It is also worth remembering that no club has retained this title since Al-Hilal in 2021, and that the last four seasons have produced three different winners. Rivals, typically, come back determined to put right what went wrong the season before. As for the reigning champions, aside from the fact that everyone wants to beat them, the biggest worry is whether it means as much to the players, or even the coach, the following season. To put it another way, is the hunger still there?

Al-Nassr's 3-0 victory over Al-Fateh at Al-Awwal Park on Saturday provided some possible answers, and not just because of the scoreline. Cristiano Ronaldo did not play. The 41-year-old, newly married and back late from the World Cup with Portugal, watched from the VIP box beside Georgina Rodriguez. The evidence was in the performance of the players who did: the sharpness of the pressing, the commitment in the duels, and the sense that a home fixture against modest opposition still mattered to everyone in yellow.

The absence was planned. "Cristiano is here today, and he is always present with us," said new head coach Ange Postecoglou afterwards. "The most important thing now is recovery." There will be plenty of chances to see him. Ronaldo is 24 goals short of 1,000 for his career, and he has passed that scoring rate in every one of his Saudi seasons. On current form the milestone should arrive around midwinter, quite possibly with an Asian Cup crowd already in the country.

Against Al-Fateh, Al-Nassr looked like what they are: a settled team in which every role is clearly defined and the movement patterns are familiar. Postecoglou named, Ronaldo apart, last season's strongest eleven, and Khaled Al-Atwi's 3-5-2 held out for barely half an hour. Angelo opened the scoring in the 37th minute. Three minutes later Joao Felix, presented with the 2025-26 Player of the Season award before kickoff, collected possession on the left, beat three defenders and finished low at the near post for the goal of the round. Samu Costa, on for his debut in the 66th minute, added the third in the 73rd. Walid Al-Enezi denied Felix in the 13th minute and Sadio Mane in the 63rd to keep the margin respectable, and his defender Al-Abdulwahed nearly turned the ball into his own net off the post before the interval. It is hard to imagine a smoother first evening for a new head coach. The champions scored three, conceded none and never looked in danger of anything else.

Postecoglou himself deserves a closer look. He arrives with a reputation for strong first seasons and difficult second ones, a pattern his critics in England pointed to regularly. Here the situation is reversed: he inherits a champion squad, a 16-match winning run carried over from last season, and a support base that expects nothing below first place. Saturday suggested how he plans to handle it. He changed almost nothing, kept the familiar 4-4-1-1 and made his interventions from the bench. Restraint has rarely been the word associated with him. It might be the most useful one this season.

But are the rest of the league ready to make a race of it? Few of Al-Nassr's rivals can call on that kind of stability. Al-Ahli begin the season with Marino Pusic in charge only days after Matthias Jaissle's departure for Newcastle United. Al-Ettifaq have a new coach of their own in the Australian Arthur Papas. And across Riyadh, the club best equipped to mount a challenge spent its opening weekend answering questions about its most decorated forward.

Al-Hilal looked like a team with a point to prove. Simone Inzaghi promised supporters a more attacking side this season after a second-place finish that satisfied nobody at the club, and the first half hour of the 4-2 win over newly promoted Al-Faisaly at Kingdom Arena delivered on that promise. Karim Benzema converted a penalty in the 19th minute, Malcom added a second from a set piece in the 26th, and Ruben Neves scored another penalty in the 28th. The game looked over before the half-hour. It was not. Alexandre Mendy and Theo Bongonda pulled Al-Faisaly back to 3-2 in the second half, and Neves needed an 82nd-minute penalty, Al-Hilal's third of the night, to settle it.

The numbers support Inzaghi's attacking claim. Sofascore recorded Al-Hilal's expected goals at 4.50 against 1.82, with four big chances created before the break and none conceded, his 4-1-4-1 becoming a front five in possession. There is also history on their side: the club has never lost an opening league fixture. The defending remains the concern. Yassine Bounou made three saves and still conceded twice to promoted opposition, and a club with Al-Hilal's ambitions cannot allow that to become normal. Spare a thought for Fernando Pacheco in the Al-Faisaly goal, who faced three penalties on the club's return to the top flight and saved none. Crysencio Summerville, on debut for the hosts, won one of them and impressed on the ball before departing in the 84th minute. Early days, but he already looks at home.

And then there is Benzema. He scored, he played well, and he was visibly unhappy when Inzaghi withdrew him with 20 minutes remaining. The coach played the moment down in his press conference, but reports across the Saudi media suggest the 38-year-old, who has scored 10 goals in 14 games since his January move from Al-Ittihad, may yet be released before the window closes on September 6. Nothing is confirmed and the club has said nothing publicly. It is not an ideal situation for a club with title ambitions.

How much would Al-Ittihad give for a problem like that? Held 1-1 by Al-Kholood, the Jeddah club ended the weekend as the only side from last season's top three without a win. They created enough chances. Hamed Al-Shanqiti kept them out. Al-Kholood's 21-year-old goalkeeper got down well to save a Houssem Aouar penalty and made a string of stops to secure the point.

The performance arrived in the middle of a wider debate. The World Cup raised questions about how far Saudi clubs trust young local players, and over the weekend Al-Kholood's owner made the point on social media: his club backed a homegrown 21-year-old in the biggest fixture on its calendar and was rewarded. One game does not make a career, but it strengthens the argument, and with a home Asian Cup turning the first half of this season into a shop window for every Saudi player with international ambitions, coaches around the league will have taken note.

The frustration in Jeddah goes beyond one saved penalty. This is a squad that sold Benzema to a direct rival in January and then watched him score against everybody else in the spring. Aouar remains their most creative player and their likeliest source of goals from midfield, but the attack has no focal point, and a crowd that saw its team win the title as recently as 2025 has limited patience for transition seasons. Round one will not have helped.

Al-Ahli, at least, found a way to win. Pusic's 1-0 victory over newly promoted Al-Diriyah may have been the weekend's most impressive result given the circumstances: he took over days before kickoff, with almost no time to work with the squad. Yasser Al-Qahtani, the former Saudi international, saw it differently, arguing the hosts deserved something from the game and that the visitors celebrated a narrow win over a promoted club too enthusiastically. On the performance, he had a point. Al-Diriyah, playing the first top-flight match in their history, were brave, organised and unfortunate. But the job was three points away from home against a newly promoted side chasing a famous result, and the points went back to Jeddah. The Asian champions have a continental title to defend, and their new coach now has a win behind him.

Outside the established three, Al-Qadsiah made the strongest impression. Brendan Rodgers took his team into the capital and won 3-1 at Al-Shabab, with last season's 33-goal top scorer Julian Quinones on the scoresheet already. Fourth place last season suggested a ceiling. Rodgers has a season to test it, and ESPN has reported an agreed deal taking Manchester City midfielder Tijjani Reijnders to the club, which would suggest an ownership intent on helping him. Neither club has confirmed the move at the time of writing, so it should be treated as unconfirmed for now.

For Al-Shabab, the questions arrive early. Opening night at home against a rival for the continental places tends to set the tone for a season, and conceding three goals in it sets the wrong one. Successive summers of squad rebuilding have not produced a clear identity, and Quinones scored from exactly the kind of transition the new midfield was supposed to stop. It is one game. It also looked familiar, which is the part that should concern their supporters.

The rest of the round produced goals and a red card. NEOM beat Al-Fayha 2-1 despite playing the final third with ten men after Alaa Hejji's dismissal, with Said Benrahma and Amadou Kone scoring and Alexandre Lacazette influential behind them. The season's first hat-trick went to Moussa Dembele in Al-Ettifaq's 4-2 win over Al-Riyadh, started in the 22nd minute and completed from the penalty spot nine minutes into added time, a winning start for Papas. Al-Riyadh finished the game with ten men, which made the late scoreline harsher than the contest. In the same game, teenager Rayane Messi scored on his Ettifaq debut, a surname that will attract attention all season.

In Buraidah, Al-Taawoun and Al-Khaleej played out the round's only goalless draw. The three promoted clubs ended the weekend without a point between them: Abha lost 2-1 at home to Al-Hazem in the curtain-raiser, Al-Faisaly at least scored twice in defeat in Riyadh, and Al-Diriyah's first appearance in the top flight ended in a narrow loss with some credit attached. The step up from the First Division is real, and on this evidence all three understand exactly how big it is.

It is true that one round is rarely a reliable guide to what follows. Equally, some broader signals were hard to ignore. Summer spending stood at 57 million dollars in early August, a fraction of the figures from the boom years, and the league has introduced limits on club spending for the season. The league has moved from heavy recruitment to consolidation, and fittingly, no big-money debutant dominated the opening weekend. The best players on display, Felix, Neves, Quinones, Benrahma, were mostly the ones already here.

The calendar will shape everything else. Between December 24 and February 7 the league pauses while the country stages the 2027 AFC Asian Cup, which compresses the autumn schedule and puts an early premium on squad depth. Postecoglou referenced the problem on Saturday when he pointed out that his players had only two days of recovery before their next fixture. By September, coaches will be rotating heavily. Those who cannot will feel it in the spring, when the schedule becomes relentless.

So the opening weekend can be summarised simply. Al-Nassr picked up where they left off, winning comfortably without their record scorer. Al-Hilal scored four, conceded two and played like a team determined to correct last season. A 21-year-old goalkeeper in Al-Kholood colours takes the biggest reputation gain of the round into next week. Ronaldo watched it all from the stands, and he will not be there for long. Nine months of football will decide the rest.