Saudi Women's Premier League player Maria Khan is living the dream
Pakistan women's national team captain on her journey to first pro deal, advocacy for expanding the game globally.
Maria Khan’s soccer journey appeared to be at an effective end when she wrapped up her NCAA career at the University of Denver in 2012. Making 24 appearances for the Pioneers, the Colorado native decided to move to the United Arab Emirates and attend business school after her undergrad years.
But over the past decade, Khan’s soccer journey has not only continued, it’s elevated in remarkable ways. While working for the Dubai government, and later, the Ford Motor Company in international business, Khan decided to start playing the sport again for fun. As she gained renown in the UAE’s amateur soccer scene, Khan got the attention of Pakistan’s federation. With both of her parents hailing from Pakistan, she was eligible to represent that country in international football, and played her first minutes for Pakistan’s national team in 2022, as the team captain, no less.
A strong showing in an international invitational tournament this past January in Saudi Arabia led to Khan being named Player of the Tournament, and this month, the 32-year-old has reached the latest benchmark in her football career, signing a professional deal and making her debut for Eastern Flames FC in the Saudi Women’s Premier League.
Last weekend, in her second appearance for her new club, Khan scored a banger of a goal and added two assists, although if you ask her, she jokingly asserts she should have been credited for a third, as Eastern Flames routed Al-Riyadh SC 6-1.
While highlights in the second-year league are hard to find easily, get a sense of Khan’s skill with this audacious free kick scored for Pakistan.
Oh, and one more thing: Khan played goalkeeper in college, while her exploits in recent years have been as a midfielder.
“Yeah, so that's a funny one,” Khan told Soccermusings during an interview last week. “My whole life I've been a goalkeeper. It's just the position that I naturally grew into as a kid and played college, D1, as a goalkeeper and then when I moved to the UAE I was like, ‘Okay, cool. Nobody knows me. I can be whatever I want to be, right? I can rebrand myself to be whatever I want to be.’ New environment, new country. Nobody knows anything.”
Khan said she began playing in the outfield as an adult amateur just to get in shape. And while she says she does miss playing in goal at times to this day, she also credited the program at the University of Denver for including GKs in regular team rondos and making sure ‘keepers were comfortable playing with the ball at their feet. Clearly, the work put in there and over the past decade in the field has paid off.
Coming from the business world, Khan said her experiences in navigating professional athlete life in an upstart league resemble those she encountered regularly in her previous career.
“I think something that also has really kind of helped prepare me for all of this is actually all of the corporate experience I've had, which sounds a little strange, but there's a lot of corporate practices that I actually take into the locker room and take into the pitch and you know, things that my previous company Ford have have taught me — working within a high performance team with impact and efficiency, right? It's no different here. When you're trying to lay the foundation down, it comes down to okay, how can we create a positive environment for individuals to thrive in?” she explained.
Saudi football has been in the news in recent months for a variety of reasons. From the Saudi men’s national team beating eventual World Cup champions Argentina at the start of last year’s tournament, to the overt investment put into the Saudi (Men’s) Pro League, attracting global superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Karim Benzema and many others, to the establishment of the Saudi Women’s Premier League last year and efforts to ramp it up this year, it is currently undergoing a massive period of growth.
But while there have been concerns in the English-speaking world that the Saudi government is using sports, and soccer in particular, as “sportswashing” for misdeeds in other realms, in another way the actual dedication to women’s football is a major step forward for the women’s game, in a region of the world where women’s football remains in its nascent stages. In a country where women were only allowed to drive starting in 2018, the sight of women playing professional football is in some ways truly transformative.
“This is something I want to be a part of, this is something that I want spend my energy and help contribute to, because I do see the commitment that's been put forward,” Khan said. “They're televising games. That's a big deal. And they're bringing over foreigners and the foreigners, they're wearing shorts, and they're showing their legs. I think it's really breaking perceptions that the Western world might have of the Middle East, and it's just kind of saying, ‘Hey, we're here and we're ready to be inclusive and we're ready to create an environment for not just our Saudi women to succeed in but for other women to also get the opportunity.’ So for me I'm grateful and I'm surprised and excited all at once if I'm being honest.”
Like many leagues around the world, including the NWSL, there is a foreign player cap on each team in the Saudi Women’s Premier League, and Khan emphasized that given the rules on how many Saudi players must be on the field during games, the ultimate priority is on developing Saudi women’s soccer. But as a fellow Muslim woman, playing for a national team also in its nascent stages, she’s able to impart her sense of professionalism on younger teammates.
“It's a different environment,” she began. “There's different resources, there's different investment, there's so many different things, right? But how can we leverage foreign talent and use it to benefit and help grow the environment that we're in? That means bringing over players that have had experience playing in the west and being able to teach and educate our teammates on what it means to be a professional. And that comes from how to be a good teammate, right, being able to put the team before yourself, showing up on time. Strength and conditioning, injury prevention, time management. These are all things that if you remove the sports side of it, it's about how you become a professional. And in the U.S., we've learned this at a very young age.”
Khan says she keeps tabs on soccer around the world, in part to see what’s working elsewhere and how she can improve and find ways to bring more to her team. She keeps up with some of her youth and college teammates, and another Colorado native, North Carolina Courage defender Ryan Williams, said Khan left a big impression in a short span of time when they trained together in the past.
“She was the nicest person and we follow each other on Instagram,” Williams told Soccermusings earlier this month. “She was so supportive and kind and outgoing and she really did leave such an amazing impression on me. I think I only trained with her a couple times but really good energy, really good person, super hard-working and excited to get better.”
It does seem like Khan is a perfect ambassador for the role she’s in now — an American-raised Pakistan international, comfortable in many cultures, with plenty of non-soccer work experience to go with legit skills on the field. A veteran getting an unexpected opportunity to raise her game in her 30s, she’s motivated to grow the game and her passion to make the most of what she’s earned, on a very unusual journey, is palpable.
“Listen, who would who would have thought [I would be here now]? So [I’m] super grateful…And I think the more that we can encourage grassroots football and not only Pakistan, but you know, these developing sporting countries, and providing that pathway [for girls and women to play football] because then you get the buy-in from the family. Because right now, if you go to a family here, in the Middle East or in Pakistan, they'll be like, ‘Okay, yeah, we're fine with our daughter playing and we're comfortable with her playing, but where's it going to take her? What can it provide for like, why sacrifice for education, if there's nothing tangible at the end of that, that she can work towards?’ So I think this is something that I'm really passionate about is how can we set up these pathways in these developing sporting countries?”
One imagines this is a project she will be involved with for a long time, but for the time being, Maria Khan is just getting started on the field.
My thanks to Bob Powell for inspiring and facilitating this profile.