The Aspire Academy in Doha is sport development perfection. It has the largest indoor football dome in the world that contains a Fifa-approved pitch with special seating for 230 VIPs.
The blurb on the website lists five sports science labs that focus on biochemistry, altitude, physiology, biomechanics and anthropometry – if you didn’t have to look up the last one you win a prize.
It has corporate suites and two hotels, one boutique and the other high-end and shaped like a torch. This is the product of extreme wealth meeting impatient ambition, a training ground for the Stepford Wives First XI.
Qatar’s off-field preparations for the World Cup have been dogged by controversy. They began with practical concerns, the extreme heat of summer forcing the tournament to be moved to a winter schedule once the nonsensical rumours about manufactured clouds had gone quiet.
It continued with accusations of corruption; of the 22-man Fifa ExCo that voted on the tournament, 10 have been banned or are serving bans for breaches of ethics codes and at least four more face similar accusations.
Finally came the human rights concerns, particularly regarding the treatment of migrant workers and the LGBTQ+ community.
While Qatar continued to flat-bat those concerns, they worked on creating a team that could compete. And they have realised that dream. Qatar won the Asian Cup for the first time in 2019, beating South Korea and Japan en route.
They will not be the lowest-ranked host nation (South Africa keep that honour). They are highly unlikely to be the lowest-ranked nation in 2022 (one of Panama or New Zealand will almost certainly qualify).
Qatar have enjoyed benefits that – shall we say delicately – might not have been available to other World Cup hosts from non-elite football nations. They were invited to join Uefa qualifying as a ghost team in the Republic of Ireland’s group, playing each opponent but not listed in the table.
They played in the 2019 Copa America months after Qatar Airways was named as a major sponsor of Conmebol, the South American confederation. They competed in the Gold Cup in 2021 and reached the semi-finals and Concacaf too signed up Qatar Airways as a principal sponsor.
In the last three years alone, Qatar have participated in competitions in four of Fifa’s six regions. They have played 22 matches in 2021 – as many as teams play in the Qatari league – and played 25 between December 2018 and December 2019. Ahead of a maiden World Cup, that helps. They have created a close-knit group with vast experience of what will come.
But everything begins and ends with the Aspire Academy. Seventy per cent of that Asian Cup-winning squad were developed inside the boundaries of this glittering palace, built at a cost of $1.4bn. So too was Felix Sanchez, the mastermind of Qatar’s rise.
Previously a youth coach at Barcelona’s La Masia academy, Sanchez moved to Doha and Aspire at the age of 30 in 2006. After seven years spent developing a new generation of youth player, he became Qatar’s Under-19 coach to stay with them.
So the pathway forms: Under-19 to Under-20, Under-20 to Under-23, Under-23 to the national team, where he has been in place since 2017.
Aspire’s influence extends far beyond Doha. Take the example of Almoez Ali, Qatar’s star striker. He spent seven years at Aspire, that time mirroring Sanchez’s own tenure there as a coach. He then moved to Eupen in Belgium, Lask in Austria and Cultural Leonesa in Spain – two of those clubs are majority-owned by Qatar Aspire Zone Foundation and the other (Lask) has established links.
If Aspire is a centre of development, a factory tasked with super-charging Qatar’s national team ahead of the World Cup, much of its future success will lie in scouting. Qatar lacked the climate, population and football infrastructure to develop players quickly enough to match ambition. It didn’t lack the money.
