkins subsequently acknowledged himself that he had never intended or imagined his Villa career ending in those circumstances.
But Emery forgave him and I'm not going to hold a grudge either. You can be disappointed with somebody's actions during one week without allowing it to completely redefine what you think about the previous six years. Watkins was an outstanding player for Aston Villa and a hugely important part of the journey the club went on. That doesn't need another thousand words explaining it because we've done that already.
Villa have also had to move forward quickly and Nicolas Jackson scoring against Tottenham at the weekend was another encouraging step in that process. I've written a lot about Jackson over the last few days and about the different things he can bring to this team, so I don't particularly want to turn this into another comparison between the two. Watkins doesn't need to fail in Saudi Arabia for Jackson to succeed at Villa, and Jackson doesn't need to replicate Watkins for Villa to have moved on successfully.
For Watkins, the early evidence suggests his new life is going pretty much as you would expect. He has settled in, he is scoring goals, he has spoken positively about Al-Hilal and he appears happy with the decision he has made. I expect all of that to continue.
The England development is the bit that changes the picture for me because it feels far more consequential than anything he has done on a Saudi football pitch so far. Watkins can talk about Premier League quality and he can score as many goals as he likes, but I don't think either will alter the reality of the decision he made this summer. He stepped away from the highest level of club football available to him at a point when he was still capable of playing there, presumably in return for financial rewards that were simply too good to reject, and there was always going to be a trade-off attached to that.
Perhaps he had already accepted the biggest one before he left.
If Watkins had come away from the World Cup believing his England career was effectively finished anyway, there may not have been as much left for him to lose as it appeared from the outside. A few weeks later he is an Al-Hilal player, scoring goals in Saudi Arabia while an England squad is announced without his name in it.
Given the choice he made, I suspect he is absolutely fine with that.
