Growing up on the edge of Sana’a in the 1980s, Zaid[1] spent his free time just like many other boys all over the world—playing football. “It was easy to play where I lived because there were empty lots—big ones that could be used for growing crops—so that’s where we played,” says Zaid. “We played six-on-six for hours until the sun set.”
When Zaid wasn’t playing football, he watched it whenever he could. That was more of a challenge. His home on the periphery of urban civilization did not have electricity in those days—so his family used a car battery to operate their TV, a solution that many Yemenis have now reverted to in its current protracted conflict. During the World Cup, Zaid cheered for Argentina and wore Diego Maradona’s number 10 jersey. Otherwise, he rooted for the British club Manchester United. Once, he immediately stopped and registered for English classes when he passed a language institute named Manchester that sported the club’s colors.
Besides connecting Zaid and his peers to the outside world, following international football from Yemen’s ancient capital also fueled their enthusiasm for competition. Thus, the group of boys Zaid played with began to challenge boys in nearby neighborhoods to test their skills. “We would play, and we would win, and we had so much joy when we did,” says Zaid.
While those happy times are long past—Zaid now lives as a refugee, and Yemen will pass the milestone of nine years of war this month—a few Yemeni youth have once again been proving football’s power to spark joy and pride from a stage a bit bigger than an empty lot. In December 2023, the Yemeni junior national team was crowned champion of the 10th West Asian Football Federation Championship, hosted by Oman. Defeating Saudi Arabia 3-2 on penalty kicks in the final match,[2] the win marked the second time in three years that Yemen defeated the kingdom to claim the title. In 2021, Yemen emerged victorious in the 8th edition of the Championship held in Saudi Arabia andthe thrill of that first triumph produced emotional scenes among Yemenis everywhere. Fathi bin Lazraq, the editor of the news site Aden Al-Ghad, described the unifying impact saying, “Yemen had tears of joy from east to west, and from north to south. People walked through ruined cities, dark alleys, on empty stomachs with their eyes filled with tears of joy to express love, and a sense of victory.”[3]
The remarkable moment inspired Yemeni researchers to dust off evidence of the positive role sports have played historically in shaping Yemen’s national identity. In a photo essay published by the Yemen Policy Center, Hala Alsadi—daughter of a man who played professionally in Yemen’s leagues in the 1980s—wrote, “The community built around football is born out of neighborhood alleyways and abandoned squares squatted in by young boys.” Alsadi’s essay emphasizes how sports can “dissolve social, religious, and cultural differences” and thereby “contribute to peacebuilding and attempts at restructuring fractured communities.”[4]
Yemen was not at war in the 1980s when Alsaidi’s father played professionally in Yemen’s south and Zaid played in empty lots in the north, but it was two countries. Moreover, the central government of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) in Sana’a had yet to assert much influence in the provincial highlands that surrounded the developing capital. Thus, when Zaid stepped out his door to join a football match, there were by all means differences to be overcome.
“People began moving into our area from a district about 100 kilometers outside of Sana’a,” says Zaid. “We played against them two or three times and the people from that area who were watching laughed at us because we were wearing pants. At that time people in the rural areas considered pants to be girls’ clothes—only girls wore pants. The guys we were playing with were wearing long athletic pants, but we were wearing gym shorts and they thought we looked like girls. I can still remember how they laughed at us.”[5]
As Zaid’s neighborhood team got stronger, they began going as far as 10 kilometers across town to play other teams. They had a volunteer coach who helped them get organized for games, and they also raised the stakes. Each player involved in the competitions contributed a small amount of money to a victor’s prize, and sometimes local shop owners or businessmen in the neighborhood agreed to sponsor the team and buy them basic uniforms to wear—or to pay for a trophy. “We would go and play a team in a distant neighborhood, and if we won, they would come and play in our neighborhood,” says Zaid. “If we won that second match, too, we would win the money collected from the two teams, or the trophy if the match was sponsored. I preferred the prize money.”
By the time Zaid and his peers started organizing intra-neighborhood contests, football had been played in Yemen for about 100 years. British soldiers first introduced the game to local elites in Aden—the capital of Yemen’s south—around 1882, playing it in colonial military camps. From there, it spread to nearby communities. In 1905, the Al-Tilal sports club was established in Aden, and it is still active today—making it the oldest sports club on the Arabian Peninsula.[6] Once the British were finally forced out in 1967, Yemen’s southern sports community found support within the new Marxist state established in the wake of colonial rule—the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Sami Al Kaff, editor of the independent news website Al-Malaab, said that sports became “an important, indispensable even, component of civil society in South Yemen. And this despite a scarcity of financial resources.”[7]
While Yemen’s colonial south embraced sports, the popularity of football spread more slowly in Yemen’s tribal north, beginning in the late 1950s. There, in the exuberance following the overthrow of Yemen’s last Mutawakkilite Kingdom and the establishment of the YAR, the Yemen Football Association (YFA) was established in 1962. Both the YAR and the PDRY began playing international matches in 1965—peaking in 1976 when Al-Tilal qualified for the Asian Nations Cup, Asia’s biggest football tournament.[8] The YFA joined FIFA in 1980.[9] Several times in the 1970s and 1980s, cross-border football matches were held between the two nations and official newspaper accounts used these events to cast a vision of one Yemen. Meanwhile, the opposing regimes each used the games to promote their own political system.[10]
At the end of the 1980s, Zaid was 16. His friends told him that with his skills as a goalkeeper and a striker, he should start training with Al Shaab football club. Al Shaab was a strong team, though not one of Yemen’s top teams at the time. However, the club had recently built a new stadium near Sana’a’s Tahreer square, about five kilometers from Zaid’s home. He decided to sign up, even though it was expensive. “After I watched that stadium get built with my own eyes, I felt very proud to play there,” says Zaid. “I still remember the card I got that identified me as an Al Shaab player.”
As a striker for Al Shaab’s junior team, Zaid got to play once against the juniors at Sana’a’s Al Ahly club—one of the nation’s premier teams. Al Shaab lost that match 5-2. “Years later after I’d quit playing football, I ran into some of the players who scored on us in that match, and they were playing on the national team,” says Zaid. “I also scored one of our two goals in that match. I still remember it today. Even though we lost, I’m proud that I scored on Al Ahly.”
As Zaid kept training with Al Shaab, shifting from striker to goalkeeper, Yemen was undergoing a much bigger shift. In 1990, a deal between the ruling parties in Yemen’s north and south united the country into a single state for the first time. With the best players of the YAR and the PDRY coming together on one team, Yemen reached its peak of 90th in the FIFA rankings in 1993. Meanwhile, Zaid’s skills as a junior goalkeeper drew attention, too. A trainer from Yarmouk, a respected club but less prestigious than Al Shaab, tried to recruit Zaid to play goalkeeper on his senior team. Zaid was flattered and surprised by the offer. “I was afraid because I was still a junior,” says Zaid. “I couldn’t make a decision, and after that, life took me down a different path away from football.”
Unfortunately, Yemen’s short-lived unification was already heading down a different path, too. Civil war erupted in 1994, in which the forces of Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of the former YAR and the newly united nation, dealt the south a demoralizing defeat. Then Saleh tried to secure the region’s loyalty by providing financial support to its most well-known sports clubs and placing political figures as their heads. This included appointing his son-in-law to oversee Al Tilal. Political entanglement in the country’s sporting ventures grew from there, and in 2005 FIFA suspended the YFA, citing “serious interference by political authorities in the internal affairs of the association.” The suspension was lifted the same year after the YFA promised to hold elections.
By 2010, the YFA’s premier division had 14 teams, the second division had 20 teams, and its third division had 258 teams. That year, Yemen hosted the 20th Gulf Cup of Nations. The event featured eight teams from Arab countries and brought over $1 billion in investment to Aden and Abyan provinces. Saleh spent millions of dollars renovating and building stadiums, hotels, training centers, and roads in the host cities where his authoritarian rule was still resisted by a separatist insurgency. “During the Gulf Cup, necessities like electricity, water, transportation, among others that the people of Yemen—particularly in Aden—struggle to obtain, even till this very day, suddenly all became available to us,” the manager of a sports club observed then.[11]
Over 600,000 Yemenis, including 100,000 women, attended the matches of the 2010 Gulf Cup and the spectacle did score a few goodwill points for Saleh.[12] However, it took a mere three months for all the goodwill it generated to run out. By March 2011, Yemenis across the country had been swept up in the energy of the regional Arab Spring and were demanding Saleh’s ouster. Southern football clubs like Hassan Abyan and Al Shaab Hadramout showed solidarity with the protestors by refusing to play for the remainder of the season, and Yemen’s national league has not played a regular season since. In early 2012, Saleh agreed to turn over power to his vice-president Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi—originally from the southern province of Abyan—who was to lead a transition to a government more representative of Yemen’s regions. Unfortunately, rather than healing national divisions the transitional period seemed rather to expose ancient social, economic, and political differences that Saleh’s strongman rule had only briefly held together. By 2014, Yemen’s FIFA ranking had dropped from its pre-civil war peak of 90th to its all-time low of 186th, and the country was transitioning from revolution to another war. As conflict escalated in early 2015, stadiums were hit by missiles and allegedly used to store weapons. Al Tilal’s historic headquarters in Aden were occupied by Houthi forces invading from the north and some professional football players joined the fighting and died on the frontlines. During the summer, the national team took a 13-hour boat ride across a treacherous stretch of the Red Sea to reach Djibouti, traveling from there to Qatar where they lost their World Cup qualifying matches in Doha.[13] After the airport in Sana’a was bombed, Zaid made that same voyage to Djibouti where he has lived as a refugee ever since.
In the years of war that followed, Yemen’s national team relied on overseas training camps and help from countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia to continue competing. A few club teams like Yarmouk—that had tried to recruit Zaid nearly three decades before—kept training together and held friendly matches with other clubs when they could. Videos posted on Facebook showed games being played with rockets sailing overhead.[14] The relentless crisis could not break Yemen’s will to play, and in March 2018, the national team defeated Nepal to qualify for the 2019 Asian Cup—a tournament that had not featured a team from Yemen since Al Tilal’s appearance in 1976.[15] While Yemen’s national league still did not restart, regional football leagues began to form around the country,[16] and by 2023, crowds of over 50,000 Yemenis were filling stadiums to watch provincial championships.[17]
In 2024, Yemeni football stands at a crossroads together with a nation that must choose to either walk the long road towards peace or take a few steps back into full-scale conflict. Zaid, who came of age during Yemen’s first unification, thinks the hard work of building bridges between diverse regions was well worth it. He says it brought about a contest more important than those played in empty lots or grand stadiums. “The citizens in the north became more open by degrees,” says Zaid. “Their society had been very closed in many ways, so they became more open, and it became easier for citizens to get things done in government offices. The country also developed ideologically because there was competition between the northerners and the southerners—each one wanted to establish that they were better or kinder than the other—and this was to everyone’s benefit.”
Zaid is now planning to return to Yemen, where he hopes to play a small part in working for peace alongside neighbors who also see the beauty in Yemen’s diversity. What remains to be seen is whether the ongoing process of rebuilding Yemeni football will be a force that restores local and national connections severed by years of war—or whether Yemen’s political elites will once again undermine its unifying energy in order to promote sectarian interests.[18]
[1] Names changed to protect vulnerable Yemenis.
[2] https://bnnbreaking.com/sports/yemeni-junior-national-football-team-triumphs-a-beacon-of-unity-and-pride/
[3] https://www.arabnews.com/node/1986941/middle-east
[4] https://www.yemenpolicy.org/the-perpetual-hope-of-football-in-yemen/
[5] In Yemen’s northern highlands, the traditional dress for women is wide sirwal pants worn beneath a fitted caftan (dress) with a long scarf tied in such a way that a lithma (face veil) can be lowered beneath the chin or raised over the nose and mouth. Some also drape a broad sheet of fabric called a sitara (curtain) over their heads as a final outer covering to cloak the back of the ensemble. Meanwhile, men typically wear a white thawb (robe) with a sports jacket over the top and no pants underneath.
[6] https://www.adengad.net/news/6987#.VPWfDPmsUdo#ixzz3TKOWGgRE
[7] https://thesefootballtimes.co/2015/12/09/how-yemen-lost-its-way-through-football-and-politics-mixing/
[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20131204063635/http://sabotagetimes.com/reportage/the-state-of-football-in-the-yemen/
[9] http://www.yemenfa.com/ar/yfa-ar/incorporation-ar
[10] https://www.mei.edu/publications/yemeni-football-and-identity-politics
[11] https://thesefootballtimes.co/2015/12/09/how-yemen-lost-its-way-through-football-and-politics-mixing/
[12] https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034328,00.html
[13] https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2015/6/18/the-long-struggle-for-yemens-footballers
[14] https://www.facebook.com/FootyRoom/videos/10160803205945644/
[15] https://deadspin.com/yemen-has-been-ruined-by-war-but-its-soccer-program-is-1830038876
[16] https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2023/10/12/yemen-national-football-team-war-2026-world-cup-qualifiers
[17] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/17/football/yemen-football-hadramout-cup-final-spt-intl/index.html
[18] The sources cited in this blog include examples and analysis from the last 100+ years that indicate sports have been both a positive force for community building and nation building in Yemen as well as a tool that politicians have used to further their own agendas. Such scenarios are not unique to Yemen, as evidenced by FIFA’s policy of suspending nations when serious political interference occurs.
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