Image for Can Bukayo Saka Become One of Football’s Biggest Global Stars?
Image for Can Bukayo Saka Become One of Football’s Biggest Global Stars?
I’ve been putting this one off, because the honest answer keeps changing. In May it was a plain yes. Saka had just helped end a 22-year wait for the league and there wasn’t a right winger in Europe you’d have swapped him for. Then came Budapest and the shoot-out, and a summer of arguing about whether the best player at a club that has just won the title is automatically one of the game’s biggest names. He isn’t, yet. Whether he gets there is the interesting bit.
Arteta’s system has an anchor, and it’s him
Start with what he does for the team. Arteta’s Arsenal are built on control, and control on the right depends on one player who can hold the ball under pressure, beat a man when the pattern breaks down, and still be back in position to press when we lose it. That’s been Saka’s job for five seasons now. Arteta could leave him, Rice, Saliba and Timber out of the starting eleven for the Community Shield in August and still beat City 3-0, which tells you how deep this squad is now, but you wouldn’t try it in a league game.
Most Read on Arsenal Mania
This season has gone the usual way. Goals against Coventry and Villa, 89 minutes against Chelsea, most of the night in Naples on Wednesday. He’s played more than 300 times for the club, scored more than 80, and he turned 25 last week. The durability gets underrated. Wingers get kicked, Saka gets kicked more than most, and he keeps turning up on Saturday.
Hale End to talisman
The connection supporters feel with him is personal because we watched the whole thing happen. He came through Hale End as a small boy, made his debut at 17 off the bench in a Europa League game against Vorskla Poltava in November 2018, and spent a chunk of the following season filling in at left-back because Kolašinac and Tierney were injured. That wasn’t the plan. He was just too good at it to be moved out of the team afterwards.
From there the arc is familiar to anyone who’s held a season ticket through it. First league start in the 3-2 against Villa in 2019. The Euro 2020 final and what followed it. The slow rebuild under Arteta with Saka as the first proof that it might work. The title. The number seven shirt. In February, a new contract to 2030 that made him the best-paid player at the club, and in July, a hat-trick against France in the World Cup third-place play-off.
The Saka brand, such as it is
Global stardom is only partly football. Mbappé is a Dior ambassador. Bellingham has a signature adidas Predator. Haaland signed with Nike in 2023 with the kind of fanfare usually kept for a transfer. At that level the profile is built in campaigns as much as in matches, and the campaigns are enormous.
Saka’s commercial life is smaller than that and, as far as I can tell, deliberately so. TCL made him a brand ambassador in January. Beats put him in its 2022 World Cup campaign, Defy the Noise, alongside Gnabry and Coman. New Balance has had him in its boots since 2021 and released his own signature boot last December. British GQ put him on a Style cover in 2022. That’s more or less the list. None of it is loud, and all of it trades on humility, on the sense that he means what he says, and on there being nothing in his public life a sponsor would ever have to explain away. Add the things he doesn’t publicise much, like funding 120 surgical operations in Nigeria through the BigShoe charity, and you have the public image most agencies would give a year’s fees to manufacture.
The money around him works differently
Club sponsorship is sold by audience size, and it always has been. Emirates has been on the front of the shirt for the best part of two decades and signed on again this summer through to 2033; Deel took the sleeve from this season. Neither company cares which of our players you like; they’re paying for everyone who watches Arsenal, wherever they watch it, and the price reflects that.
Most of the advertising a fan actually sees around a match is that kind. Airlines and car makers and payroll software pay for shirts and sleeves; the companies behind online casino games pay for perimeter boards and league sponsorship; everyone is buying the audience rather than the player. None of that money goes anywhere near Saka.
A player’s own deals work differently. They’re a short list, chosen for fit, and each one trades on his reputation rather than the club’s audience. That’s the Mbappé tier. Saka’s list is shorter than Mbappé’s and quieter, and I think that’s a choice rather than a ceiling. He earns less that way. He also never ends up fronting something that makes him look cheap, and for a player people like because he seems decent, that matters more than the invoice.
So, is he getting there?
My view is that he’s one level below the three names above, and the gap is European trophies and the size of the club’s worldwide audience next to Real Madrid’s or City’s, not anything he can control. What he can control he’s already doing, which is staying fit, staying himself and scoring in the games that get replayed. A Champions League final came down to one shoot-out. Win the next one and this question gets a different answer, and I’d expect to be the one writing it up.