ISIS 18

Saudi-Qatari rivalry spills onto the soccer pitch

By James M. Dorsey


Unable to persuade Qatari leaders to drop their support for the Muslim
Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, Saudi Arabia appears determined to
deprive its tiny neighbour of its regional soccer supremacy.


A recent decision to build 11 stadia under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian
Oil Company (Aramco), one of the country’s most efficient, forward-looking
institutions, constitutes an effort to rival Qatar that is developing at
least eight of the Middle East and North Africa’s most advanced facilities in
advance of its hosting of the 2022 World Cup. It also signals the end to a
debate in the kingdom on whether to emphasize individual rather than team
sports in its five-year national sports plan in a bid to prevent soccer
pitches from becoming venues of protest as elsewhere in the region.


The Saudi decision to battle Qatar on the soccer pitch followed the
withdrawal five months ago of the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates and Bahrain from Doha. It came as Gulf rulers acknowledged that
deep-seated differences notwithstanding, they needed to cooperate in
confronting the most significant threat facing them: the rise of the Islamic
State, a militant jihadist group that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq with
a population larger than that of several of the wealthy, oil-rich sheikdoms.


A crisis meeting in Jeddah this weekend of Gulf leaders focused on countering
the Islamic State threat avoided mention of the rift with Qatar, one of the
most serious crisis in the almost three-decade old history of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC), which groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. A flurry of meetings in recent weeks
including a visit by Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to Saudi
King Abdullah and talks last week in Doha between Tamim and a Saudi
delegation that included Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal,
intelligence chief Prince Khaled bin Bandar, and Interior Minister Prince
Mohammed bin Nayef failed to narrow the Qatari-Saudi gap.


The decision to build the stadia and the significance attributed to it by
assigning the task to Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, which has
been tasked in the past with key projects such as the development of the King
Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research focused
institution that is not bound by gender segregation and other religious
restrictions, highlighted the deep-seated roots of soccer in the kingdom.


It also signalled the fact that Saudi rulers afraid in the wake of the role
that militant soccer fans played in the 2011 toppling of Egyptian president
Hosni Mubarak as well as the 2012 resignation of Prince Nawaf bin Faisal as
head of the Saudi Arabia Football Federation (SAFF) and his replacement this
year as head of the Saudi Youth Welfare Presidency accepted that seeking to
de-emphasize soccer in favour of sports that evoked less deep-seated emotions
was politically too risky.


The plans for the new stadia made no mention of including facilities for
women spectators, an indication that efforts by more progressive elements of
the political hierarchy and soccer establishment have so far failed to make
the game more inclusive. Similarly, the national sports plan is being
designed for men only, reinforcing the notion that the kingdom and the
Islamic State draw their inspiration from a shared puritan interpretation of
religious texts despite the fact that Saudi rulers view the group as one, if
not the most serious threat they are confronting.


The announcement of plans for new stadia followed a number of trial balloons
floated by the kingdom in the past year testing the waters for a greater role
in world sports. Some reports suggested that the kingdom was considering
bidding for international sports events, which risk putting it under the
international spotlight and exposing it to criticism like happened with
Qatar’s handling of foreign workers.


Equally unlikely are suggestions that the kingdom would field a credible
candidate for next year’s election of a president of the Asian Football
Confederation (AFC). Saudi Arabia is more likely to support the re-election
of Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, a national of Bahrain, which is
closely aligned with the kingdom. Salman last year defeated hands down among
others a Saudi national in an interim AFC election.


Challenging Qatar’s lead role as not only the region’s soccer hub but as an
increasingly important node in global soccer will take more than matching it
in infrastructure. While Qatar hardly ranks among the world’s most
transparent and accountable nations, it has less domestic soccer-related
transparency issues than the kingdom does.


Prominent Saudi businessmen, including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a prominent
member of the Saudi ruling family and one of the world’s wealthiest men, and
soccer officials recently grumbled over government guidance in the awarding
by SAFF of soccer broadcast rights to Middle East Broadcasting Center Group
(MBC) in a deal worth 3.6 billion Saudi riyals or $960 million.


The deal with MBC, which is chaired by Sheikh Waleed Bin Ibrahim Al Brahim,
an in-law of Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family, was rushed through in an
effort to pre-empt a  possible bid by beIN Sports, the sports channel of the
Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera network. MBC’s flagship, Al Arabiya, was
founded as a counterweight to Al Jazeera. SAFF president Ahmed Eid Al Harbi
justified the decision as having been taken in consultation with senior
government officials because there were national issues involved that were
“larger than soccer.”


James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore,
co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and
the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a
forthcoming book with the same title.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-dorsey/saudi-qatari-rivalry-spil_b_5743894.html