Cristiano Ronaldo is in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves - The latest step in the Saudi takeover of Esports

CR7 is in Fatal Fury

September 21st 2024 fighting game fans were stunned by a video posted to Twitter by Cristiano Ronaldo, considered to be one of the greatest football players of all time, promoting the release of SNK's upcoming game Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, the video ending on the statement "A legendary player joins a legendary game."

For the next 6 months fighting game fans would hear nothing about this supposed collaboration, the details of which remained a total mystery. Jokes would be made around the possibility of Cristiano Ronaldo becoming a fighting game character but most players assumed this would be a skin or wondered if perhaps he would appear as an NPC in some fashion. The possibility this was just a regular PR tweet was also not off the table. Cristiano, who currently plies his trade for Saudi Public Investment Fund-owned Al-Nassr (SNK are also owned by this fund), had previously done promotional tweets for Saudi Arabia's forays into the gaming world. In particular, he posted a promotional tweet for the Gamers8 event, a precursor to the "Esports World Cup"

On March 26th 2025, approximately 6 months on from the initial tweet and less than a month from the release of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves it was revealed that Cristiano Ronaldo would be a playable character at launch.

We now live in a world where I will soon be able to say that the Cristiano Ronaldo vs Chun-Li (who is announced as Year 1 DLC) match up is 6:4 for Chun-Li and that is objectively very funny. But beyond the initial shock there is a lot more to this going on. Acknowledging the fact that the Saudi economy will eventually need to move beyond oil, the country has been investing large sums across a variety of industries.

Sportswashing

One industry the Saudis are particularly interested in boosting is their tourism. They have just one small roadblock to overcome; an atrocious reputation on the global stage. According to Human Rights Watch they are committing potential "crimes against humanity" along their border with Yemen, they use vague laws around impinging "religious values" and "public morals" to target queer people, women are treated as second class citizens and they impose "one of the most restrictive and abusive kafala (visa sponsorship) systems in the region" a system that gives employers unilateral power to abuse migrant workers.

Saudi Arabia's biggest strategy to combat how the world views them for this has been a strategy dubbed "sportswashing"; using exorbitant amounts of money to insert themselves in a wide variety of sports, normalising their existence on the global stage. They've hosted WWE events, gotten a Saudi Arabian Grand Prix added to the F1 calendar, started a rival Golf league to the PGA tour called "LIV Golf" and spent billions importing some of the world's biggest names to play in their professional football league, the "Saudi Pro League."

Football has been the centerpiece of this sportswashing operation and it has culminated in them securing the rights to host the 2034 World Cup (a whole separate web of corruption) and the crown prince of their footballing endeavours is Cristiano Ronaldo who they pay reportedly $200m/year. While that may seem insane to pay a single sports player, Cristiano is arguably the most famous person on the entire planet with 115 million twitter followers and 651 million instagram followers and they have effectively bought his brand to be an apparatus for Saudi Arabian sportswashing.

Bringing it Back to Gaming

Traditional sports, however, are not the only avenue Saudi Arabia has been using for this endeavour, they have spent the last few years increasing their presence in the esports space as well. This has involved buying large numbers of shares in gaming companies, including some outright like SNK, creating and funding esports organisations and hosting and sponsoring a variety of esports events.

One genre of esports in particular where the Saudis have become unavoidable is fighting games. Fighting games as a genre has long been viewed as the "poverty" esport. While MOBAs or Shooters would have prize pools in the millions, the largest fighting game tournaments would be lucky to break 6 figures. EVO, the largest community ran event, saw first place in Street Fighter 6 take home $21,116 for winning a 5000 player bracket. In comparison, the Street Fighter 6 tournaments at Gamers8 in 2023 and the Esports World Cup 2024 had a cumulative $1 million prize pool. A number only bested by Capcom's official finals Capcom Cup, which before SF6 historically had much smaller prize pools.

Along the way the Saudis have left their influence all over the community. Many events were turned into qualifiers for the Esports World Cup in 2024, their Qiddiya gaming city was the primary sponsor for the EVO awards and for 2025 they have negotiated themselves into being an official part of the Capcom Pro Tour, both qualifying players from official capcom events into EWC and making EWC a qualifier for Capcom Cup as part of a 3 year collaboration.

Fatal Fury then is just a natural extension of these moves. As mentioned SNK is now outright owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund and so making their newest fighting game a key part of their esports expansion feels like a natural choice. However, although historically SNK was a juggernaut of the fighting game industry in the arcades, in the modern era SNK fighting games are a niche within a niche. So how do you make it a big deal and a thriving esport that can be used to further your nation's sportswashing aims? You get the most famous man on the planet, who is already on your payroll, to be a playable character and capitalise on the ensuing marketing buzz.

How effective this will truly be remains to be seen, the first beta for Fatal Fury had an awful online experience that would quickly push away most of these new eyeballs but if the game launches in a good state who knows.