Are Qatar any good at football?

Posted by Christie Applegate on Friday, May 24, 2024

The decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar was not, to say the least, a popular one.

The objections can generally be split into two categories. One is the moral argument, the idea that the World Cup should not be played in a country with an abominable human rights record and in which an estimated 6,500 migrant workers have died in the last decade, a number of them while constructing stadia for the tournament.

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The second was that this was a country with no football heritage, that the hosts of the World Cup would be a terrible team who had no sporting place being there. This will, after all, be the first World Cup to be hosted by a country that had never qualified for one before since Italy staged it in 1934.

The first argument still stands. The second, not so much.

Qatar are to face the Republic of Ireland and Portugal next week, and what Stephen Kenny and Cristiano Ron… sorry, Fernando Santos’s sides will discover in those two friendlies is an exciting, attacking team who play with a clear philosophy most the players involved have largely followed since their earliest days in the game.

Qatar, in short, are good. Potentially, really good.

Big-name foreigners are not new in Qatari football. Gabriel Batistuta, Sonny Anderson, Claudio Caniggia, Samuel Eto’o, Wesley Sneijder, Marcel Desailly, Juninho Pernambucano, Raul and, of course, Pep Guardiola have all plied their late-career trade there over the years.

Pep Guardiola, left, and Marcel Desailly played for Qatari clubs at the start of this century (Photo: Karim Jaafar/AFC files/AFP via Getty Images)

By comparison, the current crop are relatively modest in terms of star power. Toby Alderweireld signed for Al-Duhail last summer, Santi Cazorla won player of the year for his Al-Sadd performances last season and now has Andre Ayew alongside him. Erstwhile Leeds United loanee Pierre-Michel Lasogga plays for Al-Khor, Javi Martinez turns out for Qatar SC and James Rodriguez joined Al-Rayyan from Everton a couple of weeks ago.

The key difference is that in the past, those big names were signed because they were big names, all at the absolute tail-ends of their career, to be paraded around the league and be handsomely compensated. While those fat cheques may still be the primary motivation for the current crop of imports and none of the latter group are in the full flush of youth, they’re all generally players who could still cut it in top European leagues.

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The idea of the international names is less as the pseudo-vanity exercises of the past, more as talent to complement and improve the standard of the league, and by extension the “local” players, thus the national team. To the point that, arguably, the biggest stars — or at least the best players — in the Qatar Stars League (QSL) are Qatari. Or at least play for the Qatar national team (we’ll get to that in a bit).

As mentioned, Cazorla was player of the year last season, but in the two years before that it was Akram Afif, a buzzing left-sided forward who has drawn comparison to a right-footed Mohamed Salah. Watching him recently for Doha club Al-Sadd, the country’s biggest team and supplier of most players to the national team, it was impossible to take your eyes off him, the sort of player you watch even when he hasn’t got the ball, just to see what he might do next.

“There are no limits for him,” said Al-Sadd coach and Barcelona legend Xavi after Afif won the Asian Footballer of the Year award in 2019. “He’s an unbelievable talent, a big player. I have told him many times that he’s an amazing player. He can play everywhere (in the world). It depends on him: his mentality, his ambition because he has everything (required) to play football.”

Akram Afif is a key player for Al-Sadd and Qatar’s national team (Photo: Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

Not too far behind Afif is Almoez Ali, a centre-forward and natural goalscorer who captains Doha’s Al-Duhail. He scored nine times as Qatar won the 2019 Asian Cup, beating a record set by Ali Daei, until recently international men’s football’s record goalscorer, and this year became the first man to score at the Asian Cup, CONCACAF Gold Cup and the Copa America.

Then there’s the national team captain Hassan Al-Haydos, 30 years old and an Al-Sadd lifer, a smooth playmaker reminiscent of a right-footed, slightly more dynamic Mesut Ozil.

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Those foreign star names have undoubtedly been influential, but far more important in the development of the national team has been the Aspire Academy, essentially a lavishly-funded university for footballers and other sportspeople in Qatar set up in 2004. The best young talent from around the country is sent there from a young age, trained and taught and often sent out to one of the European clubs associated with/owned by Aspire (including Eupen in Belgium, Spain’s Cultural Leonesa and LASK in Austria).

The current chief football officer at the academy is Tim Cahill. “Without Aspire Academy, there’s no national team,” former Everton and Australia midfielder Cahill told football website Goal earlier this year. “The Qatar national team — they’re a unit. It’s unique to see players grow together, to see the chemistry and the leadership.”

Graduates from Aspire form the backbone of the national team. Most of the squad have passed through it at some stage, many of whom have come through and matured together; five of the starters in the 3-1 Asian Cup final win over Japan two years ago had played for the victorious Under-19s team in their age group’s version of the same competition in 2014.

While most countries like to think of their approach as joined up and thought through, this is surely the definition of big-picture planning, an entire system designed to create a national team that won’t embarrass the hosts at the 2022 World Cup.

And based on recent results, there’s little chance of that happening.

There were high hopes for Qatar going into the qualifying campaign for the 2018 World Cup. The team was stacked with members of what they hoped would be their golden generation, who had won the 2014 Under-19 Asian Championship under coach Felix Sanchez. The senior side had won the eight-nation Arabian Gulf Cup the same year. The prospect of actually reaching a major finals was real.

They sailed through their opening round with seven wins out of eight (admittedly not against the strongest opposition — in one game they beat Bhutan 15-0), but it all went south in the next phase when faced with proper teams: they won just two of their 10 games and finished bottom of the six-team group, five points adrift of second-last China, who they had beaten in the previous phase, and a whopping 15 behind table-topping Iran.

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Coach Jose Daniel Carreno was sacked after the terrible start to the second phase, then his replacement, fellow Uruguayan Jorge Fossati, resigned with two games of the campaign remaining. Successful under-19s coach Sanchez was promoted to the senior side, and since then things have gone pretty well.

At the 2019 Asian Cup in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar were few people’s favourites, in both a literal and betting sense.

The political situation between the UAE (and indeed, many countries in the region) and Qatar at the time was so tetchy that at one stage it looked doubtful they would even be allowed into the host country, and officials from the local organising committee refused to talk to their Qatari counterparts, instead employing intermediaries to pass on messages.

Sanchez used that to create the mother of all siege mentalities, which, combined with the coming of age of that under-19s side he led to glory five years earlier, propelled them through the tournament. They sashayed to winning the group, scoring 10 unanswered goals in their three games including a satisfying 2-0 win over Saudi Arabia, edged past Iraq by the only goal in the second round and then, shockingly, beat South Korea — Son Heung-min and all, and just six months after they’d knocked then-world champions Germany out of the World Cup — 1-0 in the quarter-finals.

That set up a potential diplomatic horror show of a semi-final, against the UAE.

The atmosphere was spicy: after Qatar scored their second goal, shoes rained down onto the pitch from the home fans (considered a grave insult in that part of the world), one of which struck Qatar midfielder Salem Al Hajri on the head.

Having to trudge home barefoot is one thing, but to do it after a 4-0 defeat to hated local rivals must have been especially stinging.

United Arab Emirates fans threw shoes in protest at their 4-0 2019 Asian Cup semi-final loss to local rivals Qatar (Photo: Zhizhao Wu/Getty Images)

Surely though, some local pride would be salvaged by Japan, who had won their previous three Asian Cups?

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Not so: Almoez Ali gave Qatar the lead in the final with a bicycle kick and Abdulaziz Hatem made it two before Akram Afif rounded off a 3-1 victory from the penalty spot seven minutes from time. This wasn’t quite a Greece at Euro 2004-level shock, but few saw it coming.

Four months later, Qatar also played as a guest at the Copa America, where they were beaten but not humiliated as they lost two games and drew one in a stinker of a group that featured Argentina, Colombia and Paraguay.

But in this summer’s Gold Cup, the European Championship/Copa America equivalent tournament for central and north American teams where they were also dropped in as a wildcard, they not only topped their group but made it to a semi-final against the USA. They dominated that match, missed a penalty with the game goalless after an hour and only lost thanks to a snatched late winner.

Qatar might be the least-experienced hosts of a World Cup, but they’re arguably the best drilled.

During a World Cup qualification cycle, most host teams would have no real structure to their games, a loose collection of friendlies designed to keep things ticking over. Qatar’s preparation has been much more official: in addition to their tour of guest spots in willing tournaments, they are essentially acting as a “shadow” team in Ireland’s five-team qualifying group: whichever nation is the odd one out on any given match day, Qatar shows up to fill the gap. They travel to face Portugal in Faro on Saturday, then are in Dublin next Tuesday.

It would be tough to argue that all of these guest places were offered from a position of warm-hearted altruism. If this was an inexperienced country without Qatar’s deep pockets, you suspect they would have been left to organise their own preparation.

For example, it probably wasn’t a coincidence that, a week before they faced the US in that Gold Cup semi-final, a sponsorship deal was announced that would see Qatar fund grassroots coaching schemes in each of CONCACAF’s 41 countries.

For all the success of Aspire and the young, local players, foreigners still retain a significant influence on Qatari football.

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Cahill took up his role at Aspire earlier this year, working under Ivan Bravo, once of Real Madrid. National-team manager Sanchez, who made his name as a Barcelona youth coach, has been around the Qatari scene since 2006, starting at the academy and coaching all of the country’s youth teams before his appointment to the top job in 2017.

Then there’s Xavi.

Watching his Al-Sadd team play, his influences are laid bare on the grass. Passes zip back and forth, positions are frequently swapped in what appears to be a remarkable 3-2-4-1 formation. Given Al-Sadd supplied 11 members of Qatar’s Gold Cup squad, it would be impossible for him not to heavily influence the national team. “I think he knows the team better than we do,” said Sanchez.

There is an acceptance that Xavi will leave at some point, presumably to rejoin Barcelona, but he will almost certainly go with the best wishes of most in Qatar.

Xavi is taking his first steps in management with Qatar’s Al-Sadd (Photo: Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images)

And then there’s the national team itself.

There was a time when you would have to squint to find many Qatar-born players in the squad. For a long time, their record appearance-maker was Sebastian Soria, a Uruguayan who moved to Qatar in 2004 and was rapidly naturalised. Rodrigo Tabata was another, a Brazilian journeyman who rocked up at Al-Rayyan in 2011, became naturalised and went on to win 18 caps but not before attempting to obtain a Japanese passport.

This has become less brazen, but it’s still worth pointing out that nine of the Gold Cup squad were born outside Qatar.

Some of those, like Almoez Ali, who came from Sudan at a young age, aren’t exactly cynical blow-ins, but others like the Portuguese-born Pedro Miguel — known as Ro-Ro — who came to play in the QSL in 2011 and was eventually awarded citizenship. The reliance on naturalised players is lessening, but they clearly have a significant influence.

In 2011, when Sepp Blatter shocked the world by announcing next year’s World Cup would be held in Qatar, their national team was 113th in the FIFA rankings and regarded as a joke, an uncompetitive embarrassment in the pipeline.

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Yet that Gold Cup semi this summer helped them achieve their highest ever FIFA ranking of 42nd, putting them ahead of Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Erling Haaland’s Norway, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Egypt.

The thought of FIFA’s great jamboree taking place in a country of Qatar’s reputation is, at best, unpalatable, at worst morally repugnant.

But like it or not, on the pitch, Qatar could surprise some people next November.

(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)

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