Croatia national team players with coach Zlatko Dalic during a training session in Doha at one of Qatar's State-of-the-art training facilities.
When 32 of the world’s top international sides arrive in Qatar for the FIFA World Cup, their training site will be a modern, state-of-the-art facility built or upgraded specifically for the tournament.
Since winning the rights to host the World Cup in 2010, Qatar’s organising committee has identified and selected 40 suitable Team Base Camps for competing nations and match officials.
Many of the facilities have been used already during recent tournaments, including the FIFA Club World Cup and FIFA Arab Cup.
Each Team Base Camp consists of a hotel and training site, with everyone close to all of Qatar’s eight tournament stadiums. Thanks to the country’s compact nature, teams will stay and train in one location throughout the event – meaning more time for rest and preparation, and minimal travel times on match days.
During the World Cup, 33 Base Camps will be used – 32 of them by participating teams and one by the match officials. Offering 40 Team Base Camps was part of Qatar’s bid in order to enable teams to pick a location that best suits their needs.
“Our training facilities are located across the country,” said Ali Al Dosari, Training Sites Project Manager at the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy.
“The longest journey between a training site and hotel will take about 20 minutes by bus.”
Each training site has been developed to include floodlit, natural grass pitches – with the turf grown at the SC’s Tree & Turf Nursery in Qatar. Each site also includes stands for media training sessions, dressing rooms, medical facilities, recovery facilities, a media centre, and IT and communications networks.
“With the new training sites, a team will have a team base camp training site of their own to train in. The training site pitches are the same as the pitches in our World Cup stadiums, in terms of the quality of turf and size.”
Over recent years, thanks to Qatar hosting a number of major football tournaments, Al Dosari and his team have received valuable feedback from major club sides like English Premier League team Liverpool and Bundesliga outfit Bayern Munich. And this month, 2018 finalists Croatia spent time at the Al Ersal training facility ahead of friendly matches in Doha against Slovenia and Bulgaria.
Croatia’s head coach, Zlatko Dalic, was full of praise for the facilities in Qatar.
“I’m very happy because there are very nice conditions for training and relaxing here,” said Dalic.
And with Qatar aiming to set new sustainability benchmarks for a mega-event, the country is already preparing to utilise the training facilities after the World Cup.
Al Dosari said: “Some of the pitches will be used by the local community as public parks, while others will be used by football clubs and schools. This will provide a valuable legacy that will benefit local residents and promote an active lifestyle.”
