Ivan Toney has insisted the Saudi Pro League is on a par with the Premier League, claiming Al-Ahli would be 'close to the top four' if they played in England. The striker, who moved from Brentford to Jeddah just over a year ago, scored 23 league goals last season and won the Asian Champions League with his club.
Toney, 28, was left out of England's squad for the recent World Cup qualifiers against Andorra and Serbia, adding only one cap since his transfer. 'Those that know me know that I do what I want to do,' he said. 'If people want to talk, they can talk. It doesn't hurt me.'
The forward acknowledged the challenge of playing in extreme heat, describing it as 'playing in a sauna'. He said: 'You have to play a different game with different tactics. There are different blocks of 20 minutes where it is intense and then it has to slow down.'
Toney finished second in the league scoring charts behind Cristiano Ronaldo, with 23 goals. 'Once I got going, the goals came,' he said. 'I felt like I could have scored a lot more, but finishing second-top scorer in my first season somewhere completely new is an achievement.'
He defended the league's standard, pointing to Al-Hilal's 4-3 win over Manchester City at the Club World Cup. 'I was going to tweet, but I would have got killed back home so I kept my mouth shut,' he said. 'But people saw the quality of Hilal. The standard in Saudi Arabia is high.'
Toney started this season with a goal against Neom and a hat-trick in the King's Cup. Al-Ahli finished fifth in the league last term but won the Asian Champions League in May, beating Kawasaki Frontale in the final in front of more than 60,000 fans in Jeddah.
