Seeking Soccer Respect, Qatar Looked Abroad
A two-part series examining Qatar’s pursuit to become a global soccer power.
By STEVE EDER, SAM BORDEN, CHRISTOPHER HARRESS and JACK WILLIAMSJULY 14, 2014
DOHA, Qatar — A little more than a decade ago, Andreas Bleicher, then a director of one of Germany’s Olympic training centers, arrived in the tiny gulf nation of Qatar, wooed there by its royal family to help turn the hopeless national soccer program into something worthy of the world’s respect.
There were plenty of reasons this would be difficult — the country hardly has a tradition of soccer excellence, and its record of producing premier athletes in any sport is sparse. But there was one problem that seemed insurmountable.
With a native population of only 300,000, Qatar simply did not have enough young players to form a team that could hope to compete with the likes of Brazil, Argentina and Germany.
“We were trying to build a national program with a talent pool the size of one you might find in a small United States city,” Bleicher said.
One of his early hires was Josep Colomer, a former youth scout for F.C. Barcelona generally credited with discovering Lionel Messi, perhaps the best soccer player in the world, when Messi was a boy in Argentina.
The possibilities were tantalizing. What if Qatar could send expert scouts throughout Africa on a mission to identify young, talented boys and offer them scholarships to come train at Qatar’s Aspire Academy, the new, glimmering sports institute that was bankrolled by the royal family?
From that simple premise unspooled a wildly ambitious plan that reached from the dusty fields of Senegal and Kenya to the cloistered royal palaces of Qatar to a rundown stadium in a sleepy corner of rural Belgium.
Let other countries start small. In the first year alone, Qatar screened nearly 430,000 boys in 595 locations across seven African countries. More than seven years later, Aspire has screened 3.5 million young athletes across three continents and cherry-picked the most promising boys for odysseys that have spanned the globe.
The program has taken Samuel Asamoah from Ghana to Qatar to Senegal to Belgium, where the royal family purchased a lower-level team as a strategic outpost to develop its players (far) away from the spotlight. It has taken Anthony Bassey from Uyo, Nigeria, on a similar journey. The program’s limitless scale is in keeping with Qatar’s broader desires to establish itself as a major player in all of its pursuits.
The Qatari government — and, more important, the royal family — is determined to use the country’s immense natural gas and oil wealth to elevate its international standing overnight in the realms of architecture, commerce, culture, education, and sports. There is even a formal plan, Qatar National Vision 2030, which pledges that the country will become “an advanced society” within 16 years.
Continue reading the main story Those ambitions are on display across Doha: Six American universities are housed on a sprawling compound known as Education City; the I. M. Pei-designed art museum rivals the Jean Nouvel-designed history museum; and more construction is everywhere, much of it overseen by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy.
A Soccer Deadline
As for its soccer ambitions, Qatar has a deadline to deliver a team that looks as if it belongs on the world stage: the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar will host.
When Qatar won its 2010 bid to host that tournament — a process tainted by accusations of rampant bribery — it earned the host’s privilege of an automatic berth at the games.
It will most likely be Qatar’s debut in the World Cup. The Maroon, as the team is known, sits at 100th place in the latest world rankings, between Zimbabwe and Moldova.
When Qatar hosts the World Cup in eight years, its standards for success will be far different from the tournament that ended Sunday in Rio de Janeiro with Germany defeating Argentina, 1-0, in extra time for the championship. Brazilian leaders are thrilled that the tournament went off without a major incident — no stadiums collapsed, no riots marred the games.
When the world’s attention turns to distant Qatar in 2022, the royal family wants to inspire nothing less than utter astonishment. Providing premier stadiums and unrivaled spectacle will be easy — that just costs money, of which Qatar has plenty.
Far more difficult will be fielding a credible national soccer team. So what is a royal family with unlimited resources to do?
Cue the African teenagers.
Bleicher and Colomer insist they have sought out the best young African athletes as a way to provide high-level competition for Qatari boys, and not, they maintain, so that African players can suit up en masse for Qatar’s national team. But there remains a possibility, albeit a remote one, that some African players could represent Qatar in 2022.
“Could it happen?” Bleicher said. “I suppose maybe some of the players feel like they would want to represent Qatar, because Qatar helped them when their home countries did not.”
But naturalization rules make it difficult — requiring players to live in the country for five continuous years after age 18. Bleicher said he believes it is more likely that the African athletes end up representing their native countries, where their success would then reflect back on Qatar and its training program. A number of the boys have already played for their home nations. “If we naturalize a few players, what will happen?” Bleicher said. “Everyone will kill us. Everyone will see. We are not stupid, and neither is anyone else.” Critics, though, have long been skeptical of Aspire Football Dreams, the name of the international recruitment program.
Some believe Qatar will ultimately attempt to naturalize some of the boys. Others have suggested that the program was designed to curry favor with the FIFA panel that awarded the 2022 tournament. And some fear that the boys, selected at 13 years of age, are being exploited.
Continue reading the main story Yet Qatar maintains there is a higher purpose, a humanitarian impulse to aid a largely beleaguered region even as it helps to rebrand the emirate, which has been criticized by human rights groups for abusive treatment of migrant laborers.
An Influential Force
For all its scope, Qatar’s international soccer machine was built largely on the word of one man: Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the brother of the emir and the most soccer-mad member of the royal family.
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At one time, it was assumed that Jassim would be the next emir of Qatar, but in 2003, his younger brother succeeded him as crown prince and ascended as emir last year. Jassim has remained a quiet, influential force, however, and has guided Qatar’s soccer development
His love for the sport knows no bounds. As the story is told in Qatar, Jassim, battling insomnia a couple of years ago, summoned a doctor to his palace. When the doctor arrived, he immediately saw the cause of Jassim’s sleeplessness — the rows of television sets covering the wall, all tuned to soccer day and night. Turn off some of your televisions, the doctor is said to have told him, and your insomnia will be cured.
In 2006, Bleicher and a group of Aspire executives met with Jassim in his former office near the top of the 30-story Qatar Olympic Committee Building. Others who have met with Jassim say that there is sometimes a lengthy wait for an audience with his highness, as he and other royals are called (his actual name is rarely uttered). Once a meeting begins, however, Jassim asks incisive questions and makes rapid-fire decisions.
“We did not need to convince him,” Bleicher said of the discussions with Jassim about the Africa plan. “You don’t convince him.” He went on, “He was excited and delighted and this is why he gave his approval. If he did not like it, he would not give his approval.”
Anywhere else in the world, the Aspire program would have sounded like a fever dream. But here it was but a small part of the nearly incomprehensible fever dream that is on display in Doha everywhere you turn.
Start of Aspire Africa
In April 2007, Aspire announced that it was embarking on an international talent search called Aspire Africa. The original plans called for scouts to be dispatched to seven African countries — Morocco, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.
In that first year, the tryouts were heavily publicized, on television and radio and on posters in small villages. The project was supported by Nike, as well as Bonus Sports Marketing, a consulting firm founded by Sandro Rosell (who later became the president of F.C. Barcelona).
From the start, the program was marketed as a chance for young African boys to have a shot at a new life, one that could drastically change the possibilities for them and their families and even their communities.
“In the beginning, the people in Africa, they didn’t believe we were coming,” Bleicher recalled.
When the scouts arrived, driving through the villages in S.U.V.s, they were often mobbed by young boys hoping to catch their attention.
Continue reading the main story The tryouts sometimes took place on bare fields in remote and even dangerous places. (One coach said he had two armed guards accompany him in Nigeria, though the protection did not keep him from being taken away in a van and questioned for eight hours by local authorities before being released.)
After watching local scrimmages for days, the scouts invited 50 players from each country for a weeklong trial in their home nations’ capitals. The three best boys from each country, along with the best three overall goalkeepers, were then taken to Aspire Academy in Doha for more trials.
For nearly all of the finalists, the trip to Qatar was their first time on an airplane. The Aspire dorms, which resemble upscale hotels, were baffling palaces where some boys needed help working the glass elevators.
The crown jewel of the Aspire campus is its multipurpose dome, said to be the largest of its kind in the world, which includes a FIFA-regulation soccer field, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a 1,200-seat amphitheater. Across the campus, speakers pipe in the sounds of birds chirping throughout the day.
Aspire originally planned to offer scholarships to only three finalists, who would then come to Doha to live and train. But once the scouts saw the wealth of talent on display, they scaled up their ambitions, allowing for scholarships for up to two dozen boys, many of whom would live and train at a satellite academy opened in Saly, Senegal.
According to an internal concept document shown to The New York Times, Aspire executives initially saw the Senegal academy as a place to develop a potential “talent pool” for Qatari football clubs and to enhance Aspire’s “image as the world’s best talent pool.”
“We realized that the level of the players was huge,” Colomer said. “And we could organize an academy with these players to give them a hope and a chance to grow to the high levels.”
A Tough Transition
In the years that followed, Aspire Africa was rebranded as Aspire Football Dreams, its scope expanding to as many as 17 countries, including three in the Americas (Guatemala, Costa Rica and Paraguay) and two in Asia (Vietnam and Thailand). By bringing the boys to the academies in Qatar and Senegal at such a young age, Aspire shouldered responsibility for their development not just as soccer players, but as people. The transition has not always been easy.
“They come from the mud huts in Africa to this spaceship,” said one former Aspire coach, who wished to remain anonymous because he still works in soccer.
There are language differences, and players get homesick. Some inside Aspire also expressed concerns that the boys were being trained too much, and that they were hiding injuries for fear of being sent back.
“We were afraid,” said Franck Cedric Tchoutou, a Cameroonian who was among the early scholarship students who lived and trained in Doha. “Most of us, we came from poor families. Being in Qatar or being in Aspire was a great experience. It was a great opportunity. So we walked around there and we were always afraid to lose our opportunities.”
Continue reading the main story Bleicher acknowledged that a scholarship away from home can be trying, but he said that Aspire offered its players more than most academies in terms of medical care, education and training.
According to an agreement reviewed by The Times, a Football Dreams scholarship offered room and board and training and schooling, a few hundred dollars per month in spending money, as well as tickets for the boys to travel home and for parents to visit. The families also receive as much as $5,000 per year, a sum that in many cases would be several times a family’s annual income.
At the start of 2014, there were about 70 boys living at the Senegal academy. Last year, Aspire brought Lionel Messi to its Senegal campus to announce plans to distribute 400,000 mosquito nets and place a medical official in every African town where Football Dreams operates.
“I believe we can use football and the inspirational power of sport,” Messi said at the event, according to an Aspire news release, “to really make a difference.”
Despite Qatar’s insistence that Football Dreams was always intended as a humanitarian mission, the program drew intense criticism almost as soon as Aspire’s scouts set off in search of African talent. The unease was due in part to Qatar’s recent history of paying to import foreign athletes to represent it in international competitions.
In 1999, Qatar’s weight-lifting team was disqualified from the Arab Games when competitors protested that it had four Bulgarian-born lifters. (A year later, one won a bronze medal for Qatar at the Sydney Olympics.) In 2003, Qatar offered the Kenyan runner Stephen Cherono $1,000 a month for life to switch countries. Cherono accepted and changed his name to Shaheen Saif Saaeed.
“I don’t speak Arabic and I have never sung the anthem,” he said at the time. “But my whole heart was trying for Qatar.”
It happened in soccer as well. In 2004, three Brazilian players were poised to play for Qatar, but FIFA quickly announced new rules blocking naturalizations where there is not a clear connection to the new country.
The British newspaper The Observer reported in November 2007 that some considered Aspire Africa to be “human trafficking” in the guise of humanitarianism, “with the sole intention of providing Qatar with footballers for their future national team.”
The article included a quote from the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, who called the program a kind of “exploitation.” He later visited Qatar and, according to a news release issued by Aspire, changed his mind and lent his support to the program.
Yet some in Doha have apparently pondered the question of whether it is worthwhile to recruit foreign soccer players to become Qatari citizens.
One former Aspire executive said that, in private meetings, influential Qataris wanted to know why they should not be able to naturalize the imported players — Qatar had trained them after all — and in that way bolster the national team.
“For them, they pay for it,” the former executive said. “Other people have a big chance to have an easy life sponsored by the Qataris.”
Continue reading the main story Bleicher acknowledged that at the beginning of the project, the question of “whether some participants could one day play for Qatar” was “raised, but dismissed.
“It did not align with the purpose of the project and the values of Aspire,” he said.
An Asset in a Cup Bid
Even if, as Bleicher and others insist, the boys do not play for Qatar in 2022, some saw the international recruitment program as a piece of Qatar’s multipronged effort to win the World Cup bid.
In interviews, Qatari officials and Aspire executives denied this was the case, emphasizing that Football Dreams was a costly program meant to help needy nations and that it provided minimal benefits for Qatar.
“Honestly, the amount of times that we mentioned it were minimal,” Hassan Al-Thawadi, the chief executive of Qatar’s bid committee, said, referring to the notion that Football Dreams played a key role in the 2022 campaign.
Documents reviewed by The Times suggested otherwise. During the summer of 2009, Aspire Academy’s marketing and communications department drew up a proposal that detailed precisely how Aspire Football Dreams could help Qatar’s bid for the World Cup.
A number of news stories have raised claims that Qatar, separate from Aspire, attempted to rig the bidding process with money. Qatar has denied the allegations, and FIFA is investigating.
Of the 24 nations with delegates on the FIFA executive committee, five were countries in which Aspire Football Dreams was operating, the proposal explained. Some in Aspire thought this would bolster Qatar’s chances for the World Cup. “Every country where projects are conducted should vote for Qatar,” the proposal read. “Five votes could be directly rendered favorable via an influence from Football Dreams.”
Bleicher said Aspire’s marketing department, which created the proposal, had no bearing on the 2022 bid campaign. “It shows the passion — but should not be mixed up with action, reality and responsibility,” he said.
Qatar’s written bid has not been made public, but The Times reviewed a portion of it titled “Football Development,” which highlighted Qatar’s contribution to the growth of soccer at home and abroad.
Aspire Football Dreams was mentioned several times, with discussion of its plans for further expansion in two countries: Thailand and Nigeria, both of which had votes on the executive committee.
It is unclear whether Aspire Football Dreams influenced the executive committee, which cast secret ballots. But in a shock to much of the soccer world, Qatar won the bid, well ahead of the United States, which finished second. Four years later, Qatar has not made a significant investment in either Thailand or Nigeria.
Al-Thawadi said programs in Nepal, Pakistan and Syria had taken priority. “Our commitment is towards football development,” Al-Thawadi said. “We are not looking at one nation or another.”
Success and Tension
In January, Aspire Academy’s campus was buzzing as the final game of the Al Kass Cup approached. Elite youth teams from around the world were in Doha for an all-expenses-paid tournament. The Aspire squad, made up of Qatari boys, finished in eighth place, and the under-16 team from Aspire Football Dreams — featuring boys from Senegal, Cameroon and Ghana — reached the title game versus Real Madrid, a global powerhouse.
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Jean Jules Sepp Mvondo, a 15-year-old Cameroonian, was the captain of the Football Dreams squad. A few years earlier, Jean Jules (known as Jiji) was among the hundreds of thousands of 13-year-old boys screened by Aspire scouts when they came to Africa.
“Football Dreams is a big thing in Cameroon,” said Jiji, who has four sisters and three brothers. He described how he cried when his father told him that he had gotten the call that he made it.
Another boy, Jalilu Haruna Mola, a 14-year-old from Ghana, explained how his father died when he was 5, leaving him behind with his mother and older brother. His mother sells rice for a living, Jalilu said, and his scholarship has allowed her to pay for his older brother’s university education. “She always tells me she’s proud of me,” Jalilu said.
The Football Dreams teams have won several international contests. But with this success has come tension. Scouts coveted some of the Aspire boys for their own development clubs in Europe, and in 2011, several players split from Aspire to pursue soccer opportunities elsewhere.
Aspire executives were displeased by the departures. “They didn’t want us to talk to other agents, they definitely did not,” said Tchoutou, who now plays for A.S. Roma’s top youth team. But after three years, he decided to leave with their approval or not.
According to one scholarship agreement, the boys pledge not to sign any contract without the written authorization of Aspire. Of the few boys who have left the program, Bleicher said agents approached them secretly and made promises.
“Even though we were not happy with the hidden approach by the agents, in each case we allowed them to leave unconditionally,” Bleicher said, emphasizing that only a few boys have left the program. “If someone doesn’t want to stay, it’s better that he leaves.”
Only the best Football Dreams players get to take the next step and play for the Aspire-owned team in Belgium. The pressure of that was palpable in the final game of the Al Kass Cup. When the Football Dreams boys won in a dramatic shootout, they charged across the field in celebration, lifting their coaches and executives, including Colomer, into the air.
Jiji, who would later be named the best player of the match, stood crying on the field. Members of the Qatari military parachuted onto the grass field, holding the championship cup.
The boys had no idea what lay ahead. Some of them would soon move to yet another completely foreign place, a tiny town in Belgium, where Qatar owns a professional team, allowing the boys to continue to improve under Aspire’s watchful eye.
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And four years from now, the very best of them could be playing in the 2018 World Cup, to be held in Russia.
Even if they are not wearing Qatar’s maroon jerseys, the players will bring Qatar the international respect the royal family has so far been unable to establish on its own soil.
“The next World Cup,” Bleicher said, “will be ‘our’ World Cup.”
Correction: July 14, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the French architect who designed the National Museum of Qatar. He is Jean Nouvel, not Jeanne.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/sports/worldcup/in-qatars-bid-for-soccer-respect-big-bankroll-and-imported-talent.html

Edited by Arthur: 23/7/2014 01:40:54 PM

Qatari Soccer Empire Buys a Foothold in Europe
A two-part series examining Qatar’s pursuit to become a global soccer power.
By SAM BORDEN, STEVE EDER, JACK WILLIAMS and CHRISTOPHER HARRESSJULY 15, 2014
I
EUPEN, Belgium — In the southeast corner of Belgium, there is a town of about 20,000 that is known, to the extent it is known at all, as a key battleground during the Battle of the Bulge and, more recently, as the center of the tiny slice of this country that speaks German instead of French.
Time moves slowly here. There is a quaint stretch of shops and a small train station and a hotel, the Ambassador, which has 28 rooms. The biggest commotion on any given day is when the children at the school in town go outside for recess.
Except on soccer days. Then, much of the town treks up a steep hill to a modest soccer stadium, the Kehrweg-Stadion, home to K.A.S. Eupen, the local professional team that has spent most of its 69-year existence in the lower divisions of Belgium’s national league. The stadium is unremarkable, with its squat, steel stands and patchy grass, and yet it was the site, on a March morning two years ago, of one of the strangest couplings in professional sports.
On that day, a group of about 20 men toured the 8,000-seat stadium, examining its sparse amenities and looking out at the drab surrounding areas. They then moved on to K.A.S. Eupen’s small offices, where a candid meeting between club officials and executives from Qatar’s Aspire Academy, based in Doha some 3,000 miles away, began promptly at 10 a.m.
Those in the room would later describe this meeting between the officials of a mostly anonymous Belgian soccer team and representatives of a Middle Eastern royal family as surreal. As they negotiated the details of an acquisition, four languages were spoken — English, French, German and Arabic — and while the club had a multilingual staff member on hand to help translate, there were still moments of inevitable confusion.
One could see why. On the surface, the two groups had nothing in common, but each also possessed something the other needed. For the officials from Eupen (pronounced OY-pen), the lure was obvious: money. Like many small-time soccer clubs in Europe, Eupen was on the verge of financial ruin; the Qatari royal family represented a surprising and unusual jackpot.
For the Qataris, the attraction was more complex. They were searching for a way station of sorts, a side door into the elite European soccer system. Through a program called Aspire Football Dreams, begun in 2007, the Qataris had scouted hundreds of thousands of young African players and brought the best of them to their academies, in Doha and in Senegal, to develop. Now they wanted a place where the youths could play professionally.
The plan seemed straightforward enough: Take the best of the African prospects and bring them to a team in Europe to begin their professional careers. After the boys live in Europe, under Aspire’s supervision, for the required number of years, have them apply for European passports, allowing them freer movement in club-to-club transfers since there are often restrictions on the number of non-European players allowed at any one club.
Continue reading the main story Then, when the boys have developed to the point that they are coveted by more famous clubs like Bayern Munich or Barcelona, cash the checks on their transfer fees and, most important for the Qataris, hold them up as shining examples of a meteoric rise in Qatari soccer acumen. The world would know that these boys came from Aspire.
“We want our players to become the best in the world,” said Andreas Bleicher, the executive in charge of Aspire’s Football Dreams project and its international endeavors. “To do that, we needed a club of our own.”
An Overriding Ambition
To understand Aspire’s interest in Eupen, one must first understand Qatar’s overriding ambition in all its pursuits.
The Qatari royal family is determined to morph its small nation of 1.8 million (1.5 million of whom are expatriates) into a modern-day player on all fronts: education, architecture, culture and sports. There is even a formal plan, Qatar National Vision 2030, which pledges that the country will become “an advanced society” within 16 years.
With soccer, however, there are severe limitations. Qatari leaders would ideally like their national team to become something more than a regional punching bag, but in a country with little ingrained sports culture, finding homegrown talent is challenging.
That forced officials at the Aspire Academy, which is just one piece of Qatar’s multibillion-dollar investment in sports, to get creative.
In 2007, the academy created Aspire Football Dreams, a self-described humanitarian effort to give struggling African countries more opportunities through soccer. The program brings African teenagers to Qatar to give them training while competing against young Qatari athletes.
If the program burnishes Qatar’s national brand, that is all to the good. Bleicher readily acknowledges that all Aspire players sign a contract that includes a strict image-rights provision so that “if a player gets really good, we can freely use his picture.”
But the ethics of this process, as well as the logistics involved, remain murkier. Elmar Keutgen, who was the mayor of Eupen in 2012, said he and other residents had significant concerns about the Qataris’ purchase of the club. Yes, K.A.S. Eupen was on the verge of insolvency, Keutgen said, but that did not mean he and others were comfortable becoming the Qataris’ washing machine in an operation intended to launder African players into Europe.
While many Africans do play in European leagues, the calculated nature of the Qataris’ plan — and the rigidness with which they controlled the young players’ futures — gave Keutgen and others some pause.
“I was very careful at the beginning because obviously the reaction from the locals was a concern,” said Keutgen, a practicing physician. “Are they treating these players like objects, or even animals? Are they trying to breed football players? People were worried.”
According to Bleicher, the idea of owning a club emerged in 2010, when he and Josep Colomer, the director of Aspire Football Dreams, realized that their first class of African players, whom they had been training since they were 13, would soon need to leave academy life and begin professional careers. Instead of simply letting the players go, Bleicher and Colomer wanted a way to continue having a hand in — or control over — the players’ development.
Continue reading the main story Bleicher, who had previously worked on Germany’s Olympics program, and Colomer, a former youth scout for Barcelona, knew that Europe was full of struggling clubs looking for angel owners.
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The executives quickly discarded England, Spain, France and Italy as options because each country had restrictive rules about how many non-European players could be on a team’s roster. In the end, Bleicher said, the choice was between Portugal and Belgium. Since many of the African players spoke French, Belgium seemed a better fit, particularly in light of the country’s residency requirements: After three years of residency in Belgium, a person can apply for a Belgian passport and become a dual citizen. (Other countries, such as France, require five years of residency or more.)
From a business perspective, Eupen was ripe. It had been promoted to Belgium’s top division as recently as 2010, but it was crippled by mismanagement. By the time the Qataris arrived, the club was back in the second division and bankruptcy was looming. “The situation seemed perfect,” Bleicher said.
Neither Eupen nor Aspire officials would comment publicly on the financial side of the transaction, but two officials involved in the deal said Aspire’s initial investment was roughly €4 million (about $5.5 million), which wiped out about €2 million in the club’s debts and came with the explicit understanding that Aspire would assume full control of the club’s professional operation, but none of its other facets.
Aspire agreed to bankroll the youth teams — for a sum believed to be upward of €200,000 per year, according to the officials — but would take no part in operating the program.
“They wanted to run a team, and just a team — we understood that,” said Ralph Lentz, a local lawyer and Eupen board member.
Once the purchase was complete, Aspire recast the entire organization. Before the Qataris arrived, Eupen’s roster was almost exclusively European, with about half the players having Belgian heritage. By the next season, about half the roster was African.
Christoph Henkel, an executive with F.C. Cologne, a professional team in Germany, was brought in to become the club’s chief executive and liaison to Bleicher. A Spanish coach, Tintín Márquez, was also hired.
Training schedules and playing philosophies were revamped. The stadium’s suite and lounge facilities were upgraded and overhauled. If players were injured and required significant treatment, they would be sent to the sports medicine center in Doha for evaluation. In the end, the Qataris kept the name and crest of the club — two things Keutgen and other longtime residents were worried about — but little else.
‘It Was Another Planet’
On July 1, 2012, just four months after that initial meeting in Eupen, 16 players and 4 coaches checked into Eupen’s Ambassador Hotel. Samuel Asamoah, who is from Ghana, and Anthony Bassey, from Nigeria, were a part of the group. “It was another planet,” Asamoah recalled of their arrival.
Continue reading the main story For Bleicher and Colomer, this remote town was perfect. They had rejected a proposal to purchase a team in a big city like Brussels because, as Bleicher put it, “if we take 15 18-year-olds to a big city like Brussels and let them loose, good luck to us.”
Bassey grew up in the city of Uyo in southeastern Nigeria, where he lived with his grandmother in a house that had no television and little furniture. “We could sleep there,” he said. “But it was not a rich man’s house.”
About seven years before he arrived in Belgium, Bassey attended a local tryout for Football Dreams with roughly 8,000 other Nigerian boys where he was one of four players selected to advance to the next screening in Lagos. He then survived one more showcase in Doha before spending most of the next three years at Aspire’s academy in Saly, Senegal.
“I’m grateful for this,” he said. “I don’t know where I would be right now if it wasn’t for Aspire.”
Yet of all the lessons he learned during his pre-Eupen Aspire experience, buying groceries or making breakfast were not among them. At the academies in Doha or Senegal, players lived in dormitories and had meals served to them; in Eupen, they lived in apartments spread out around town. “My first thought,” Bassey said, “was: How am I going to eat?”
Henkel, the new chief executive, tried to anticipate the players’ practical concerns. When the boys arrived, the club organized a cooking class for them. “We brought in a chef,” Henkel said. “We showed them how to make fish, how to make salad. I am not sure how much they actually do.”
Asamoah, a midfielder, laughed when he recalled the lesson. “It was good,” he said. “But, you know, we make a lot of pasta. Pasta and rice. That’s pretty much it.”
There were other problems, too. One player could not figure out how to use his washing machine; flummoxed that it stopped every time he opened the lid, he tried to bail the water out and broke the appliance.
When the weather turned colder, Michael Graeven, the club’s longtime caretaker, said he had to tell some of the African players to replace their sandals with socks and shoes.
As the days passed, the players explored the town and did their best to interact with its residents, many of whom speak French or English in addition to German. Frank Neumann, who owns a clothing store in the center of town, said many local residents were initially leery of the Qataris’ intentions (as well as the motivations of the African boys) but were pleasantly surprised to see how fairly the Qataris treated local businesses.
“They offered to let residents use their buildings or the stadium for events,” Neumann said. “That went a long way.”
He added: “The boys don’t seem arrogant at all. They come in here and shop the way everyone else does. They come from a different culture and are a different color, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
Jonas Deumeland, a veteran goalkeeper, was kept on the team to help mentor some of his younger teammates. He said most Aspire players stayed away from bars or nightclubs. “Many are very religious, very committed to being Muslim,” Deumeland said. “I’m not sure I’ve seen one drink.”
Continue reading the main story Deumeland also remarked on how much pressure he sensed that the Aspire players felt, an awareness that this was the opportunity of their lives.
Each African earned at least the Belgian league-mandated minimum salary for non-European players — about €77,000 euros, or $104,000, this past season — and a portion of their paychecks was deducted by the club for rent on their apartments.
During the first few months in Eupen, several players went to team officials to quietly ask if they could receive more spending money. The players sheepishly revealed that they had not spent their money on one big purchase; rather, they had simply sent all of their salary back to struggling relatives in Africa.
“We feel pressure to perform here, but it is a good pressure, because we are trying to change the paths of our families,” Asamoah said. “We have a chance to make a big difference.”
A Changing Team
Not surprisingly, the Qataris’ transition into Belgium was not altogether smooth. Many of Eupen’s European players were looking for work after losing their spots on the roster to the African players. Longtime Eupen fans expressed concern that their team would lose its Belgian identity, and some former Eupen players said they did not receive a fair chance to earn playing time under the new leadership.
Kevin Kis, a Belgian defender who initially stayed with the team, recalled that every player was summoned for individual meetings with Colomer in June 2012.
“He said there were 15 new players coming, and he explained that they’d been training them since they were 12,” Kis said. “He started to say more, but it mostly just seemed like we didn’t have any choice about any of it.”
A starter for much of the first three months of the season, Kis was a bench player by early 2013, as the African players became more comfortable. When his contract expired at the end of the season, he was let go.
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Ben Myers5 days ago
Having read the Qatari soccer articles, I have to ask what is the contorted logic of FIFA in awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a country...

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How is it that the morning after the All Star game the lead story in the New York Sport section is about soccer?

Smohan6 days ago
"Most important for the Qataris, hold them up as shining examples of a meteoric rise in Qatari soccer acumen." The kids are African, the...

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“The year before, it was different, it was the best players who actually played,” Kis said. “Last season, it was not like that anymore. The new guys got credit and were being trained. The rest of us were left out.”
The new coach, Márquez, who played professionally in Spain, would not comment on his personnel choices. He did point out, however, that the Aspire players were not immune from criticism; in fact, a handful of Aspire players who spent years training in Senegal or Doha found themselves on flights back to Africa after that first season because they did not perform well enough.
Hamza Zakari, a midfielder from Ghana, was one of the players dropped from the team, though he remained in Europe. He played a total of two minutes during that first season in Eupen, then was sent on loan to Tromso in the Norwegian league and is currently playing for a team in Iceland.
When he described his experience in Eupen, Zakari also questioned an unusual part of Aspire’s setup: Instead of allowing each player to sign with his own agent, Aspire pays one agent, Lamine Savane, to represent all its players.
Continue reading the main story Zakari said he also believed it was difficult for one agent to represent an entire roster of players who were all competing for playing time.
“I think maybe we all cannot stay in one place and play for one team,” Zakari said. He added, “For me, it was very strange.”
Bleicher said this arrangement was preferable, since the players do not have to pay any commissions to Savane, who travels often to Eupen to check on them. Savane did not respond to requests for an interview.
A Crucial Final Game
On a sunny Sunday at the end of April, more than 1,000 Eupen fans, including several Aspire executives, traveled across Belgium for the team’s final game of the regular season.
The stakes were considerable: Eupen was second in the league, just one point behind its opponent, K.V.C. Westerlo. If Eupen won, it would win the league and be automatically promoted to the first division; if it tied or lost, it would have to go through a four-team playoff to have a chance at promotion.
Sitting among the fans at Westerlo’s quaint stadium were four Qatari players from Aspire’s academy in Doha. They had arrived in Eupen in January and played with the club’s reserve team during the second half of the season. If things went well, one or two might have a chance to play for Eupen’s first team.
According to Bleicher, the progression of those players (and other young Qataris), as well as the development of the Football Dreams players, is what will ultimately determine the answer to the most intriguing question surrounding this entire arrangement: Will it work?
With just one full season completed, it is impossible to say. Scouts from bigger clubs, such as England’s Tottenham Hotspur, have come to see the Eupen players, but executives around Europe generally view Aspire’s plan with curiosity more than intrigue.
One personnel executive at a top-division club said he was monitoring the situation in Eupen but “was not particularly impressed with the talent,” though he acknowledged they were still quite young. “Having teenagers, essentially, playing first-team football is unusual,” the executive said, “and that’s often for a reason.”
But wins for Eupen are not necessarily the overriding goal. Márquez said he was more focused on the technical improvement of his players, so that they can grow into more viable professionals. “Playing a professional season is a new experience,” Márquez said. “It is nothing like what any of them has done before. So we need to prepare them.”
That is why the Qataris are being integrated, too, Bleicher said. Even if they do not become stars — or even starters — at Eupen, having the opportunity to play in a European league will only raise their level when they are playing with Qatar’s national team.
“Next year we would love to have 10 Qatari players involved in Eupen, either with the reserves or the first team,” Bleicher said.
Within a few years, he said, he envisions a first-team roster with a mix of five to seven Qatari players, five to seven African players, and European players filling out the rest of the spots.
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Realistically, Eupen will always be just a starting point. While the Qataris have a strong business relationship with huge clubs like Barcelona (and have owned the Paris St.-Germain team for three years), Bleicher insists that there is no formal pipeline in place.
That was why the players felt so much pressure on the day of that final game. The Belgian first division, while hardly akin to the English or Spanish top leagues, was a significant step up from the second tier, where Eupen currently played. Sitting in the stands not far from the Qataris, Bassey, the speedy Nigerian midfielder who had injured his knee earlier in the winter, rooted as hard as anyone. “Playing first division next year would be amazing,” he said.
But it was not to be. Westerlo won, 1-0, and the Eupen players and fans trudged back to their buses.
Bleicher, though, was not unhappy with the result, nor was he particularly distressed when the team failed to win promotion through the playoffs.
“Our strategy, honestly, does not depend on the result of one game or on the result of one season,” he said. “Our aim is not to win the Champions League.”
Bleicher already had his eye on the summer off-season. At the moment, there was no interest in the Aspire players from any major clubs, but Bleicher sounded proud as he hinted that one of the Eupen players might soon make the jump to a bigger team. A few months later, it happened. Diawandou Diagne, who played two seasons with Eupen, signed a contract to play with Barcelona’s “B” team. “Hopefully, he can make it into the first-team squad in a year or two,” Bleicher said.
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To the Aspire officials, Diagne’s move is proof that in some small way, the plan is working. Yes, the Qataris want the African players to thrive in Eupen, but they also, ultimately, want them to leave. That, more than any win or loss, is what will define this bizarre partnership between a royal family and a rural town.
Asamoah, the Aspire player who made the most appearances for Eupen this past season, knows the stakes. He has seen other African players find success on the continent and, despite the unusual path from Ghana to Doha to Senegal to Belgium, hopes that he will do the same.
Every day, Asamoah said, he watches videos of players like Samuel Eto’o, a Cameroonian forward who left Africa in the early 1990s, found his way to Real Madrid’s youth academy in Spain and went on to become a dominant scorer. “He did it one way,” Asamoah said one afternoon after practice as he stretched out his legs and looked out at the stadium field in front of him. “Why can’t I do it this way?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/sports/worldcup/a-qatari-soccer-program-looking-to-rise-buys-a-foothold-in-europe.html?_r=0

Heavey reading but interesting.

I have no problem with any of this in theory - but for some reason I struggle to believe that kids who don't make the grade are given so much as their plane ticket home... Rather, are more likely to end up on a building site prior the 2022 world cup.

Depressing read, posted in WF a few weeks back.