It’s January 2024 and the meeting of the European Club Association board is being held in Doha. Geography buffs will have no doubt spotted that Doha is not in Europe, so you might conclude it is an odd place to hold such a conference. Well, yes and no.
The meeting was hosted, in more than one respect, by the chairman of the ECA, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, also chairman of Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and also therefore the chairman of Paris Saint-Germain. Advertisement Al-Khelaifi at times resembles the bird that chooses which direction the flock is going to fly: when he moves, everyone else seems to follow him. You see the commotion before you see the man, a hubbub followed by this slight, ostensibly quite unassuming man.
He doesn’t have a particularly big retinue, or at least not one that is immediately obvious, but the room seems to move around him. Everyone wants a little of Al-Khelaifi’s time. Fellow executives, assistants, ECA officials, local media, international media, a guy who just walks past the room in which the meeting is held and sticks his head in to see who’s there, authors of books on football club ownership.
He has that dual quality that many in his position have: when he’s on the move, shifting from meeting A to glad-handing opportunity B, he looks straight through you — not in an outwardly rude or unpleasant way, but in a fashion that ensures he can move to the next thing without being slowed down excessively. “I wanted to build ‘a brand’,” .