DOHA, Qatar — Finding a way to accommodate soccer’s free-flowing, alcohol-infused fan culture with the traditions and religious beliefs of an overwhelmingly Muslim country like Qatar remains one of the significant challenges facing the emirate as it prepares to host soccer’s World Cup in 2022.
Just ask Walid Shafiey.
A Muslim who is strict about the religion’s tenets, Shafiey arrived at a pop-up fan zone on the edge of a golf course on Wednesday night to watch the broadcast of a big, televised match only to discover alcohol being served.
“This is a very big problem,” he said.
It was not big enough to chase away Shafiey, who settled in to watch the game with his wife, their four children and hundreds of foreign fans visiting Qatar this week for matches in FIFA’s annual world club championship. But the public presence of alcohol, a rarity in this country holding onto tradition while seeking a bigger presence internationally, didn’t sit well with him and other Qataris.
“It’s very difficult,” he said, “I’m Muslim.”
Qatar’s balancing act for the club championship could presage the strain that it will face — accommodating foreign visitors and keeping true to its customs and norms — when it plays host to soccer’s World Cup in 2022.
Merely securing the hosting rights to the World Cup almost a decade ago has challenged Qatar in myriad ways, from criticism about its human rights record to the billions of dollars in spending on stadiums and infrastructure projects that already have transformed the country. But it also has led to searching questions, both inside Qatar and out, about how accommodate the expectations of tens of thousands of foreign soccer fans — and powerful sponsors like Budweiser — in a conservative Muslim country where the consumption of alcohol is heavily controlled, limited to bars in international chain hotels, and subjected, since the start of this year, to a 100 percent excise tax that effectively doubles its price.
For visitors as well as organizers, this week’s Club World Cup, a tournament for six regional champions and a team from the host nation that concludes Saturday, is a crucial part of the strategy to work out the kinks. For many fans, the experience has been unlike anything they have experienced.
Surrounding Shafiey were hordes of Brazilians, in town to follow the South American champion, Flamengo, which will face the European champion Liverpool in Saturday’s final. Unlike Shafiey and his family, who had come to watch soccer, the Brazilians had been lured to the fan zone by the cheap and plentiful beer.
A few yards from where Shafiey had weighed his discomfort on Wednesday, Tom Singh, who had arrived in Doha from England that morning, was on his way out. Having quickly downed four pints of beer, Singh had just as quickly decided the Club World Cup fan zone wasn’t for him.
“I think it’s a bit quiet to be honest,” he said in a thick Liverpool accent as he scanned the open-air venue. Not far away, a few hundred visitors were milling around a stage where Jamie Webster, a singer/songwriter from Liverpool, had just performed.
Mohamed Ali, a 30-year-old Tunisian who now lives in Qatar, said fans should be welcomed for big events like the World Cup, but that they needed to respect the country’s customs. “It’s not allowed here to drink alcoholic drinks,” he said, making a circle with his arms to signify the city’s historic center. “It’s much better for them to go far and drink.”
For many Qataris, alcohol is seen as a public hazard; Abdul Rehman al Assaidi, a 29-year-old from Doha, even suggested selling beer in popular areas would be unsafe. “If you have drunk people in the street that’s not safe,” he said. “There’s children. There’s women. We have traditional customs, we cannot mix them.
“It’s scary: if you’re drunk, what can you do? I will not feel safe for my children or family because the people who are drunk could do anything because they are outside of their minds.”
To try to strike a balance between differing sensibilities this week, organizers provided discounted beer in the fan zone but ensured the venue was not near busy urban areas — an apparent effort to keep any awkward encounters to a minimum. But that immediately created a new problem: How to move thousands of supporters to the stadium en masse?
The answer came in the form of a caravan of buses, which at one stage numbered more than 100 idling along both sides of the approach road to the golf club. Fans heading to the Khalifa stadium were divided into groups depending on the teams they supported and set off, in a convoy with police outriders, on a journey that took almost an hour. (Without bathrooms on board, this soon created its own discomfort for fans who had been drinking but were not prepared for such a long ride.)
In many ways, the fan zone’s off-site location has been emblematic of the Club World Cup, where supporters have not congregated in the city center the way they typically do at international tournaments. There were few signs or flags draped from buildings, for example, nor the sounds of songs and chants filling in the air. Instead, fans have scattered around hotel bars, shopping malls and the Middle Eastern cafes and restaurants of Doha’s old town, where on Wednesday conversations in Brazilian Portuguese could be heard above traditional music on Qatar’s national day.
At a table at one of the cafes, a group of Flamengo fans chatted about the differences between their trip to Doha and the one they had taken last month to Lima, Peru, for the final of the South American championship, the Copa Libertadores. There, the entire city had been consumed by the game between Flamengo and Argentina’s River Plate, they said, and the beer was not only more available, but also much cheaper.
The Flamengo group was not the only one working out the limits of local cultural norms. Most visitors in Doha this week, especially the estimated 10,000 fans from Brazil, said not only had they never been in Qatar before, many also had never traveled to the Middle East. Some said they had been spooked by travel guidance issued by their home countries. Most said they just wanted to be good visitors.
Matt Bloor, a Liverpool fan, said his girlfriend had been especially careful since they arrived on Sunday. “She’s like: ‘What can we do? What can’t we do?’” Bloor said. “Holding hands? I don’t know whether we can or whether we can’t.”
Even for expatriate residents of Qatar, the rules can be confusing and, at times, confounding, according to Sebastian Carr, who has taught music in Doha for the past eight years. After years of having to pay eye-watering sums for beers, he said he had raced to the fan zone to “fill up.” But Carr acknowledged that even he is not quite sure where the line is sometimes in a country where foreigners outnumber the local population by more than three to one. “No one really knows,” he said.
But western norms are bending to meet Gulf sensibilities, too. Webster, the singer, toned down the lyrics of some of the standards he performed during his performance, and alcohol has not been available inside the stadiums during the Club World Cup. Organizers have yet to decide whether the same will be true at the World Cup, although FIFA has pressured previous tournament hosts to allow it.
But Liverpool’s fan base is also among soccer’s most global, and for its Muslim supporters the tournament’s host city conferred benefits. Fans from Iraq and Jordan, for example, were able to take short flights to Doha and enjoy the rare treat of seeing their team live. For Ismail Timol of Preston, England, a city about 45 minutes from Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, it meant his devotion to his club and his faith could fit neatly together.
“There’s halal food, mosques everywhere, so we don’t need to worry about the food or doing our prayers,” Timol said. “And we thought, let’s go.”
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
