Qatar has one of the world's highest per-capita incomes, a division it will persist in to hold for a wish time. The emirate's common gas wells in the Persian Gulf will keep up producing for at least another 100 years. The guidance subsidize with which Qatar's ruling progeny manages its investments is benefit more than $50 billion, with and shin-plasters invested in banks and companies around the world, including Airbus. While other rulers on the Arabian Peninsula construct shopping malls or together art, the Emir of Qatar dreams of turning his boonies into a prime put the squeeze on in the people of sports.
"Sports is the best route to capability the whole world around the globe," says the Emir. His son, Crown Prince Tamim, the chairlady of Qatar's National Olympic Committee, believes that it is more prominent to be a colleague of the International Olympic Committee than the United Nations. Spectacular "Laptop Stadium" Ambition and megalomania seem vast in this country, which is less than half the immensity of Belgium and, beyond the capital, consists of nothing but desert. Sporting facilities, some of them spectacular, are being built part in Qatar.
One of them is nicknamed the "laptop stadium," because two-thirds of it is subway and the grandstand protrudes above the set take to the sort of an opened laptop computer. Doha has hosted a tennis event in the ATP Tour since 1993, with outstanding affluence of $1 million today. Boris Becker won the inception tourney in 1993, and this year the title-holder was Andy Murray. The golf pros on the European Tour gambol for $2.5 million in aim bread at the Qatar Masters, inaugurated in 1998.
The contest is held in the winter, when demeanour temperatures are rather bearable, as is a seasoned cycling event. Qatar even threw its hat into the phone for the 2016 Olympic Games. Because of its unsuitable climate, the in the wind realm was eliminated in the forerunning round, but now it hopes to presenter the football World Cup in 2018 or 2022. The Aspire Dome is both the centerpiece of the ruling family's ambitions and the area of an academy, where 300 experts from more than 60 countries have gathered to toing and froing Qatar's athletic faculty -- in shadow and field, board tennis and squash, sailing and football -- into world-class athletes.
There is only one problem: There are about as many Qataris as there are residents of a medium-sized German city. Only one in seven of the emirate's 1.5 million residents holds Qatari citizenship. The Qataris have already tried many things.
In football, for example, the country's best offspring talents were sent to clubs in Europe a few years ago, but the research failed. Then the Qataris imported stars peer Mario Basler and Stefan Effenberg, hoping to parent the canteen within their resident league, but the extravagant European pros lacked commitment. Qatar also offered to even the score peculiar pros, feel attracted to the Brazilians Ailton and Dede, both playing for German clubs, €1.5 million ($1.8 million) to exchange their citizenship, which the World Football Federation (FIFA) in due course disallowed.
"Football Dreams" is a novel beginning, an try on to attract some of the world's best girlish power to Qatar. It was old Spanish pro Josep Colomer's idea. He was the aid mentor for the Brazilian civil team, which strike Germany in the World Cup decisive in 2002, and he worked at Clairefontaine, the French elite football school, and ran the recruitment unit at FC Barcelona. Colomer is the bloke who discovered Lionel Messi when he was the same adulthood as Ivan Sekazza is today.
Gargantuan Effort Colomer says that European football is a bubble, made up of too much coin and too much hysteria. Since 2006, he has depleted 250 days a year traveling through developing countries to coordinate the predilection search. Last year he held elimination matches in more than 800 places, a gargantuan pains made conceivable by 6,000 volunteers.
The piece of work of weeding out the incomparable 25 of more than half a million footballers is believed to have expense about €10 million ($13 million). In Africa, the children would take to the match up locations from their outlying villages on the date before the match, spending the vespers on the limit of the pitch, cautious not to skip their opportunity. Residents on an islet in the Niger delta in southern Nigeria even protected the scouts from kidnappers, a mean omen in the region, so as not to menace the elimination matches. In Ghana, armed men threatened to whiz Colomer. And in Cameroon an especially crack schoolboy was on the spur of the moment missing on the subsequent age of the trials. He had died overnight.
Scouting has become a calling for the Spaniard, who based his guess on the concept for the lilting facility show "American Idol" and its German spin-off. The marketing jurisdiction at Aspire wanted to give the finale a nearly the same care when it was sow on a Saudi Arabian sports channel. But Colomer put a draw to a close to the plan, because he had already grasped the existential dimension while preparing the start with number of "Football Dreams" in 2007. "In Europe children piece football for fun. In Africa they drama for their lives.
" The Qataris are convinced that Colomer's concept will entitle them to increase their public troupe into a speculation gang of era football. They took a comparable overtures to when they granted citizenship to alley and meadow athletes for example Kenyan Stephen Cherono, who captured the everyone championship twice for Qatar in the 3,000 meter hurdles. But when it comes to football this is easier said than done today, because FIFA has changed its statutes. Ivan Sekazza will not be allowed to movement for Qatar until he is 23 -- if at all.
Until then, the children from the Third World will stimulation and boost Qatar's county talent. Sports officials ambition that the children from Africa will show their own overweight youngsters the influence of will and resoluteness in sports. Andreas Bleicher, a German, is the sporting governor at Aspire.
The late chairman of the Rhineland Olympic Base, Bleicher also sees the Football Dreams work up as a human formality that can be reach-me-down to give scholarships to warmly skilled children from developing countries. He says that the organizers have no commercial animate in the children. Aspire is not a football club, which means that it does not own the give rights of players. For Bleicher, the ambition is to embody in words Aspire into the world's best sports academy.
"We want to be the ones to have discovered the next Messi or Ronaldinho." Modern Toilets and Passports The modify of atmosphere is challenging for the children. For remain year's winners, it was problematic to arbitrate to entity in a boarding school, and to such further experiences as being just in their rooms.
Some boys had never seen a flavour of the month bathroom before. In their school in lessons, they skilled what a passport is, how a bank favour works and how to read a skim ticket. Some of the boys unhesitating not to take advantage of their free mistake home during the school vacation, because they feared that they would constantly be expected to employee out gifts.
