The prestigious football school does not pay (yet) in Qatar: the fata morgana round of 16

Hardly anyone expected anything from Qatar. Yet their early elimination from the World Cup after defeats to Ecuador and Senegal in the group stage looks disappointing. Especially for Qatar. The round of 16 turned out to be a mirage.

Now the Oranges are waiting for Tuesday night. A chance to save honor and show what a high-tech soccer academy and secret training camps are worth. Because the two great stars of Qatar, Akram Afif and Almoez Ali, sons of the Qatari football culture, trained at the prestigious Aspire Academy, did not shine.

As ten and thirteen year olds, Ali and Afif find themselves in Aspire’s state-of-the-art training environment. The development of national top scorer Ali is symbolic of the Aspire project.

Born in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, Ali moved to Qatar with his parents as a child. He learns to play football there and receives Qatari nationality. At the age of ten he secured a place in the luxurious Doha football school, established by decree of the emir in 2004.

“Life is hard,” says Fouad el Fdil, born and raised in Breda, who worked for years in Qatar, as a youth coach at Aspire and later as sports director at Al-Gharafa. Football training is nothing more than training, going to school, eating and sleeping, explains El Fdil. Some guys spend the night internally, others just stay at home.

Check out the Aspire Academy here. El Fdil explains how it works:

After years of bivouac at the luxury academy in Doha, 18-year-old Ali is sent to one of the satellite clubs in Europe by the high lords of Aspire. At the Belgian KAS Eupen, on the border with Germany. Growing football personality, he calls her El Fdil.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Eupen? You don’t go there for fun. You come to a small city, where they don’t have the comfort and luxury you have in Doha. You are challenged.”

Ali fails to break through in Eupen. He is still moving on to Austrian LASK and the Spanish second division, returning at the age of 20 to the club where he now plays in Qatar, Al-Duhail.

The European football dream of his partner Afif – according to El Fdil “the taste maker, a bit the Memphis Depay of Qatar” – is going a little better. After also a season at Eupen, the 20-year-old Afif leaves for Villarreal. The Spanish sub-topper immediately lends him to Gijon, after which Afif returns to Qatar via Eupen, from his current employer Al-Sadd.

In Qatar, Ali and Afif, now both 26, build stable careers as professional footballers and become leading figures in the national team.

El Fdil, captured by Aspire in 2013 after twelve years of service with the KNVB, has experienced much of the current Qatari selection up close when the men were still boys.

“The core of the team is made up of players who come from the Aspire Academy,” says El Fdil. “From the Under-16s they grew up to the national team. It’s unique. They’ve been playing together for a long time.” Eighteen internationals learned to play football during training in Doha.

The players also know each other from the national competition, the Qatar Stars League (QSL). A competition in which no dog is in the stands every week. Let this, according to national coach Félix Sánchez, be one of the reasons for the failure of the World Cup. “Perhaps the nerves have betrayed us.”

The pressure is – or was – immense, El Fdil stresses. “These kids, who normally play in empty stadiums, are under tension. They have been facilitated in every way for optimal preparation.”

Even the Qatar Football Federation predicted that the level would take some getting used to. And so they packed their bags for an absurd preparation. Since June, the union has asked all internationals and left for six months in a mysterious training camp.

See how Qatar’s secret preparation for the World Cup went here:

With a little imagination it can even be said that the preparation for the World Cup already began in 2006, when Sánchez, then coach of the Barcelona youth team, was brought to the Aspire Academy and placed in charge of a group of young players . Sánchez grew up alongside the talented generation of Ali and Afif.

If Qatar wins the World Cup in 2010, the development of football will accelerate, says El Fdil. The Aspire Academy is modernizing even further, all in order to present Qatari football to the world in the best possible way when the World Cup kicks off twelve years later.

“In 2014, the under-19 became the champion of Asia. That’s when everyone started believing in the Aspire Academy model.” In 2019, hopes grow even higher when Qatar wins the Asian Cup, following victories against World Cup participants Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Japan.

Now that it seems that Qatar cannot impress on the highest stage and Aspire has not delivered world stars, the question arises whether the whole project has not completely failed.

“The training center has never had the goal of raising funds, but it wants to demonstrate that the model has worked well for Qatar and can be an example for other countries,” says El Fdil.

The question remains whether the emir still wants to invest money in the football project once the World Cup is over and the spotlights of the football world will no longer be focused on Qatar.

“There are still well-educated generations who will compete in Asia for prizes,” El Fdil says. “But what comes next will have less. It will never be like it was between 2010 and 2022.”