The “big challenge” of the Qatar football championship is to be more competitive, the competition’s sports director, the Portuguese Antero Henrique, who played at FC Porto and Paris Saint-Germain, among others, emphasizes today.

“Qatar invests heavily in sports and football emerges as the most visible unit. When the country invests in people, processes and infrastructure, it means it is a player important on this global platform and which does not want to be an end point, but a starting point,” said the 55-year-old leader.

Only speaker at the conference titled “How can we manage the sustainable growth of a football league? The case of Qatar Stars League“, inserted at the top Think footballAt the Pavilhão Rosa Mota in Porto, the leader shared his experiences about a special role he took on in March 2022, the year Qatar hosted the World Cup.

“It’s a different challenge. The League felt the need to standardize processes and create organic development so that all components of the process aligned. It needed a profile that had sufficient knowledge to coordinate these functions and create conditions for football to exist in the best way.” condition,” he noted.

The event, won by Al-Duhail in 2022-2023, brings together 12 clubs with public funding models, with the regulator exercising a “strong presence” in terms of approving asset entry and defining processes, with up to “veto power”.

“I had interesting accumulated experience, especially because I had been at a club in a theoretical market [FC Porto] and in a theoretical buying club [PSG]. This series of experiences contributed to the selection. The challenge is to manage a professional league, which has two levels. There is a need to transform the II League into supporting the I Division as a recruiting space”, contextualized Antero Henrique.

Despite Qatar being a country that “invests heavily in sport” and sees itself as a “stage for events of various kinds”, the Football League acts as a “starting point” and tries to ensure that “the market value of aspiring athletes is realistic . “.

“I don’t know the strategy in Saudi Arabia, where we know that huge investments have already been made in four or five teams. Our goal is to have a balanced league, something that, from what I understand so far, is not a major concern for the Saudis for now. Our project is completely different and there is no intention to change it in any way due to greater investment. The main criterion [de recrutamento] is competence. We want to have stars, but who associate their brand with performance,” he emphasized.

The arrival of foreign reinforcements comes to “help develop local talent” from Qatar, whose national team is the current Asian champion, with Antero Henrique noting a “completely strategic” presence of coaches with “different contexts”, including Portugal’s Leonardo Jardim ( Al-Rayyan), Pedro Martins (Al-Gharafa) or Bruno Pinheiro (Al-Sadd).

“There are elements that are non-negotiable. The coach is the center of the process and from there everything develops in coordination. The number of visitors is increasing and there is a great passion for football, but there is still no culture of stadium experience” , he concluded.

‘AI Liga is at a very high level’

“Dialogue is always the best tool to reach a conclusion. It is clear that we all think that Portuguese football has enormous potential and incomparable talent. However, there clearly needs to be a strategic vision and a path that everyone can join in order to better and progress. AI Liga is at a very high level, compared to championships of the same size in terms of population. We are the ones who are very ambitious, we look up and we want to be compared to the top 5,” he analyzed.

The director explains with talent the ambition of Portuguese football. “AI Liga is a seller that wants to balance its budgets, but it produces huge talent and has more and more conditions to develop it. This is what makes it grow day by day. Very important questions are now being asked, which are beginning to are being discussed and which have to do with the centralization of television rights and ultimately of other rights, such as commercial rights, to find a set of criteria that will benefit the clubs.”including the former general manager of football, vice president of the club and administrator of SAD at FC Porto, a club where he worked from 1990 to 2016.

Antero Henrique, aged 55, saw the emergence of B teams at the turn of the century as the “ideal tool at the ideal time for Portuguese football to move to a completely different level in terms of quality or export volume”.

“Our after-sales service is excellent, but then there are complicated things that need to be analyzed. For example players worth 100 million euros have almost all failed, which is frightening in some ways. We need to make our global market realistic,” he argued, seeing Portugal as “a great exporter of skilled talent.”

The second edition of Thinking Football, organized by the Portuguese Professional Football League (LPFP), started today and runs until Saturday, at Pavilhão Rosa Mota in Porto, where national and international speakers gather for debates about the sport.