Al-Kuwari stated she was within the means of transferring the ladies’s nationwide workforce underneath the aegis of the Qatar Soccer Affiliation, the place she is now employed, and that she had come to the federation with a listing of calls for for 2023: coaching camps, pleasant matches, a brand new head coach, a goalkeeper coach, a coaching employees, devoted amenities for the ladies’s workforce. The record goes on.
And in the event that they don’t get these items? “We’re ready for the legacy of the World Cup to carry us up. That’s our solely hope,” Saleh stated.
The interview ended after a query in regards to the 2022 World Cup bid, and whether or not the ladies thought their workforce was only a field to examine in making certain 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 workforce began in 2009, a yr earlier than the bid, she insisted, earlier than Qatar knew it might host the World Cup.
An Unsure Future
The basic story of Qatar’s girls’s nationwide workforce will not be singular. The gamers spent eight years with out assist, 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 dealing with in all places.
In the US, the world champion girls’s workforce sued the governing physique for soccer in America to press its rights for equal remedy, and equal pay, with its nation’s males’s workforce. Australia’s girls’s workforce boycotted matches in a dispute over pay, and Canada’s girls’s workforce, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, is locked in a bitter contract dispute with its federation.
In Qatar, the disappearance of the ladies’s workforce was in some ways an outdated, acquainted story: When it got here to useful resource allocation, males’s soccer got here first.
“There isn’t any motive 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 want extra assist, and that we’re as much as play and that we do have a girls’s nationwide workforce in Qatar.”
Supply: NY Times
