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Mahdi Ali’s Under-23 side, with a core that had delivered the country's first Asian Football Confederation (AFC) crown with the 2008 AFC U-19 Championship, dazzled in the Emirates' debut at the Olympics. It fell within another period of prosperity for the UAE, far removed from their 1990 vintage.
UAE captain Mohammed Omar, centre, played an important role during his team’s surge to the final in Abu Dhabi.
Now, the UAE’s collection of marquee football venues includes Zayed Sports City in Abu Dhabi, the Hazza bin Zayed Stadium in Al Ain, and the significantly refurbished Al Maktoum Stadium. The infrastructure has developed alongside the country's footing footprint. Photo Courtesy Dr Mohamed Kassala's Private Collectionįrom there, high-level footballers and their clubs have frequented the UAE: George Weah and Fabio Cannavaro, both at one time the Fifa World Player of the Year, have plied their trade in the Emirates Diego Maradona, of course, as manager so too Carlos Alberto Parreira, a World Cup-winning coach Zlatko Dalic jumped almost right from managing Al Ain to leading Croatia to the most recent World Cup final. Liverpool were in the UAE to play a friendly match against Al Nasr at Al Maktoum Stadium, on May 26 1978. In 1978, European champions Liverpool came to town to inaugurate the opening of Al Maktoum Stadium, the last of four grounds built in Dubai during that time.ĭr Mohamed Kassala holding the European Cup with Phil Thompson of Liverpool. During that 1972/73 campaign, the Dubai side hosted a Santos team replete with World Cup winners such as Carlos Alberto and a certain Edson Arantes do Nascimento - more widely recognised as Pele - on a makeshift sandy pitch near Dubai’s creek. In 1972, the UAE Football Association was founded under the leadership of Sheikh Mubarak bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, a body set up to govern the beautiful game and help structure the league competitions.Īl Nasr captured the inaugural championship.
However, soon after the birth of the nation, football became regulated and better organised. At the same time, it attracted interested local observers. The beautiful game was introduced in the Trucial States by the British Army, when soldiers stationed there as far back as the mid-1940s would play in their units primarily to keep up morale. To this day, it represents the country's only participation in a World Cup.Įven before the UAE was formed in 1971, 50 years ago on Thursday just past, football constituted a popular pursuit. The UAE exited at the group stage, but a squad comprising exclusively locally based players left with reputation enhanced. “I can see the lights of Rome from here,” wept overcome Emirati commentator Adnan Hamad, a soon-famous line that later titled a documentary - The Lights of Roma - chronicling the UAE’s passage to, and experience at, the 1990 World Cup.Īt the tournament in Italy seven months later, the UAE were beaten in all three matches in a devilishly difficult Group D, but the highlights were still plentiful: the national anthem, sounded for the first time at football’s showpiece event, before the opening 2-0 defeat in Bologna against Colombia and Carlos Valderrama and Freddy Rincon Khalid Ismail’s history-making goal at San Siro in the 5-1 loss in Milan to West Germany, the European powerhouses that would go on to lift the trophy Ali Thani finding the net in the 4-1 reverse to a talent-packed Yugoslavia. They survived a frantic, six-team final shootout for a place at Italia ’90. Adnan Al Talyani’s strike pulled the UAE level at the Jurong Stadium and, with Qatar defeating China at the same time, the national team had done it. In 1989, through the mud and the mental strain in Singapore, the UAE came from behind against South Korea to grab a 1-1 draw and qualify for the Fifa World Cup. It remains the UAE’s greatest footballing achievement, closer now to the country’s inception than it is to its landmark birthday.