The grief of 'Al Abyad'

It is painful to follow football celebrations around the world and to try to escape our sorrow by cheering for one team or another, for this side or that, while grief remains lodged in our hearts because the UAE's 'Al Abyad' squandered a golden opportunity to reach the 2026 World Cup finals.

This feeling grows more bitter as we watch 48 nations competing on the greatest footballing stage in the world, some of them producing levels no higher than our own team's — indeed, the technical comparison often favours the UAE.

But football does not recognise wishes; it recognises results. And those results were a reflection of accumulated, shared mistakes that denied our national team the dream of returning to the World Cup for the first time since its only historic appearance, in Italy in 1990.

With every match played at the World Cup, the same question returns to the lips of UAE fans: where does the problem lie?

The truth is that the answer is not simple — it may in fact be one of the hardest questions facing UAE football. In terms of support and resources, the state has never been stingy with the national team, and recent years have seen a series of administrative and technical changes, including at the player level, alongside continuous efforts to develop the system and find solutions that would return Al Abyad to its rightful place.

Yet the reality confirms that the problem runs deeper than merely changing a coach or a management, and that the coming period demands bold ideas and unconventional solutions before the 2030 World Cup qualifying campaign gets under way.

Among the proposals that deserve serious study is linking players' participation with the national team to their club contracts and bonuses, because it is illogical for rewards and privileges to remain tied solely to club achievements while a player's performance with the national team does not sufficiently affect his evaluation or incentives. The national team is supposed to represent the pinnacle of the footballing pyramid in any country, and any genuine professional system must make success in the national shirt a core part of the reward-and-accountability equation.

What Al Abyad needs today is not simply a search for new excuses for failure, but a comprehensive review that redefines priorities and instils a culture in which representing the national team is a major responsibility no less important than any domestic or continental tournament.

The sorrow that accompanies us during this edition of the World Cup must not become a scene repeated every four years, but rather a launching point towards a genuine project that returns the UAE to the place it deserves among the great nations of world football.