The complex, which took thousands of workers two years to build, also includes upscale dorm rooms to house athletes and classrooms where they attend school. It cost a reported $1.3 billion, almost twice what Arsenal paid to build its 60,000-seat Emirates Stadium in London at about the same time. Over the years, the Aspire complex has grown to include two five-star hotels, one of which looks like a giant torch; a top sports science hospital; a 40,000-seat stadium; a luxury mall; and six outdoor soccer fields. The green spaces and running trails that surround the complex make Aspire a welcome oasis amid the sand, asphalt, and concrete that make up much of Doha’s landscape. Speakers across the campus even pipe in the sounds of birds chirping throughout the day.
A youth team from Manchester City playing a match at Aspire in Doha, with the academy’s massive dome and the five-star Torch hotel looming in the background.
The first time Diawandou walked into Aspire’s dome, he decided that even if he wasn’t one of the players chosen to train at the academy, he wanted to be buried there. “I looked up and thought, ‘This is amazing!’ ” said Diawandou. “I never saw anything like this in my life. This facility, if you don’t play football here, you need to die here!”
Diawandou wasn’t alone. All the Football Dreams kids found the scene that greeted them in Doha to be mesmerizing. Their first glimpse came as they descended into the city’s airport. Below them, a forest of ultramodern skyscrapers blanketed the coastline. The buildings’ curved lines and varied geometric forms make them look like some sort of giant urban art installation. At night, they’re lit up like Las Vegas with flashing red, blue, and gold lights. For the kids, it was like staring into the future, a sensation both wonderful and disorienting. Doha often had that effect, even on Qatar’s own citizens, especially the ones who were old enough to remember what the country looked like only a few generations earlier. Back then, it was nothing more than an impoverished patch of desert dotted with crumbling mud homes that had no plumbing or electricity and very little access to fresh water. The leap from that to one of the richest countries in the world had occurred in a historical blink of an eye.
Modern-day Qatar, a finger of sand jutting into the Persian Gulf, didn’t even have permanent settlements until well into the nineteenth century. The country’s future rulers migrated from the vast central desert area of what is now Saudi Arabia. Qatar was technically under control of the Ottoman Empire until the early twentieth century, but it was a restless territory, and the Ottomans vied with the British for influence in the region. Pirates holed up in Doha regularly attacked ships in the Gulf, angering the Brits, who bombarded the town in retaliation. Despite these periodic disputes, the local ruler signed a treaty with Britain in 1916 that placed Qatar under the country’s protection.
But life for Qatar’s small population was difficult. There were only about 20,000 people in the country toward the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them lived in modern-day Doha on the peninsula’s eastern coast. They relied on pearling or fishing to make a living. Large wooden boats with high, V-shaped hulls lined the beach in town. Their edges had distinctive grooves worn by the ropes pearl divers tied around their waists before jumping in the water. It was tough work and not very profitable.
The locals lived in small, dingy mud homes huddled closely together on narrow, winding dirt alleyways. They fetched water from brackish wells in the desert using bags made out of goatskin. The center of activity in Doha was the marketplace, Souq Waqif, where fishermen went to sell their catch. Bedouins who lived in the desert also came to the market to buy and sell camels, as well as camel hair carpets and blankets.
Life got even tougher in the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese perfected the ability to grow cultured pearls, and the bottom fell out of the market. The worldwide economic depression that struck at about the same time made matters even worse. These were the “years of hunger” that the oldest Qataris still remember. Poverty forced many people to leave the peninsula or live in dire conditions. Even Qatar’s ruler at the time struggled. He was forced to take out a mortgage on his house in 1935 to cover a debt of 17,000 Indian rupees. But the country’s fortunes were about to shift.
Qatar signed its first oil concession later that same year with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Workers finally struck crude in 1939, but the country didn’t begin exports until 10 years later because of World War II. The pace of change was slow at first. People in Doha still didn’t have electricity, telephones, or adequate clean water in the early 1950s. The weekly plane that brought the mail often didn’t bother to land. It would circle two or three times and drop its load by parachute. Even when the mail did come, there were only about 600 Qataris who could read. But the oil money eventually began to have an impact. The country built roads, schools, and a desalination plant to produce clean water. It also said goodbye to the British when it declared independence in 1971.
But it wasn’t oil that drove Qatar’s dizzying transformation from a penniless backwater to a nation of mind-boggling wealth. It was natural gas. Qatar’s oil reserves aren’t that big compared to many of its Gulf neighbors. But the country does have the third largest natural gas reserves in the world, enough to heat all U.S. homes for more than a century. Most of that gas is located in one large field off Qatar’s northeastern coast that covers an area nearly the size of the country itself. It shares the field with neighboring Iran. The winds of change really picked up speed in the 1990s when Qatar began to export liquefied natural gas. Its largest tankers are each the size of an aircraft carrier and can hold enough gas to heat every home in the United Kingdom for a day. Those shipments made Qatar the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world and sent the nation’s wealth soaring.
Qatar’s oil and gas sales regularly generate over $100 billion a year, a significant amount given the country only has a population of about 2 million people. Its average income per person (GDP per capita) is around $100,000, one of the highest in the world. That’s close to double U.S. GDP per capita and over a hundred times greater than the level in many of the African countries targeted by Football Dreams. But GDP per capita doesn’t really capture Qatar’s true level of wealth because the state only has about 300,000 citizens. The rest of the population is mostly composed of poor migrant laborers who hardly receive any state benefits. Qatar’s GDP per citizen is closer to $700,000. That’s over 10 times higher than the equivalent figure in the U.S. Qatar’s staggering leap in wealth prompted the U.S. Embassy in Doha to write a cable in 2008 saying, “Qatar will soon—literally—have more money than it knows what to do with.”
That wealth has transformed Doha. Gone are the crumbling mud homes of pearl divers that once dotted the city’s coastline. Gleaming skyscrapers now stand in their place, and construction cranes, ready to build more, poke their skinny heads into the sky across the city. The towers rise on the backs of South Asian men who often live and work in terrible conditions. They’re filled with white-collar workers from the United States and Europe who are responsible for building the country’s foundations in a different way. As for the Qataris themselves, the country’s cradle-to-grave welfare system means they don’t have to work that hard at all.
Outside the city’s skyscraper forest, Doha feels like a rambling ode to poured concrete. Vast gated communities catering to white-collar expats are filled with identikit, two-story villas. Those owned by Qataris are often three or four times larger and are built with elaborate facades. Fleets of white Toyota Land Cruisers, the Qatari vehicle of choice, dominate Doha’s notoriously clogged streets. Ferraris and Maseratis are popular as well. They buzz between opulent five-star hotels and palatial malls filled with stores like Gucci and Valentino. In fact, much of the city feels like a duty-free shop in a modern airport. Luxury brands, a nice display, but a bit soulless.
Even the parts of the city that are supposed to look old are new, like Souq Waqif. The government completely renovated the market so it looks historic but posh. A group of men in traditional Arab dress are paid
to ride white horses back and forth through the souq, past patrons sipping tea and smoking shisha at outdoor tables. It may seem artificial, but it’s certainly better than the real version of that life Qataris were living only a few decades earlier. The locals definitely aren’t hungry and scrounging for pearls anymore. They’re buying them.
Qatar’s newfound riches have dramatically transformed its place in the world as well. People used to joke that the country was best known for not being known at all. But the emir who presided over Qatar’s massive increase in wealth, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, wanted to change that and spent billions of dollars to raise the country’s global profile. One of the first things he did was launch Al Jazeera in 1996, and it quickly became the most important news service in the Arab world. Qatar also engaged in a flurry of international mediation efforts in places like Libya, Lebanon, and Yemen; snapped up some of the world’s most iconic businesses and valuable real estate, like Harrods department store in London and Europe’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard; and became one of the world’s biggest buyers of art, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on works by major artists ranging from Paul Cézanne to Damien Hirst.
These were certainly effective ways to attract attention, but media, politics, business, and the arts weren’t enough. What Qatar’s rulers truly craved was success in the world’s most popular game. Soccer offered a route to market the country to billions of people around the globe in a way that could transcend differences in politics, culture, and religion. In fact, to many people, the sport is a religion. It offers its own culture, and the only politics that matter are which team you support. Qatar’s rulers knew that if the country could make a splash in international soccer, the rest of the world was bound to stand up and take notice. Aspire Academy and Football Dreams fit squarely into that vision.
Aspire was the brainchild of one of Qatar’s richest and most powerful men, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, son of the emir who had transformed the country. Sheikh Jassim was slated to follow in his father’s footsteps, but the two couldn’t have been more different, even down to their looks. A portly mountain of a man with a bushy black mustache, Sheikh Hamad looked as much like the Hollywood version of a powerful Arab ruler as his son did the dashing young prince. Sheikh Jassim’s square jaw, perfectly trimmed beard, and tall, slim figure gave him movie-star looks. Also, unlike his father, the reserved, soft-spoken sheikh didn’t want to spend his time tending to matters of state. Soccer, not politics, was his true passion. He renounced the throne in 2003 at the age of 24 and threw himself into the game in a way few others could.
There’s a story told in Doha that illustrates just how passionate Sheikh Jassim is about soccer. He was battling insomnia several years ago and summoned a doctor to the palace. When the doctor arrived, the reason for his lack of sleep was immediately clear: rows of television sets covering the wall, all tuned to soccer day and night. The doctor told him to turn off the televisions and his insomnia would be cured. The story might be complete fiction, but the fact that it’s told at all is revealing.
Sheikh Jassim (center) and his father, Sheikh Hamad (left), standing before a soccer match in Doha.
Sheikh Jassim didn’t just watch soccer. He played as well, and not just anywhere. He had a private, perfectly manicured pitch hidden away within the royal palace complex in Doha. The field is regulation size but seems small compared to the palaces around it. At least a half dozen of them are set amid elaborate gardens filled with palm trees and trickling fountains. Elegant horseshoe arches typical of Islamic architecture grace the palace facades. Inside, ornate Persian carpets and oversized crystal chandeliers fill cavernous rooms the size of tennis courts. Paintings by Manet and Chagall hang on the walls. Servants attired in traditional white robes and headdresses attend to the royals and their guests. They serve lobsters the size of small dogs and tea out of gracefully curved, golden pots.
Sheikh Jassim was used to this kind of luxury. Qatar’s oil and gas riches meant he had more money than he could likely spend in a lifetime. The emir enjoys absolute control in the country, and there’s no real difference between his family’s bank account and the state treasury. “Qatar is a family business with a seat at the United Nations,” a former U.S. ambassador once said. But Sheikh Jassim didn’t have the one thing he truly wanted: a national soccer team that could compete on the international stage. Qatar had never qualified for a World Cup, and he wanted to change that. The odds were definitely against him. No state with so few citizens had ever made it to the tournament.
Qatar didn’t have much soccer history either. Foreign oil workers first brought the sport to the country in the late 1940s. They played in the sand near the western city of Dukhan, where the first well was located, and reportedly used oil to line the field. The country officially started its league in 1973, but relatively few Qataris played. Soccer had to compete with traditional sports like camel racing and falconry. Many players in the league were from other Middle Eastern countries and the Indian subcontinent, definitely not soccer powerhouses. Over time, soccer became the most popular sport in the country, but that mainly meant locals watching European games on TV. There were still relatively few Qataris who played or watched the country’s mediocre clubs. These teams often competed in front of a couple hundred fans in gleaming stadiums built for much larger crowds, even after the government pumped millions of dollars into the league in the early 2000s to attract aging stars like Pep Guardiola, the former captain of Barcelona who would go on to become the club’s most successful coach in history.
These certainly weren’t the ingredients to produce a world-class Qatari soccer team. But the country did have plenty of cash. Could it simply buy one? Qatar certainly tried. The nation offered three Brazilian players reportedly more than a million dollars in 2004 to play for Qatar in the 2006 World Cup. All three played in Germany, and one was the top scorer in the Bundesliga at the time. None had previous connections with Qatar. The move prompted a rebuke from FIFA and caused the organization to tighten its rules on players switching nationalities. But that didn’t stop Qatar from naturalizing players. When the country surprisingly won the 2006 Asian Games, its best players were a Uruguayan striker, a Senegalese defender, and a Senegalese goalkeeper.
But Sheikh Jassim had a different idea. Could Qatar train its own world-class soccer players by building a state-of-the-art academy and recruiting the best coaches and sports scientists? There were certainly significant obstacles. Qatar’s local population is not only one of the smallest in the world, it’s also one of the most overweight. Nearly half of Qatari adults and adolescents are obese, according to government studies. Physical activity is often kept to a minimum, with servants catering to their every need and Toyota Land Cruisers whisking them wherever they need to go. Qatar’s lack of soccer culture didn’t help either. Many boys in Argentina grow up dreaming of becoming Messi. It wasn’t the same in Qatar. Becoming a professional soccer player in the country wasn’t seen as very glamorous.
None of this deterred Sheikh Jassim. He had billions to spend and wanted to see how far that could take him. The sheikh also wanted his academy to capture the world’s attention. Money could certainly do that. For the international launch of Aspire in 2005, the academy hired Cirque du Soleil acrobats, kung fu fighting Shaolin monks, and two of the greatest soccer players in history, Pelé and Diego Maradona. They put on a show for Qatar’s royal family and 120 international journalists under Aspire’s massive air-conditioned dome. Not surprisingly, headlines followed. The organizers even handed out $15,000 gold medals to VIP guests that were designed by the French mint that makes the ones for the Olympics.
But splashing out cash on eye-catching buildings, celebrity guests, and pricey mementos was the easy part. Now Aspire somehow had to produce a world-class soccer team. A big part of that challenge fell to Andreas Bleicher, a steely, angular German with a buzz cut who was hired as Aspire’s sports director. He was responsible for sports science and talent identification, amon
g other things. Before joining Aspire, Bleicher worked as a director at the German Sport University in Cologne and at one of the country’s Olympic training centers.
One of his first tasks at Aspire was trying to figure out just how much young soccer talent there was in Qatar, so he held tryouts for basically every young boy in the country. At least that’s one benefit of Qatar’s size. They could test everyone. There were only a few thousand boys in each class at school, and only a little over 2,000 registered soccer players in the whole country. That’s the equivalent of a few Manhattan city blocks. Slim pickings.
Not surprisingly, Bleicher only found a small handful of Qatari kids in each age group who he thought had the potential to become decent national players in the future. That wasn’t good enough because those players weren’t challenged by the other kids their age, thus stunting their development. They also lacked the motivation to work hard since they were better than everyone else. Imagine young Messi trying to develop into a world-class player by only competing against kids his age on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, and you get the idea. Bleicher tried to address the problem by inviting top youth teams from around the world, like Arsenal and Ajax, to play against the Qataris, but that wasn’t enough because the competition was intermittent.
Bleicher realized he needed a larger pool of players if Sheikh Jassim’s multibillion-dollar experiment was going to work. “We thought it would be better to increase the quality by integrating better players with very high motivation and the ability to be role models for our kids,” said Bleicher. They could bring the players to Aspire on scholarships, and they would provide the kind of competition the Qataris needed to improve.
The Away Game Page 8