Travelling with Saudi fans – 100 buses, sympathy for Messi and a World Cup shock for the ages

Omar is a 20-year-old engineering student from Dammam, a city about 320km north of the border with Qatar.

He was meant to leave the house at 5am but overslept, and that meant his group of three Saudi fans did not set off until 6.15am, which probably explains why Salman, the oldest of this trio, is at the front of the bus we are all on, telling the driver to speed up or let him drive.

The problem, if there is one, is it is now nearly 11am, Saudi Arabia’s opener against Argentina kicks off in two hours, six other buses have overtaken us on the four-lane highway from the Abu Samra border crossing to Doha, our driver seems to think he is doing his test, and have we mentioned that Saudi Arabia play Lionel Messi’s Argentina in two hours?!

It is a scene every travelling fan has seen or heard about.

And it is at this moment that I realise Fifa president Gianni Infantino was right (even a stopped clock and all that) on Saturday when he said we are all united in our love for the magic of football: an irrational, journey-through-the-desert, travel-in-hope and sing-a-few-songs kind of love and it is absolutely universal.

And while we are on the topic of being fair to those who have been criticised of late, this bus, while cautious, is free of charge, clean and comfortable. It is one of at least 100 the Qataris have provided to take Saudi fans to Monday’s match. All their neighbours had to do was download the World Cup’s ticketing app/temporary visa, get to the border, park and then move through a giant tent that can process 4,000 football tourists an hour.

“It’s been really easy, really smooth,” says Mohammed, a Chelsea fan from Dammam, who has just started supporting Newcastle United, too. Cannot imagine why.

Life is smooth when you go with the flow. The Athletic would have taken a picture of the Qatari border guards’ faces when it explained to them that its reporter had arrived at the border by taxi from Doha, had sent this taxi away and now wanted to get on a bus back to Doha with the Saudi fans behind that huge fence, but they had guns, real ones, and they thought the reporter was a danger. To himself.

However, once they realised nobody that stupid could be a threat to national security, cursory directions to a roundabout were given, kindly local cops intervened and a one-way passage back to Doha was secured.

Messi mania

Abdul and Abdullah, sitting in the front seat of the Lusail Express, wearing immaculate white robes, found it all very amusing, but then they were living their best lives as Saudi supporters who just so happen to be Messi fanatics, too.

“I’m cheering for Saudi Arabia and Messi,” says Abdul. “The perfect result would be 4-3.”

“To whom?” asks The Athletic.

“Saudi Arabia, of course, with a Messi hat-trick, that’s the best.”

“How many Saudi fans do you think will be at the game?”

“Probably 40,000 Saudi Arabia and 40,000 Argentina. Yeah, you’ll see a lot of Messi fans, 100%, and not only in Saudi, the whole world.”

A few rows back, behind two sleeping World Cup volunteers, are four fans from Al Hofuf, a Saudi city about two hours’ drive from the border.

“I’m cheering for Saudi Arabia,” said Farhad.

“I’m for Messi – he’s the best!” interjects his friend. There is a Barca/ Real Madrid split in the camp and it extends to their score predictions: the Barca supporters thought Argentina would win by at least five goals, while the Real supporters were hoping for narrower defeats.

Of the first 10 fellow travellers we spoke to, only sleepy Omar was dreaming big.

“Saudi Arabia will win, of course,” he says. “My score prediction is maybe 2-0 for Saudi Arabia.”

His friend shakes his head. “No, it will be 3-1 to Argentina,” he counsels.

“He is more realistic,” counters Omar, who only supports Al-Hilal, “the most powerful team in Asia”, and has no time for this supporting-foreign-teams nonsense.

“I am more optimistic. I don’t care about Messi. He is only one man. I care about the team. That’s what’s important.

“I care for my country, 30 million people, not only one man. Messi is only one player. And we will be the loudest fans.”

Saudi Arabia’s day

Omar has a ticket for Saudi Arabia’s final group-stage game against Mexico next Wednesday. Unlike most of the bus, he was heading back to Dammam immediately after the Argentina game as he thought he had college on Tuesday.

Not anymore, my friend. Have yourself a national holiday. Because, just in case you missed it, Omar was so nearly right.

The final score was Saudi 2, Messi 1: cue the commissioning of thousands of pieces on Messi’s misery, top five World Cup shocks and Hervé Renard picture galleries. Rightly so, too, this was one of those wonderful upside-down moments that every World Cup needs, and Saudi Arabia and their travelling army deserved it.

But perhaps the bigger shock is that Abdul, Abdullah, Omar and I – yes, it was me – were on that bus at all, because less than two years ago that border crossing was closed, as it had been ever since 5 June 2017, when Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates decided to blockade Qatar by land, sea and air.

These four countries closed their embassies in Doha, ejected Qatar’s diplomats from their capitals, severed all financial ties with their fellow Gulf Cooperation Council partner and began a coordinated campaign to crash Qatar’s economy.

The spark, well, it is hard to say, but the quartet’s official reason was that Qatar’s attempts to assert its own sovereignty, which means getting out from under Saudi Arabia’s shadow, had unsettled the region’s delicate equilibrium.

In truth, it had been coming. After more than a century of doing whatever Saudi’s royal family, the House of Saud, told them to do, Qatar’s royal family, the Al Thanis, had decided that their peninsula kingdom would only be truly safe if it made some new friends and got noticed on the global stage.

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The former meant speaking to the type of people the Saudis disapproved of – Iran, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Gulf bogeymen – and the latter involved launching the region’s biggest news network, Al Jazeera, an award-winning airline and hosting lots of major sports events.

In fact, if Qatar winning the right to stage the 2022 World Cup, and then not inviting Saudi Arabia and the UAE to share it, was not the last straw, it was certainly among them.

And now?

“We’re all Arabs,” says Mohammed, the Chelsea/Newcastle fan. “Saudis, Qataris, it’s the same.”

It has certainly looked that way this week, after Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman took his seat on the other side of Infantino from Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, during Sunday’s World Cup opener. The Arab brothers – the real ones, not Infantino – were together again for the Saudi-Argentina match, and Sheikh Tamim was even wearing a Saudi scarf.

That three-and-a-half-year row that shut the border, threatened the fragile equilibrium of this complicated region and held up the Newcastle United takeover? All forgotten about now.

In the same way that you might decide your in-laws have been frozen out enough and perhaps they can come to Christmas this year, Sheikh Tamim and MBS are football buddies again, Iran is the one to worry about and maybe Saudi Arabia can have their own World Cup in eight years. They have already got Messi.

But let us not spoil what was a World Cup game for the ages with too much politics. They will still be there tomorrow, unfortunately.

Perhaps the final word today should go to Omar. When asked where he learnt his excellent English, he said: “Edinburgh. I studied there for six months last year. I really liked it but it’s not really a football city, is it? They like rugby more.”

I almost jumped in to tell him he missed a trick by not going to Hibernian to hear them sing Sunshine on Leith, but while I was weighing it up, he said: “I want to go to Glasgow. Now that’s a football city.”

That’s true, Omar, but it sounds like Dammam is, too. And today so was Doha. DM

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.