“Welcome to FIFA, welcome to Qatar! We love you, oh our country, Qatar!”boys with the flags of the countries participating in the World Cup sing in English and Arabic, in small boats that sail through one of the artificial rivers of the new district of Qanat, north of Doha.
It is over 36 degrees, the humidity is above 60%, but nothing stops them. Apart from these young people who are trying to make a video for D-Day, there is not a single cat on the streets of the capital, apart from, as every day, the migrant construction workers.
In these climatic conditions, all that remains is to ask: how can you do outdoor sports, and in this case football in the middle of the desert? Football is as much a part of Qatari culture as camel racing or it’s just a possibility?
football is sacred
In Doha cafes, talking to taxi drivers or doormen in shopping malls, everyone is unanimous: here football is sacred.
“We watch all the games in all leagues,” exclaims Richard, a native of Ghana. “And Qatar certainly is the best team in the Arabian Peninsula“adds Ahmad, a 22-year-old Indian who has become very” patriotic. “Men or women, young or old, the round ball seems to be the unanimous choice.
Effect of the World Cup? It seems not, since the stadiums are constantly fullaccording to fans, and the matches “Al derby” and “Al klasiko” between the biggest clubs in the country fascinate the Qatari.
there is also a women’s team, although not very popular with Qatari conservatives. In the cafes and hotels of the capital, the main foreign football leagues are projected on giant screens.
“There is a passion for football in Qatar,” says Raphaël Le Magoariec, PhD student of the Arab and Mediterranean World Team (EMAM) of the University of Tours and researcher of sports policies in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. A culture and a passion certainly more recent than in other countries, but that has a story.
Immigrants are the spearhead of Qatari football.
It was in the late 1940s, at the beginning of the development of the oil industry, that football made its appearance in the small emirate, with the arrival of foreign workers from the Arab world (including many Egyptians), where football was already very gift.
The interactions between these workers have made Qatar interested in football. Thanks to oil revenues, football could be institutionalizedespecially when the country became independent in 1971.
“Sport is an opportunity for gather around the figure of the emir“, stresses Raphaël Le Magoariec. And since the 1980s, the Qatar team recorded its first” successes “on the international scene, in particular against France at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (2-2).
“There was great progress in the 1990s. The population got rich, shopping malls appeared and the sport was less interesting. The Emir’s father then decided to speed things up to become more powerful, “continues the researcher.
Some members of the ruling family began to do this inject some of their wealth into local clubs. It was also during this period that the Aspire Academya gigantic training center in turn directed by big names in world football, which fi would love the players from all over the world naturalized based on their performance (i 90% of the Qatari population is foreign).
This selection program has also been extended to Africa, Latin America and Asia. Qatar football has become more and more attractive. Former Paris Saint-Germain manager Laurent Blanc was appointed manager of Al-Rayyan from December 2020 to February 2022; in 2019, Qatar won the Asian Cup thanks to your selection overtrained.
a symbol of identity
Although sport, and in particular football, has been a tool of the emirate’s soft power since the 1990s, it remains a “very popular symbol of identity”, adds Raphaël Le Magoariec.
“There is also a question of ego on football, especially during the 2017 embargo (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed an economic and diplomatic embargo on Qatar for three and a half years, judged, among other things, too close to Iran and accused to support the Muslim Brotherhood).
Calcium was therefore used as an element to structure a nationalism, a concept that was not intrinsic to this society, “he points out.
Residents of the small emirate love to criticize Qatar, claiming that its players are naturalized, Sudanese, Yemenites, Egyptians, etc.
“There is this game of denouncing naturalizations because Qatar annoys its neighbors by being at the forefront of football“, indicates the researcher. And this despite Saudi Arabia is increasingly striving to get closer to its rival Qatar, for example by creating its own sports academy on the model of the one in Doha.
Dressed in her traditional abaya, involved in the Bayern game, Houda takes out her phone and comments on her photos: “This is fromin September inauguration of the Lusail Stadium! Look how we are all united! We all wear the national team jersey. It was magical. here football it is more than a passionIt is part of our life “, he exclaims.
And the young Qatari, not a little proud, recognizes that she is a privileged one: she will attend three World Cup matches with the jersey of her national team, regardless of what she gets.
Qatar, special envoy of RFI
Source: Clarin
