Qatar Football Dreams: Is it a humanitarian project or a scheme to buy Africa's best players?

Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022In 2007, a Qatari sports academy named Aspire sent thousands of scouts to identify Africa's brightest soccer prospects. The very best of these young players, all boys born in 1994, became the first class in a project that Aspire called "Football Dreams." This July, that same group showed up at Northern Ireland's Milk Cup, one of the world's most prestigious youth tournaments and?as David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, and Ryan Giggs can attest?a proving ground for future superstars. In the tournament final, Aspire beat Manchester United's youth side 5-1.

It's difficult to understand how a team with no professional affiliation, one that's based in some far-off desert, could make the young stars of the world's soccer powerhouse look like, well, boys. It's without precedent. It just doesn't happen?it can't. Except, of course, that it did. And it happened before, too: Aspire knocked Manchester United out of last year's Milk Cup as well (albeit in a lower age category).

Aspire's remarkable success suggests that the Qataris may have discovered the secrets of elite player development. The project's success has come about thanks to money, shared knowledge, and scouting on a colossal scale. But why does Qatar care about building a youth soccer empire in the first place?

Aspire was established in 2004 by the Middle Eastern emirate's prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, as a developmental center for athletes and scholars. Today roughly 200 students, grades 7 through 12, train in a multitude of sports, year-round. The campus is part of Doha's Aspire Zone, a massive compound that contains shopping malls, hotels, a sports medicine and orthopedic hospital, and the Aspire Dome?the planet's largest indoor sporting complex.

Officially, Football Dreams is a humanitarian project operated by Aspire Academy?a means for poor African prodigies to launch careers in professional soccer. While the vast majority of those chosen for Football Dreams don't spend much time in Qatar?they go instead to a slightly less posh West African sister facility, Aspire Senegal?an Aspire scholarship is still a winning lottery ticket. Each player overcomes long odds to make it through the colossal scouting process. The academy claims its 2010 operation was the largest in the history of world soccer, with more than 600,000 hopefuls from 15 countries taking part.

Aspire's ability to draw players from multiple countries at a relatively young age?most recruits are only 14?sets it apart from clubs in Europe, in which foreign recruitment is more regulated. This is especially true in England, where non-European Union nationals must be 18 and hold a work permit to join a team. The Qataris, by contrast, can sign any African player they want. Their only limit is the size of their seemingly unlimited bank account.

At the very least, Aspire's practices are an improvement on the continent's standard scouting procedures. As Der Spiegel reported last year, nearly one-quarter of all footballers in Europe are African. Finding top African talent is big business, and that business is carried out in a thriving black market. Talented boys?sometimes as young as 7, according to a report in the Guardian?are contracted to scouts or agents or ramshackle academies, some of which are roadside clearings lacking goals or proper fields. As the players progress, their contracts are bought and sold, with the trainers keeping most of the profits. It's a system similar to the shady world of youth baseball in the Dominican Republic, where buscones claim ownership of promising players and the young hopefuls are paid in little more than hope.

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Brian K. Blickenstaff is a freelance writer and a professional geographer. Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Chief FIFA inspector Harold Mayne-Nicholls is and Technical Director Jasir Al-Jamal at the Aspire sports complex by Clive Rose/Getty Images for Qatar 2022.

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