This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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What Lionel Messi tells us about Qatar’s global ambitions
By: []
Date: 2021-09
It was in November 2010 that Argentina played what appeared to be a rather meaningless friendly against Brazil at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, Qatar. The football was largely pedestrian, though the local crowd still seemed ecstatic when a 23-year-old Argentinian, Lionel Messi, scored the only goal of the game.
In retrospect, it was the beginning of a tangled tale of money and geopolitics that will culminate when Qatar hosts next year’s World Cup. At the time, Messi was playing for Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona. Opposite him on that night was an 18-year-old Brazilian named Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, a centre-forward for the club Santos. They didn’t know it yet, but their futures would become intertwined.
It would be four years until Neymar joined Barcelona to play alongside Messi, famously becoming part of the fearsome ‘MSN’ trinity (of which Uruguay’s Luis Suarez is the third member). In 2017, Neymar joined the Qatari-owned French club, Paris Saint Germain, in a deal worth almost £200m, which smashed the world-record transfer fee paid for a football player.
Four years on, Messi and Neymar are friends reunited, the Argentinian having signed for France’s ‘big bucks’ capital city club with a reported take-home salary of €35m a season.
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More than a decade later, we now know that the Argentina versus Brazil game was anything but meaningless; indeed, it has arguably become the world’s most significant ever ‘friendly’ game of football. Three weeks after it took place, Qatar controversially won the right to stage 2022’s World Cup; several important figures associated with the hosting vote attended the game that November night.
Also in Doha for the game was FC Barcelona’s then-president, Sandro Rosell. It was Rosell who in mid-December 2010 announced that his club had signed a record-breaking £125m shirt sponsorship deal with Qatar Foundation. In 2013, this was superseded by a further multi-million pounds deal, with Qatar Airways.
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