Al-Kuwari stated she was within the strategy of transferring the ladies’s nationwide staff underneath the aegis of the Qatar Soccer Affiliation, the place she is now employed, and that she had come to the federation with an inventory of calls for for 2023: coaching camps, pleasant matches, a brand new head coach, a goalkeeper coach, a coaching workers, devoted amenities for the ladies’s staff. The listing goes on.
And in the event that they don’t get this stuff? “We’re ready for the legacy of the World Cup to convey us up. That’s our solely hope,” Saleh stated.
The interview ended after a query concerning the 2022 World Cup bid, and whether or not the ladies thought their staff was only a field to examine in guaranteeing FIFA would approve Qatar’s plans. The gamers didn’t reply, however al-Kuwari spoke up. “No. No, no, no,” she stated. Saleh translated for her once more: The ladies’s staff began in 2009, a 12 months earlier than the bid, she insisted, earlier than Qatar knew it might host the World Cup.
An Unsure Future
The elemental story of Qatar’s girls’s nationwide staff shouldn’t be singular. The gamers spent eight years with out help, financing or curiosity commensurate to that of males’s soccer. What seems to have led to that distinction — some mixture of apathy and neglect — is just like what girls’s nationwide groups are going through in every single place.
In the US, the world champion girls’s staff sued the governing physique for soccer in America to press its rights for equal remedy, and equal pay, with its nation’s males’s staff. Australia’s girls’s staff boycotted matches in a dispute over pay, and Canada’s girls’s staff, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, is locked in a bitter contract dispute with its federation.
In Qatar, the disappearance of the ladies’s staff was in some ways an previous, acquainted story: When it got here to useful resource allocation, males’s soccer got here first.
“There is no such thing as a purpose in sitting right here with a journalist and saying the identical story each time with none profit to us,” Saleh stated. She added, “We’re right here to inform the world that we’d like extra help, and that we’re as much as play and that we do have a girls’s nationwide staff in Qatar.”
