Trees and treelike structures in dense digraphs

We prove that every oriented tree on $n$ vertices with bounded maximum degree appears as a spanning subdigraph of every directed graph on $n$ vertices with minimum semidegree at least $n\mathrm{/}2+o(n)$. This can be seen as a directed graph analogue of a well-known theorem of Koml'os, S'ark"ozy and Szemer'edi. Our result for trees follows from a more general result, allowing the embedding of arbitrary orientations of a much wider class of spanning ``tree-like’’ structures, such as collections of at most $O(n^{0.99})$ pairwise vertex-disjoint cycles and subdivisions of graphs $H$ with $\mathrm{\mid }H\mathrm{\mid }<\exp (\sqrt{O(\log n)})$ in which each edge is subdivided at least once.