Indian soccer fans sometimes brawl over their teams

Fatih pulls the car over, letting the engine idle, and reaches for his phone. He is searching for a group called “Brazil Fans Qatar.” This, he said, will explain everything, writes Rory Smith of The New York Times.

Last month, as teams started to arrive in Qatar before the World Cup, several found guards of honor waiting for them at their hotels and training bases: groups of a few dozen fans, clad in national team jerseys, waving national flags, carrying homemade banners and beating drums. In most circumstances, that would not be especially noteworthy. Here, though, it was impossible not to wonder.

There had long been doubts about how many fans would attend the first World Cup in the Middle East, thanks to practical concerns — the cost of spending weeks in Doha, the relative scarcity of alcohol — and ethical ones, centered on Qatar’s treatment of the migrant workers.

Qatar, it had already emerged, had recruited several hundred “fan leaders” from across the world, paying for their flights and accommodations in exchange for their enthusiastic, public support. The suspicion ran that the groups waiting to welcome the teams, apparently wholly composed of South Asian men, were another arm of the same program.

No, no, no, Fatih said, suddenly stopping the car.

After a minute or so, he finds what he wants: a video from Kerala, his home state in India. It had been shot that day but had already been forwarded many times. It showed two groups of men, some carrying sticks, brawling in the center of a village. Half of them are wearing bright yellow Brazil jerseys. The others are in the distinctive sky blue and white of Argentina.

“This happens every FIFA World Cup,” Fatih said. There are other fans whose loyalties lie with Portugal or England or Spain, he explained, but mostly it is Brazil and Argentina. The affiliations run deep. Fatih might change his club team, he said, but Brazil was nonnegotiable.

It was fans like these, like him, who had greeted the teams in Doha: Keralans who live and work in Qatar and had been sufficiently enthused by the prospect of seeing these usually remote, distant stars in the flesh that many of them paid hundreds of dollars for tickets to games. Fatih himself was going to see Brazil play Cameroon, he said. Any cost was worth it.