One year away from its soccer World Cup, Qatar gains strength with Xavi at Barcelona

There was a time when Barcelona’s jersey was a virgin of advertising, a land free of sponsors. And there was a time when Qatar was completely alien to soccer. Times gone by: Qatar Airways was already the team’s main sponsor for years, and now that that stage is over, the Gulf emirate is making a strong comeback to the Spanish club through Xavi Hernandez, its new coach.

A very timely landing, because there is barely a year left for the start of the World Cup in Qatar, perhaps the most controversial in history, and one of the axes of the collapse of FIFA in 2015. The small Persian Gulf country will host the World Cup between November 21 and December 18, 2022.

Xavi, one of the best players in the history of Spanish soccer, and key to his country’s title in South Africa 2010, was managing Al-Sadd in the Qatari league. Joan Laporta, Barcelona’s president, declined to clarify whether the club paid the five million termination clause to take Xavi before the end of his contract.

But what matters in Barcelona is something else, that the 41-year-old former midfielder restores the direction of a team that marveled more than a decade ago with Josep Guardiola at the helm and is currently struggling in the domestic league and has been stringing together years of frustration in the Champions League.

“I can’t talk about what has happened in recent seasons because I haven’t been there. But when we have had standards and demands, we have done well. What is clear to me is that you have to set standards,” Xav stressed at his presentation on Monday in Barcelona. “You don’t have to be tough, you have to set rules and follow them. It’s not discipline, it’s order.

The illusion in Barcelona is to repeat the history of Guardiola: a former soccer idol of the team that, without major experience in the position, is revealed as a genius as a coach.

There are those who believe that Xavi, as Guardiola’s “brain” in that brilliant team, is the right choice. And there are those who warn of the dangers of unsubstantiated illusion. “Let’s be serious: nobody knows if Xavi is a great coach. Nobody,” wrote columnist Iñako Díaz Guerra in “El Mundo”.

Since he stopped playing for Barcelona in 2015, Xavi settled with his family in Qatar, where he first played for four years for Al-Sadd, then served as “global ambassador” for Qatar 2022 and finally, since 2019, coached Al-Sadd.

Qatar, which has become in the last decade a powerful player in the high politics of world sport, once aspired to host the Olympic Games and proposed Doha as a candidate, but soon noticed that it had much better chances betting on soccer.

Thus, in 2010, FIFA decided to choose Russia as the host country for 2018 and Qatar for 2022. An unprecedented double choice that Joseph Blatter, then FIFA president, still regrets: it is from this choice of Qatar 2022 that his current problems with the judiciary arise.

The footballing power of the reigning family in Qatar, the Al Thani, thus became enormous. Not only for the World Cup, but also for having acquired Paris Saint Germain, the club that has just signed the best soccer player in the world, the Argentine Lionel Messi.

In addition to Xavi and Messi, there is also Guardiola, who played for Al-Ahli for two seasons when Qatar was just an emerging idea in the sport. Like Xavi, Guardiola was also an ambassador for the Qatar 2022 World Cup.

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