It doesn’t really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened

Soccer players aren’t generally known for their fighting prowess, but that’s not stopping SNK from adding famed footballer Cristiano Ronaldo to the lineup of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, the latest addition to the long-running Fatal Fury series of fighting games.

“One of the top football players in the world,” Ronaldo’s character page states. “He uses his time off to visit South Town to hone his new football skills. The various techniques he has developed playing football make him an unstoppable force, even to seasoned fighters.” He cherishes football and family, according to the page, and his fighting style, you’ll be not at all surprised to hear, is a blend of martial arts and football.

You might be wondering why exactly a real-world soccer player is being added to a game whose cast is otherwise made up of more conventional fighting game semi-superheroes with handles like Rock Howard, Vox Reaper, Tizoc, and Kain R. Heinlein. The short answer is, I don’t know. If it had been Vinnie Jones, okay, maybe, but Ronaldo? I don’t see it.

But there are some interesting connections between the seemingly disparate pieces. The Fatal Fury games are developed by SNK, a Japanese gaming company founded in 1987 that’s now almost entirely owned by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman through the Electronic Games Development Company, a part of the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation.

Bin Salman, who you may recall has been credibly accused of ordering the murder of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, has interests in a multitude of gaming companies, primarily through the Savvy Games Group, a division of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, of which he is the chairman. So that’s not especially noteworthy on its own.

But Ronaldo himself also has big money ties to Saudi Arabia. In 2022, he signed a deal worth roughly $200 million per year to play for Al Nassr FC, a Riyadh-based soccer team that’s 75% owned by the Public Investment fund—the one headed up by bin Salman.

All of this is public record stuff, so while I’m not exactly keen on what it says about the consequences of putting too much money in the hands of too few people (particularly people who head up regimes notorious for human rights abuses), I can’t say there’s anything especially dark or nefarious going on here. But I do have to wonder if this is a case where the boss said “we’re doing it” and that was the end of the conversation. After all, if a guy basically owns Ronaldo and Fatal Fury, he can mash them up pretty much however he wants and nobody’s going to tell him no.

Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is set to launch on April 24 on Steam and the Epic Games Store. An open beta test is also scheduled to kick off at 10 pm PT on March 26—that’s today—and run until March 31.