AL HOFUF, Saudi Arabia – Inside what natives refer to as The Kingdom, two hours by taxi from the eastern border of Qatar, there’s a place not far from the World Cup that can also seem like it’s located a world away. Visitors will find a city of 150,000; an agricultural center that claims status as the date capital of the globe; and ancient souks, or bazaars, that peddle everything from spices to gold to handwoven textiles.
According to local legend, Al Hofuf is also the burial place of two fictional lovers, Layla and Majnun. Their love story was created as a poem and is the Arab world’s version of Romeo and Juliet. In it, Majnun is deemed too obsessive, Layla is married to someone else and Majnun becomes a hermit who spends every day writing poetry professing his adoration for Layla. Alas, they die before they can marry or even rekindle their romance.
The city and the story tie in perfect and random ways on Wednesday, starting with a Layla-Majnun drawing printed on a poster that someone slapped on a beige, brick building in downtown. Someone else stuck a World Cup sticker on the poster, covering Majnun’s face. And, in the dirt nearby, someone else planted the national flag.
The combination spoke to another love story. It’s a tale about a city and its beloved sport. It’s an account that’s antithetical to the billions the Saudi government has pumped into soccer clubs all over the world, through its Public Investment Fund, for sportswashing and relationship-forging and the kind of national pride that comes with heavy price tags.
Here in Al Hofuf and the neighboring suburbs, it’s impossible to traverse more than a few blocks without spotting a pitch. The surfaces vary: grass, turf, carpet, clay, dirt, even sand dunes. Some are padlocked. Some are fenced in. Some are guarded by towers and fences. Some are lit. One, during a Wednesday tour, even features couches with upholstery ripped to the padding and stained recliners stacked near each other to qualify as “stands.”
As the largest sports tournament in the world unfolds about 100 miles away, Qatar’s only neighbor accessible by land is not absent soccer history. In the previous eight World Cup tournaments, Saudi Arabia qualified six times. But it passed the group stage only once, in 1994, and collected all of three wins in five previous appearances, and two of those came in ‘94. Still, the Green Falcons have won three Asian Cups, two Arab Cups and three Arabian Gulf Cups. They also finished second in the FIFA Confederations Cup in ‘92.
Here, though, it’s not investment in well-known clubs in other places that seems to matter most. The national team be the focus, when there’s a run or a day that demands a celebration, of which there have been few.
Overall, though, in this city of soccer pitches, the beautiful game itself is the love story. Hence why, when King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud declared Wednesday a national holiday, men who were no longer prospects still gathered to play on dirt and others squared off on dunes.
Their pitch is remarkable in how unremarkable it truly is. The surface is colored light red and pocked with pebbles. The sidelines are awash in broken glass. The men run and pass and dribble in red, green, black, maroon and neon jerseys, and they are happy, first to be playing soccer, which they do even while fasting when it’s Ramadan, before dawn or after nightfall. But they are also ecstatic, smiling and giggling like teenagers, for an epic event that took place the previous afternoon a country away.
“Yesterday, we proved we can win on any team,” says Abdulaziz Alfarhan, now 26 and once a soccer prospect.
He points at the row of houses beyond the field. The goalkeeper for the national team, Mohammed Al-Owais, . They were high school teammates and training partners, he says, and Alfarhan found Al-Owais friendly, committed and thoughtful, before the goalkeeper came to star in this epic moment.
Now, on a national holiday created maybe 18 hours prior, the teammate who inspired a country has also allowed his old friend to dream his favorite dream, which now seems just a touch more realistic than it did the day before.
“I was telling everyone,” Alfarhan says, as the sun dips below the horizon and the low sky turns bright orange. “The year is 2030.”
“We must have the World Cup.”
