BarcelonaSudan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Their national team has never even come close to the final stage of a World Cup, despite being a crazy land for this sport, where stadiums of more than 40,000 people are packed to watch the Omdurman derby, the most populous district of Khartoum, the capital. Almoez Ali was born precisely in Khartoum (1996). Little is known about the childhood of one of the most famous men in Qatar right now. Sudanese journalists talk about the modest origins of this boy who has become one of the great hopes of the local team thanks to his scoring prowess. When in 2019 Qatar proclaimed themselves champions of Asia for the first time, he was the top scorer of the meeting with nine goals. His image filled the streets of Doha for weeks. At 26 years old, if he scores one more goal he will become the national team’s top scorer. He was unable to do so in the team’s frustrating debut at the World Cup, where they were clearly defeated by the Ecuadorians.
Being able to host a World Cup, however, has allowed Qatar to score a goal against its neighbors. The sporting and diplomatic success of Qatar has caused a strong stomach ache in the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, where they do not like to see how such a small neighbor manages to organize the first World Cup in an Arab state and succeed more than them. If in the last decade these countries have come to carry out a blockade of Qatar twice, by land, sea and as far as they could air, in an unsuccessful attempt to suffocate the Qatari economy, as far as football is concerned the United Arab Emirates they filed a complaint with FIFA to get Qatar disqualified from the Asian Cup claiming that Almoez Ali does not meet the requirements to be an international with that country. Qatar has so few inhabitants that it has gone looking for talent abroad in order to continue growing. In the industrial, educational and sports world.
FIFA, after seeing how for decades a lot of governments distributed passports to people who had only lived in their country for a few days, or directly had never lived there and had no family ties, just to improve the level of the national teams, 2020 introduced a change to the player nationalization system. The idea was to avoid cases like some in Qatar, where during the first decade of the 21st century foreign players who received their passports a week after landing in Doha were allowed to become international, such as the Uruguayan Sebastia Soria, who would arrive to score 39 goals in 123 games. The new regulations stipulated that, in the case of people without roots, in order to be able to play for the selection of a state, it was necessary to prove having lived there for five years and played there once they turned 18. And Ali did not meet these conditions in 2019: he had arrived in Qatar at the age of 7, but in 2019 he was 23 years old. In other words, he had only been living in Qatar for four and a half years from the time he turned 18. So he was in breach of FIFA regulations.
A mysterious certificate
And then the mother’s birth certificate appeared. According to Qatar, proof that everything was legal. According to the United Arab Emirates, too suspicious a document. The Sudanese are one of the largest foreign communities in Qatar, because being two British protectorates for years, many Sudanese sought a better life in Doha even before 1971, the date of the Emirate’s independence. Currently, about 40,000 Sudanese live in Qatar, some of them in important public positions. But it is hard to find cases like that of the mother, a Sudanese woman born in Qatar who returns to Africa without leaving much of a trace. In Sudan, some journalists who have investigated the case have also found no answers. Be that as it may, the birth certificate of a supposedly Qatari mother has allowed Ali to continue playing for Qatar.
Of the local selection, nine players were born abroad, in states such as Portugal, Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, France, Ghana or Bahrain. Defender Musab Kheder is also born in Sudan and five other Qatari players have Sudanese roots but have already been born in Qatar. The 2022 World Cup tells us about a globalized world where more and more people have to emigrate and escape poverty. A total of 137 players in this match were not born in the country they defend on the pitch, with 14 Morocco internationals born in Europe, for example. The same thing happens with Qatar. Being a rich Arab state, it has attracted workers from other countries in the area and more than half of the team has roots in another country, especially in Sudan. Now, in the case of Qatar, not only emigration explains the roots of the footballers.
Aspire, an academy with a Catalan label
Of the 26 players in the host team, 18 have trained at the Aspire Academy. Also Ali. Qatar understood that in order to improve in sport, it could not hand out passports to foreign players and decided to start training its future champions thanks to this academy, which was born in 2004 and has a sports city near Doha. The idea was to train not only footballers and offer them the best facilities, education and technicians, but also to recruit talent from all over the world, opening academies in 18 Third World countries, especially in Africa, where to spot youngsters like Ali , to whom we offer to go live in Qatar as children, accompanied by their family, so that they become citizens of a country with a population of less than 300,000 people. From the Qatari point of view, money must be invested in those who know how to manage it best, so they settled on two models: Spanish grassroots football and the French Clairefontaine academy. For this reason, Aspire’s first partners were entrepreneurs such as Sandro Rosell, who together with other partners was responsible for laying the foundations of the Football Dreams project, which opened academies outside Qatar to find talents like Ali. A project that Qatar finally closed in 2016, when it understood that it had already recruited enough young people for several years. At the Aspire headquarters in Doha, a lot of technicians from Barça have been hired, such as Carles Domènech, Óscar Fernández (now in the coaching staff of his brother, Xavi, at Barça) and the Barcelona native Félix Sánchez, who arrived there he spent years training young people and now he is the absolute coach. Aspire has agreements or has bought European clubs such as Cultural Leonesa, the Belgian Eupen or the Austrian LASK Linz, to send their youngsters there to gain experience. Ali, for example, played for a few months at LASK and a few months at Cultural, where he was trained by the Catalan Juan Ferrando, who remembers “a striker with great potential, who had received good tactical training”. “Aspire had very clear ideas, but being young it was difficult for him to adapt to the city,” he adds.
It is at the Aspire Academy that Almoez Ali has spent almost his entire life, living and training with his peers. Indeed, even when playing with Qatari clubs, players selected to improve the level of local football could spend months training at Aspire’s headquarters rather than with their team. Everything, to give Qatar a team capable of being Asian champions. And allow a young Sudanese to make his World Cup debut. In Sudan, I probably never would have. In Qatar, yes. The rich states always take advantage of the poor, although for the moment all the money invested has not allowed them to make a triumphant debut in the World Cup.
