Qatar ready to make history in Asian Cup … but the world is not watching
When the Qatar 2022 World Cup was announced in Zurich by a sweating, slightly fevered Sepp Blatter, the idea was floated almost immediately that this could become a regional tournament; that Qatar’s gulf neighbours might share the burden and the riches, bringing them together in one great happy football-stinking embrace.
It is a theme Fifa has returned to even as the Gulf itself has atomised in the eight years since, with the suggestion still out there that an expanded 42team tournament could bring Qatar’s neighbours on board.
Last month Blatter’s successor as Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, announced during a speech to – for some reason – the G20 world leaders’ forum: “Football can bring us together and make the world a more prosperous, educated, equal and perhaps even peaceful place.” The only sensible response to which is, of course, a sardonically raised set of eyebrows, the real-world equivalent of the chin-stroking-puzzled-face emoji. But then football has always liked to sell itself as an intangible global force for good, as opposed to a highly successful global force for merchandising, sponsorship and soft power.
From the branding of Qatar 2022 as an underdog “new frontier” to SvenGöran Eriksson’s famous “ball of peace” – a Fifa-backed plan that saw Sven travelling the world getting assorted embattled groups to kick the same football, thereby bringing about, er, world peace – there is a general doublespeak about football’s ever more complex place in the tides of geopolitics.
It is a process laid out in the most fascinating way at the current Asian Cup. The tournament has already entered its endgame. Japan beat Iran 3-0 in the first semi-final on Monday. In the second, scheduled for 6pm local time on Tuesday in the Mohamed bin Zayed stadium in Abu Dhabi, Qatar will face the hosts, the UAE, in the second of the tournament’s “Blockade Derbies”.
For Qatar this represents real footballing progress and a shot at a first ever final in this competition. Football aside, it is also perhaps the most fascinating fixture in world football’s calendar right now, a meeting of the sport’s two most aggressively expansionist states – Manchester City versus Paris Saint-Germain by proxy – and a primer on exactly how Fifa, football and Gulf state poli
tics remain irrevocably tangled.
Qatar is, of course, in a state of blockade by the UAE and its immediate neighbours. The current standoff reached a nadir last summer when the Saudis announced plans to build a trench along the shared border filled with sewerage, effectively turning Qatar into an island cut off from the rest of the world by a river of radioactive human excrement. Quick, Sven! The ball of peace!
None of this has stopped the current tournament rolling on well enough. There has already been one Blockade Derby – Qatar beating Saudi Arabia 2-0 in the group stages. Some booing aside, the game passed off without rancour, although it is this lack of obvious fire, and indeed any overwhelming