Today at the FIFA World Cup: Can Qatar unleash tiki-taka in the desert?

In 2004 – six years before the Gulf state automatically qualified for the World Cup after being declared hosts – the country set up a $1.4 billion Aspire Academy in its bid to produce home-grown players rather than rely on naturalised talents.

On Sunday, when The Maroons make their World Cup debut against Ecuador, 18 out of the 26 players to choose from for coach Felix Sanchez will be Aspire graduates who’ve grown up playing together.

🎙️ Selected quotes from the pre-match press conference featuring our national team coach Felix Sanchez and captain Hassan Al-Haydos, ahead of tomorrow’s #FIFAWorldCup opener against Ecuador #AlAnnabi #Qatar2022 pic.twitter.com/eEr83PpqlZ

— Qatar Football Association (@QFA_EN) November 19, 2022

This familiarity – and Aspire is just one of their many links – will be the key for Qatar, who are relatively unknown to the rest of the world given that their preparation has been shrouded in secrecy. The team has held training camps far away from public glare, in Spain and Austria, since June and played a lot of matches behind closed doors, even ensuring that no one except their video analyst recorded them.

Sanchez may have held his cards close to his chest but Qatar have an unmistakable Spanish influence, which is apparent in the way they play. Almost one-fourth of their squad plays for the same club, Al Sadd, where Spanish World Cup winner Xavi was the manager before he moved to Barcelona. Xavi’s methods and style have been imprinted on the minds of these players, with Akram Afif being an embodiment.

Watch out for Afif, Qatar’s creative outlet who makes the team tick. At club and country, the 26-year-old has been given the freedom to float around on the pitch to make things happen. And if his partnership with Almoez Ali, who is on the verge of becoming Qatar’s all-time top-scorer, clicks over the next fortnight, the tiny country will start dreaming.

Afif and Ali have been playing together since their pre-teen days and throughout their journey, Sanchez has been a constant. Sanchez, a La Masia graduate who holds Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp as his gurus, led Qatar to the Under-19 Asian Championship title in 2014 where Afif and Ali played an influential role. Two years later, when he was handed over the reins of the Under-23 side, Qatar almost qualified for the Rio Olympics, and were crowned Asian champions in 2019.

Cohesive unit

En route to the continental title, Qatar showed remarkable fluidity and looked a team that liked to attack, move the ball around swiftly with delightful one-touch football and hold possession – tiki-taka in the desert, if you will. Years of playing together, right from their academy days to the club level and finally for the country, has made Qatar a cohesive team.

But will that be enough to help them see off the group stage? In recent matches against Canada, Chile and Croatia U-23, which Qatar lost, Sanchez’s approach was more defensive rather than the free-flowing attacking football which helped them become Asian champions in 2019.

Say cheese! 😄📸

🇪🇨 High sprits in the Ecuador camp ahead of tomorrow’s opener#FIFAWorldCup | @LaTri pic.twitter.com/RCiEOWMjSp

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) November 19, 2022

The other big question is, will Qatar be able to come out firing on all cylinders as Russia did in 2018? They will have to on Sunday against Ecuador if the country hopes to avoid becoming only the second host country, after South Africa in 2010, to be eliminated in the group stages itself, given their next two ties – against Senegal and the Netherlands – will only get tougher.

Qatar, though, will feel ready and confident. While the rest of the world coped with disruptions to their domestic schedule, Qatar have been training together for the last six months; trying to apply the finishing touches to a project that began 18 years ago.