The possibility that Lionel messi join a Dream Team with Neymar, Mbappé, Donnarumma, Sergio Ramos, Marquinhos and Di María draws attention. How can it be that Barcelona, the club that had the most income in the 19/20 season, does not manage to retain it, and Paris Saint-Germain, with almost 200 million euros less raised in the same season, can pay a world team? The difference is that Barcelona is a team, but PSG is a State. Or, more precisely, it is a public limited company owned by a state, which in this case is Qatar. While soccer teams must subsist on traditional income, PSG adds a section: that of a government subsidy.
Qatar bought 70% of Paris Saint-Germain in 2011 and, a year later, took the remaining 30%. It did so through a sovereign investment fund managed by today’s Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who at that time was the heir to the throne. This investment fund, called the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), was created with the objective of managing the profits generated by oil and natural gas. Therefore, PSG is owned by the QIA, which is owned by Qatar and controlled directly by the royal family.
Now why did Qatar decide to invest in football? Was it just another investment or did you have another intention? Of course it seduced the glamor of Paris and the possibility of rebuilding a team with little history and fewer titles (in 2011, it had only two local championships against nine from Marseille and ten from Saint-Etienne), but, more than that, PSG gave Qatar a chance to clean up its image and play on the board of international politics.
Specifically, The Qatari government got into soccer when its Arab neighbors accused it of promoting coup movements and protecting terrorism. According to academic Simon Chadwick, an expert on the Eurasian sports industry, this was the main reason for the investment. Faced with the need to nullify the negative image generated by Saudi Arabia and its allies, Qatar fought back with a kind of whitewash through sport.
The first strong move that Qatar made in the football industry was to obtain the headquarters of the 2022 World Cup, which occurred in 2010, when it surpassed, to the surprise of the planet, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Australia. That struggle coincided with the first tensions between Qatar and Arabia, which hardened between late 2010 and early 2011, during the Arab Spring, a political movement that led to the fall of the governments of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. The reason for the confrontation was that Qatar encouraged the new political wave and Arabia preferred a more conservative stance. In 2011, QIA bought PSG.
The conflict grew and reached its peak in 2017, when the Saudis accused the Qataris of supporting terrorism. The Riyadh government severed relations with Doha and found rapid alignment in the Emirates, Bahrain, Libya, Egypt, the Maldives, and Yemen. All together they exercised a diplomatic boycott against Qatar, banned the circulation of airplanes of origin and destination from Qatar, closed its borders for the citizens of that country, demanded that Doha break with Iran and demanded the dismantling of the chain of TV Al-Jazeera, owned by the Al Thani government.
Thus, Qatar responded with a strategy that can be summarized with the term “soft power.” It is a concept that emerged in 1990 at Harvard, when Joseph Nye thus defined the power of international influence by soft methods such as diplomacy, relationships or marketing. It is an opposition to the term “hard power”, which would be to obtain results by hard means, such as violence. The objective of Qatar, which was not in a position to resolve its political conflicts through a military dispute, was to clean up its image and change the axis of the discussion with sport as one of its main arguments.
For Chadwick, he achieved his goal, especially by winning the World Cup venue, then by buying PSG and finally by every high-sounding acquisition, such as Neymar’s, in 2017, which came very shortly after the protection accusations. terrorism. Arabia and its allies severed relations with Qatar in June 2017. Neymar’s purchase occurred on August 3 of that year. “As the political dispute grew, QIA used Neymar’s signature to show its economic and political strength,” Chadwick said. Qatar showed its neighbors immense soft power and Neymar unwittingly became an ideal piece of Al Thani strategy.
In January 2021, Qatar and its adversaries reestablished relations, and the King of Arabia lifted the blockade on the Qataris. But Qatar has already proven that the soft power of football brings them good results. Why, then, should he not take advantage of the possibility of hiring Lionel Messi?
* Author of “El Circo de los Pueblos. How dictators, drug traffickers, politicians and businessmen got power through football “
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