Search for images of Al Tilal Sports Club of Yemen on the internet and you will find photographs of a quaint little stadium on the shores of the Arabian Sea in Aden, with the waves kissing its walls. On the opposite side, a dusty, barren hill is rising up from behind the main stands.
The club has a second home as well, the swanky, 30,000-seater May 22 Stadium, which opened its doors in 2010 and hosted most of the matches of the Gulf Cup of Nations that year, but the original Al Tilal stadium has a special place in the region’s sports history.
It is the original home of the Arabian Peninsula’s first sports club. It was founded in 1905 and is steeped in history.
But alas, both homes of Al Tilal, like most of the buildings in the country, bear the scars of war.
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Al Tilal last played at home on December 27, 2014, losing 2-0 to AlHelal AlSahely. A few other clubs continued to play until mid-January before the worsening security situation in the country and the political crisis forced the suspension of the league.
Money was just one of the issues. With no recourse to private sponsorships or donations in what is considered the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen’s clubs are entirely dependent on the funding provided by the government, which would normally be in the region of US$47,000 (Dh172,600) a year.
With those funds unavailable for the past year, the clubs were struggling to make ends meet. It was something of a relief when the Ministry of Youth and Sports announced in February their decision to suspend all activities of the Yemen Football Association.
With the Houthis camped in Sanaa and the voice of the secessionists growing stronger in the south, the ministry was left with little choice.
“We love the club, we want to give it all we have, but no one can endure under these circumstances,” Mohammed Abdulfattah, a player for Al Ittihad club of Ibb, told the Yemen Times in March amid growing political uncertainty and the worsening security situation in the country.
The situation has only got worse since, but knowing their love for football, youngsters can still be found playing the game in the dusty neighbourhoods of Sanaa, Aden and Abyan, oblivious to the war around them.
That passion must give all Yemenis hope. In their 15-year existence, the Yemen FA had weathered many storms, including bankruptcy in 2013 when they were forced to put a freeze on their clubs participation in Arab and Asian tournaments, but the sport has always bounced back.
Football is the favourite pastime of Yemenis and one of few avenues of recreation. Aware of this power, the government has used the sport to foster unity and national belonging in a country that only came into being in 1990 following the unification of North and South Yemen.
The first national championship, held in 1990/91, saw 32 teams take part: 16 from the northern governorates and 16 from the south, with the captaincy at every club alternating between southerners and northerners for each match “to enhance national unity”.
Adding another layer of symbolism, the final match of the season was played on the anniversary of unification – May 22 –and Al Tilal were crowned champions.
According to professors Thomas B Stevenson and Abdul Karim Alaug, two men who have done extensive research on football in Yemen, “the effort to promote a new national identity was evident in the selection of the national team”.
"When the team's members were announced, each former state was represented by 16 players," the duo wrote in one of their research papers titled, Yemeni Football and Identity Politics.
“In the press, the roster alternated between a player from the north and the south. There was an assistant coach from each state. During matches, the team captaincy alternated.”
The effects of these measuresare up for debate, but the Yemen national team, like Iraq, another Arab state ravaged by war, was indeed a unifying force. That was clear at the last Gulf Cup, held in Saudi Arabia last year, where they were eliminated in the group stages after drawing twice and losing once.
The Yemeni fans were one of the highlights of that tournament, despite their team’s failings, packing the stands for all three matches of their group play. In the match against Saudi Arabia at the King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, the home fans were embarrassingly outnumbered.
A similar atmosphere can be found at the league matches in Yemen as well, where 14 teams compete in the top division and 20 in the second tier, while around 258 teams play in the third division.
These domestic matches are often a balm for the Yemenis, who have suffered decades of unrest and civil war.
Football helps Saeed Mansour, a player for the Khanfar club in Abyan governorate, which has witnessed intermittent conflict between the Yemeni army and Al Qaeda militants since 2012, “forget the pain and grief of war”.
"When I play football I feel as if I am not in the field, but flying in the sky forgetting bad experiences that myself and the whole town have gone through," Mansour, who refused to leave Abyan with his fleeing family, told the Yemen Times last year.
Speaking to the same newspaper, Saleh Tameem, who lost his mother in a drone strike, said he felt alive watching his favourite team, Al Aeen, in training or at matches.
“As I see the players excitedly passing the ball to each other, I feel as if I am playing, and I forget my pain,” he told the newspaper. “Football makes my life continue.”
The likes of Tameem and Mansour, then, will be waiting for calm to return to their country, enough calm for football to resume. Only then can their lives return to normal.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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