The most notable team in the upcoming World Cup is Qatar, who have broken into football’s cream of the crop just by hosting the giant event. In recent days, he has also been talked about in connection with a controversial cartoon in a French weekly.
They are holding a gun, wearing a rocket launcher or belt with explosives and playing football – not on the lawn, but in the desert. This is how the French satirical newspaper Le Canard enchainé portrayed the Qatari footballers in a special October issue dedicated to Qatar.
He caused a storm, especially in the Arab world. The media there, led by the Qatari state television Al Jazeera, soon mediated the reactions of outraged social network users.
This is how the French newspaper Le Canard Enchainé portrayed the Qatari representation. | Photo: Le Canard Enchainé
However, the leading representatives of Qatar also spoke. “Hard satire is also welcome. But Le Canard enchainé resorted to lies and hatred. to defame Qatar,” wrote Qatari Deputy Prime Minister Hamad Al-Kawari.
The Minister of Labor, Ali bin Samikh Al-Marri, spoke similarly. “We will not tolerate hate speech and systematic racism against our people, our country and our team,” he said. “We are calling on international human rights organizations to take a stand against anyone who engages in these attacks.”
According to Al-Marri, the cartoon is part of a “smear campaign” against Qatar. He resorted to these words in Brussels at a meeting organized by the European Parliament, where he also objected to accusations that six and a half to fifteen thousand migrant workers died during the construction of stadiums for the 2022 World Cup. They say these are completely inaccurate and exaggerated numbers.
Qatar has long been criticized for the level of human rights in the country. In the recent past, he has also faced accusations of financing terrorism and extremism.
In the case of the football championship, there are doubts as to whether the rich Muslim emirate did not help itself to the organization of a bribe. It became the host as the smallest country in history (even the Czechia is about seven times larger than it). In addition, his national team was at the 113th place in the world rankings at the time.
Has she improved since then? Anyone who doesn’t watch it regularly might think not. Especially if, at the end of August this year, he registered a bizarre match between the Qatari team and a village team from the fifth Slovak league.
Domaniža even reached for a sensation when, in a match played over two half-hour halves, she conceded for the first time in the 50th minute. In the end, she fell only 0:2.
“It was a life match for the boys, most of them did not play more than the third league,” their coach Milan Svoboda summed up the feelings of the amateurs, who otherwise only play for gas money.
But it’s not like Qatar is ashamed of itself. He did not field the best players against Domaniž and took the match only as a preparation as part of the Austrian training camp, where he also encountered World Cup participants Morocco and Ghana. Originally, he wasn’t even supposed to play with Slovak amateurs, but after he unexpectedly lost one of the agreed opponents, he was looking for a replacement and he didn’t care who it was.
Otherwise, the Qataris have already proven that they can play football at a solid level. They probably shone the most at the 2019 Asian Cup, where they celebrated their first ever triumph thanks to victories over South Korea and Japan. In addition, they conceded only once in the seven matches of the tournament.
They are still the biggest outsiders in their home World Cup group with Ecuador, Senegal and the Netherlands, but they shouldn’t be embarrassed.
According to the FIFA rankings, they are not even the weakest team in the tournament. They are in 50th place ahead of Saudi Arabia and 61st Ghana, i.e. the teams that qualified for Qatar through sports.
You won’t find a big star among the Qataris. According to the website Transfermarkt, the entire team of Spanish coach Félix Sánchez is worth around 15 million euros, which is half that of the first division Pilsen and one tenth that of the Czech national team.
Prim plays well together. It is no coincidence that Sánchez called only footballers from a few clubs in the Qatari league to the championship. The diversity comes only when you look at the place of birth of individual representatives – Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Portugal, France, Algeria, Sudan, Ghana, Egypt.
Foreigners make up more than a third of the team. However, compared to hockey China, which naturalized players at the last minute for the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Qatar proceeded more systematically. With a few exceptions, he trained footballers through the generously subsidized Aspire sports academy. For example, Almoez Ali, a native Sudanese who came to the oil emirate as a child and now lacks a goal to become the best scorer in the history of the Qatar national team, comes from it.
