It’s January 2024 and the meeting of the European Club Association board is being held in Doha. Geography buffs will have no doubt spotted that Doha is not in Europe, so you might conclude it is an odd place to hold such a conference.
Well, yes and no. The meeting was hosted, in more than one respect, by the chairman of the ECA, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, also chairman of Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and also therefore the chairman of Paris Saint-Germain.
Al-Khelaifi at times resembles the bird that chooses which direction the flock is going to fly: when he moves, everyone else seems to follow him. You see the commotion before you see the man, a hubbub followed by this slight, ostensibly quite unassuming man. He doesn’t have a particularly big retinue, or at least not one that is immediately obvious, but the room seems to move around him.
Everyone wants a little of Al-Khelaifi’s time. Fellow executives, assistants, ECA officials, local media, international media, a guy who just walks past the room in which the meeting is held and sticks his head in to see who’s there, authors of books on football club ownership. He has that dual quality that many in his position have: when he’s on the move, shifting from meeting A to glad-handing opportunity B, he looks straight through you — not in an outwardly rude or unpleasant way, but in a fashion that ensures he can move to the next thing without being slowed down excessively.
“I wanted to build ‘a brand’,” says Al-Khelaifi, when I ask what his primary goal for PSG was back in 2011 when QSI bought the club. “We wanted to build up the football club. We wanted to have fanbases all over the world. We wanted to win trophies. We wanted to build the best training centre in the world.
“We wanted to have our youth players coming into the first team, which we are doing now — we never had this before. People thought we would just be buying players, but we invested in our training centre. We want 11 players from our academy — that’s our goal. That’s our real goal. We want to be here for the long term and this is what it shows. It’s our strategy and vision.”
And whatever else you might think of PSG, QSI, Qatar or Al-Khelaifi, it’s pretty clear they have succeeded in building the “brand” of the club. The 2024 Deloitte Money League ranked them as the third most valuable club in the world, behind only Real Madrid and Manchester City, and ahead of traditional behemoths Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
They opened a shop on London’s Oxford Street in 2023, something Al-Khelaifi was very keen to stress not even clubs in London had. ‘”That was one of our main objectives,” he says. “If I had told you before we want to open a store in London you would have said, ‘No, that’s totally crazy and impossible’. We have them in Japan, Korea, the U.S. — this is also part of our strategy.” This is brand PSG, which is inextricably linked with brand Qatar.
“I’m proud to be an ambassador,” he tells me. “I was an ambassador when I was a tennis player. I’m proud of my flag and anything I can do for our country, because we have ambition. We have objectives and goals and plans, and we have the right to do it. We have proved it.
“We had the best World Cup, and people need to look at Qatar in a very positive and realistic way — not just what they are reading and hearing without being here even. It’s not really anything to do with my job, but as a human being, as a Qatari, I feel it when you hear a lot of things before the World Cup and after you saw people give such good feedback. We’re very proud.”
If this was a Wikipedia article, there would be a pretty big “citation needed” next to Al-Khelaifi’s claim that the World Cup was the best ever. The spectacle of the astonishing final, with the satisfying narrative of Lionel Messi finally getting his hands on the big one, might allow them to claim that.
But you’d get a different answer if you asked the families of the workers who died building the infrastructure and stadiums that made it possible. Or the workers held in the country and forced to live in cramped, sweltering conditions. Or the gay people who felt unable to exist in Qatar because of the nation’s inhospitable attitude towards homosexuality. Right down to the relatively insignificant complaints of those of us who weren’t subject to any of those genuinely oppressive conditions, but just found Doha to be a dreary, soulless place where even the Souq Waqif, the theoretical ‘old town’, was essentially built from plywood (the original souk burned down in the 1990s), adding to the impression that the whole place was just one giant facade.
Those opinions, however, may be in the minority, which could be evidence that their work here is done; that the purpose of all of this has been achieved.
“We don’t see it that way,” Al-Khelaifi somewhat unconvincingly claims, when I ask if he thinks the world sees his homeland differently because they own one of Europe’s biggest football clubs. “Qatar has changed so much in the last few years, in a positive way. Everything is changing. People came here and said: ‘Wow, so much has changed here’. The infrastructure, stadiums, facilities. It’s Arab culture, it’s in our DNA: we love to host people, we love to open our houses to people, we love to help and support. This is our culture. It’s how we’ve been educated.
“PSG is owned by QSI: so everyone will talk about Qatar, directly or indirectly. But it’s a French club and we’re focusing on it and building a French brand.”
The reasons QSI bought PSG in 2011 are obvious and have been discussed at length. This was soft power, sportswashing, geopolitical influence — however you want to describe it. This is a tiny but fabulously wealthy nation with a population of something like 2.6million (only 500,000 or so of whom are actually Qatari), with bigger and more powerful neighbours, who wanted and needed a voice on the world stage, and also wanted the global consciousness to think of them as something other than an oil well with a spicy Amnesty report.
The interesting element to the Qatari ownership of PSG was always going to be what happened after the 2022 World Cup. It wasn’t a coincidence that QSI’s purchase of the club happened in the same year as the World Cup bid, so the common consensus was that its decision-makers would lose interest when FIFA and the rest of the world had gone, leaving behind them only a few dog-eared World Cup posters and a selection of ostentatious and capacious football stadiums that would rarely be used. Would they cut football, and by extension PSG, loose, thanking them for their service, having served their purpose?
As it turns out, they wouldn’t. One reason is simply that, in terms of a ‘brand’ and a business, PSG has been undeniably successful. QSI paid roughly €70million (£59m; $76m at current rates) for the club in 2011 and, while it has poured Scrooge McDuck levels of money into the club via player acquisitions and infrastructure investments, the purchase of 12.5 per cent of the club’s shares in late 2023 by Arctos valued the whole thing at €4.25billion.
Another is a continuation of the original reasons it bought the club in the first place. Qatar still needs influence, it still needs soft power, it still needs a distraction from a questionable human rights record: in a 2023 report, Amnesty International highlighted ‘concerns’ with LGBTQI rights, women’s rights, citizens’ rights to free assembly and forced labour, among others. It also needs to future-proof its economy: one day the oil and gas will run out, so it needs to raise the profile of Qatar as a destination, for business, for tourists and for sport.
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But perhaps more than anything else, it needs an element of geopolitical protection. Because between 2017 and 2021, Qatar was under a wide-ranging blockade from a collection of nearby states, most prominently Saudi Arabia, the nation that is the only one Qatar — this tiny peninsula jutting out into the Persian Gulf — shares a land border with.
The crisis was rooted in mutual suspicion and rivalry for local influence and power, with Qatar keen to establish itself as a genuine force in the region, rather than just the little neighbour.
But the reason given by Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, for cutting Qatar off from the rest of the world was that it ‘supported terrorism’ and was too cosy with Iran for their liking. There was hacking of official government websites and emails of prominent officials on both sides, and an arms deal between Saudi and the United States didn’t help matters. By June 2017, the opposing nations announced a severance of diplomatic relations with Qatar, and closed the land border between it and Saudi Arabia, in addition to banning aircraft destined for Doha from using their airspace.
A big part of the crisis was the seemingly outlandish but very real threat from the Saudi side to turn the land border between the two states into a canal. The ‘Salwa Canal’ project proposed by Saudi was, in public at least, said to be a shipping route, but in reality its purpose would have been to literally cut Qatar adrift from the Arabian peninsula, to turn it into an island. Qatar was already legally, diplomatically and ideologically isolated, but this would have cut it off physically too.
The plans were eventually abandoned, but once the idea of something like that is out there, it will always be out there, a constant threat, a huge Acme anvil hanging over its heads on a precarious length of piano wire.
The crisis came to a theoretical close in January 2021, after a summit in the Saudi city of Al Ula. Diplomatic relations were restored and the blockade was officially ended, but many more fundamental issues remained unresolved. It was replaced by an uneasy truce and, while there are some small symbolic shows of unity (you can see adverts for the Saudi tourist board at Doha’s Hamad International Airport, for example), nobody is under any illusions that the problems have all been solved.
Which is where stuff like PSG comes in. As long as Qatar has some definitive ties with the wider world, both economically and culturally, then it can count on a certain amount of protection and solidarity. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, sided with and lobbied for Qatar during the diplomatic crisis: would that have happened had Qatar not owned France’s biggest and most successful football club? Of course not. If the countries around Qatar really start to get busy, then will PSG keep Qatar safe? Again, of course not. But it does provide some comfort, some reason for the wider world to care about and notice a nation that, despite its vast wealth, can feel significantly isolated.
“When we came in, we wanted to be part of the beautiful European family,” Al-Khelaifi says, warming to a lyrical theme. “We have shown we want to be part of the future of European football, it’s been amazing, positive. We want to be part of this big success. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
(Top photo: Aurelien Meunier – PSG via Getty Images)
