Random Ramblings with Hamad Al Amari

The Architect of Our Identity: HH Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani

There are moments when time simply freezes. Today is one of those moments. I do not know how to feel, and words cannot describe the overwhelming sense of loss. I am writing this holding back tears.

Over the next few days, words like "achievement," "legacy," and "visionary" will be used to describe His Highness the Father Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

A word like "achievement" is absolutely not enough. It doesn't even scratch the surface.

He didn't just achieve things. He built a nation and secured safety and prosperity for generations after us.

I talk constantly about the authentic culture of Qatar what it means, what our culture truly is, and the very DNA of a Qatari. We stopped seeking validation from the rest of the world and built a new center of gravity entirely on our own terms. None of that, ABSOLUTELY none of it, exists without him.

He is the reason I, and every Qatari, can stand anywhere in the world and be phenomenally proud of who we are and where we come from.

The Doha skyline we see every day, the media powerhouse Al Jazeera, the Constitution of Qatar, the national education system, the national healthcare system, international sporting events like the historic FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, and so much more. All of these would not be possible without him. Before being our leader, he was our Father. The Father of our nation.

He built our identity. He built the foundation that supports every Qatari and every expat who comes here to work and live. He turned our land into a prosperous, undeniable, unedited reality that forced the rest of the globe to take note.

Today, you don't need a script or a history book to understand what he did for us. You just have to look around. You feel it in the streets, you feel it in the unbroken pride of our people, and you feel it in the raw, unfiltered grief we all share right now.

We are all one today.

To the man who gave us our voice, who gave me my name, and who built our home, our Father Emir.

May you rest forever in peace, may Allah grant you the highest paradise, may He grant you His mercy, and may He grant us all the strength to continue on in your legacy.

إنّا لله وإنّا إليهِ رَاجعُون

(P.S. Thank you Mum for naming me After Him.)

11.7 Millimetres

I am a Liverpool fan, so let me get my bias out of the way before I say a single word about Manchester City.

2018/19. Klopp's side took 97 points. We lost one league game the entire season. One. Away at the Etihad on the 3rd of January, and the moment that decided it was John Stones clearing off his own line with the ball 11.7 millimetres from crossing. Goal line technology, measured to the millimetre, and we finished one point behind City. 97 points and no parade.

I have made my peace with that. Mostly.

Then last month an independent commission found 114 of the 115 charges against Manchester City proven. Nine seasons, 2009/10 to 2017/18. The Premier League's own statement says sham contracts with commercial partners, revenue artificially inflated and costs reduced by more than 900 million pounds. City say they are innocent, they lodged their appeal within days, and no sanction has been decided. Nothing is final.

And to be straight about it, 2018/19 is not in those nine seasons. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But the squad that beat us by a single point was built during them. That is the part that will never sit right with me, and no panel is ever going to measure that to the millimetre.

Now here is the part nobody is talking about enough.

None of this exists without Rui Pinto. A Portuguese kid who ran Football Leaks and handed the documents to Der Spiegel in 2018. Those documents are the foundation of the entire case. Eight years later, a commission confirms he was telling the truth.

And his reward? 147 charges in Portugal. Extradition. Over a year in custody. House arrest. A four year suspended sentence. And on the 10th of October, his protected housing ends and he is out there on his own.

So the man who exposed it loses his protection, and the club he exposed files an appeal with the best lawyers money can buy. Tell me that is a system built to find the truth. I'll wait.

We will measure a football to 11.7 millimetres in real time. But nine seasons of accounts takes three and a half years, and the whistleblower pays for it personally.

Give us back the real stuff.

The Definition of Geek

Am I a Geek? A question I never anticipated receiving from anyone, let alone my first born!

But who better to answer it than the Deputy CEO of Doha Film Institute and Founder of GEEKDOM, Abdulla Jassim Al-Mosallam, whom she met at Geekend. What is a geek, she asked?

“A geek is someone who is deeply passionate about something and invested in knowing more about it.”

My daughter a geek! How do I feel? Am I a Geek? Well, it's safe to say I am a Football Geek!

And being who I am, I asked anyone I bumped into at Geekend if they thought I was a geek. Apparently I am a film geek and a culture geek.

My daughter is heading straight for anime and Japanese culture. She doesn't know what kind of geek she is yet, but she knows she wants to be one, and I couldn't be more proud!

I go to Geekend for a few reasons. The friendships with the team, my love for the Doha Film Institute, and the fact that they genuinely bring the communities of this country into one room.

I can't remember them all, but so many different cultures were in one room for the love of Geekness. The people I interacted with came from India, Pakistan, Somalia, Philippines, Japan, Finland, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi, and my Qatari peeps everywhere.

Supporting local artists is something I always want to do, and there were so many of them showing off their skills and selling their own designs, their own prints, their own stickers. Drawing it, printing it, investing in themselves, with an actual space to do it in. Caricaturists flew in from Bahrain, Kuwait, and Georgia to be part of it. One girl was knitting her own characters and stuffing them by hand. That is pretty damn cool.

I bought what I could. A couple of notebooks, a couple of stickers. Support the people making the real stuff. My daughter obviously was the one making the decisions here!

Children doing karaoke. Accomplished people deep in a board game. Escape rooms, tournaments, music, art walls. All ages, a lot of energy, slightly overwhelming, and you just feel happy being there.

For me, it is very simple: passion needs a place to live. Give people that place and they stop feeling like a niche and start feeling like they belong. The turnout at Geekend says there are far more of these people in Qatar than anyone assumed, and they are at home.

I hope Geekdom happens this year. I'll be there.

(P.S. If I like music a lot, am I a music geek?)

An all-Argentina officiating crew, for France against Morocco.

My thoughts on VAR didn't just end with geometry lines. If you want to see the absolute sham this system has become, just look at what happened to the Egyptians.

It forces a very real, unfiltered conversation: Is this just blatant favouritism toward the old-guard World Cup winners, or are we looking at straight up racism?

Every time African nations step onto the pitch in this tournament, they bring the exact human element the sport desperately needs. They bring the flair, the passion, and the phenomenal, unedited vibes that actually make the game worth watching. Just look at the football being played Senegal was one hell of a game. Ghana and England was a great game. Mexico and England is probably the best game for a neutral to watch over and over again.

But imagine the absolute chaos if Harry Kane's late winner in a match like that was suddenly canceled for a microscopic foul in the build up.

There is nothing wrong with defeat. Losing is an experience in itself. But when all the odds are stacked against you, and you manage to break through and score an unbelievable goal, only for a guy in a booth to bring it back to a play that in football timing happened three years ago? It completely kills the magic.

WITH ALL THE SENSORS AND MICS AND CAMERAS GLUED TO THE REF WHY DOES PLAY GO ON!

Apparently, in this highly sanitized version of the World Cup, African nations aren't allowed to have their joy. The system always seems to find a way to kill the momentum when the script doesn't favor the usual suspects. They are turning it into an ad money grabbing sponsor fest that completely bleaches the soul out of football.

And to top it all off, the irony of tonight's match is just beautiful. France is playing Morocco, and the organizers have somehow decided it makes total sense to assign an all-Argentina referee squad to manage the game.

Look, I am a huge fan of Messi. For me, he wins the discussion as the greatest of all time, and I literally broke down in tears when he won it all right here in Qatar. But my love for the player doesn't blind me to the absolute absurdity of the system. You literally cannot make this level of organizational irony up.

It is highly entertaining watching them try to convince us this is a perfectly unbiased, well organized tournament.

Dimaaa Maghrib!

Can we please get rid of VAR?

I'm just going to say what every real football fan is thinking right now.

Can we please get rid of VAR?

I grew up watching a game built entirely on raw, unedited emotion. You score a goal, the stadium erupts, you lose your mind with your friends. It is an intimate, explosive, time-freezing moment. Now? You score a goal, and 50,000 people have to stand around in awkward silence for three minutes while a guy in a sterilized control room draws geometry lines to see if a striker's left toenail was offside.

It is annoying, and frankly, it ruins the experience.

They told us VAR would perfect the sport. Instead, they took something beautiful and completely sanitized the exact friction that made it phenomenal in the first place.

I believe in humans. Football is played by humans. It is supposed to be refereed by humans. The mistakes, the missed calls, the absolute chaos of a bad decision that is the authentic reality of the sport.

When you try to remove the human error from the pitch, you kill the human connection in the stands. You turn a passionate, chaotic game into a corporate compliance meeting with a whistle.

I'll take a blown offside call and a screaming stadium over a three minute video review any day of the week.

Give us back the real stuff.

(P.S. If you need a supercomputer to tell you if it's a goal, it probably shouldn't be a goal. Enjoy the football. Iran was offside too though)

I can't help but be the chatty dude.

I've spent so many hours of my life over the past 15 years holding a microphone. Sometimes that just means standing on a stage and reading directly from a cue card or a script on plain A4 paper, just because the event producers think color or branding is "too much." Annoying? Obviously it is, but that's the job.

The script is the main thing in the event.

What matters most to me though, is the human element which I like to think I bring to every stage, panel, video, or production I've been involved with. I can't help but be the chatty dude. I truly believe that through conversation we can connect on a deeper human level. In a professional setting, that sometimes means problems, but we get to the real stuff quickly, so I'll take it.

Whenever I share the stage with decision makers or moderate a panel, my goal isn't to lead a sterilized discussion about market trends or scaling metrics. My goal is to push the conversation from a strict business standpoint to a human one.

Because I believe in humans.

You can talk about operational strategies all day, but humans are at the core of every single business and every single family. When you drop the corporate titles and throw out the PR talking points, we are all just individuals working on something.

When we finally step back, ignore the script, and speak honestly about the hurdles we face, that's when the actual value comes out. That raw, authentic connection is what drives real growth, and it is exactly what I will always push for every time I pick up the mic unless I'm telling jokes, which is usually the exact opposite.

(P.S. I'll still read from the cue cards and deliver the best for your event always!)

The Point That Froze Time

I went into the game against Switzerland as just a football fan, hoping for a moment to be proud of my country.

Let's be honest about 2022. The absolute pleasure of that tournament was being the host nation and delivering the most unbelievable World Cup the world will ever see. But on the pitch? We didn't get a single point. It made me feel a certain way. So going into this 2026 tournament this time as two time Champions of Asia, having actually qualified I wanted us to put on a show.

For most of the Switzerland game, I was frustrated. First half, second half... it felt like just another tournament. But fate had it so that we didn't lose faith. A defensive performance, a final push, and then in almost the last kick of the game we scored.

1-1. The first World Cup point in Qatar's history.

For that moment in time, everything froze. It reinvigorated and realigned all the hopes and pride of belonging to my nation. Every Qatari in the world was connected. But what really hit me was my inbox. It flooded with messages from friends, from Arabs living in America supporting Qatar, and from expats who have lived and worked in Doha. That showed me exactly what Qatar offers the world. It's not just a job or a temporary stop, it builds lasting relationships. They didn't have to support our national team, but they felt a moment of pride and shared it with me. I'll always remember that goal because of that exact, intimate feeling of unity.

And of course, to top it all off, there was the morning news.

It was highly entertaining watching the exact same Western outlets the ones who spent 2022 screaming for boycotts, parading the German team's stance, and saying we didn't deserve to host suddenly having to report on Qatar securing a historic point. The irony is a beautiful added flavor.

Even better is watching those same outlets remain completely silent on the absolutely crappy organization of the tournament currently happening in the US. Fans are having a miserable time, the heat is insane, and the host cities look entirely bland. It doesn't even feel like the FIFA World Cup, it just feels like people commuting to a game.

But I'm not going to let their hypocrisy take away from what happened. It was phenomenal.

Proud of our Team!

This is the first time in my life I haven't looked forward to a World Cup.

Yesterday was my birthday, and the universe decided to celebrate by kicking off the 2026 World Cup. I'm another year older, and honestly, getting to see a global tournament open on your exact birthday is pretty dope.

But as this three nation spectacle kicked off, I couldn't help but reminisce about exactly where I was three and a half years ago. I was at Al Bidda Park at the FIFA Fan Festival, standing on stage with 13 World Cup winners, Myriam Fares, Gianni Infantino, and H.E. Hassan Al Thawadi, watching an opening ceremony that was nothing short of historic.

For ten straight years, the Western media gave us absolute hell. They lectured us and tried to tear us down. And in response? We pulled off the unimaginable. We hosted an unmatched experience where the world actually came together to celebrate football in true mutual love and support. We broke records. It was a tournament where fans could effortlessly attend multiple games.

Fast forward to today, and the irony is staggering.

The exact same people who spent a decade playing the moral police are now running the show. I just hope the Western media actually decided to broadcast yesterday's opening ceremony to the whole world unlike some outlets that blatantly refused to broadcast Qatar's opening.

As a massive fan of the game, I'm going into this World Cup with a heavy heart. It's hard to watch knowing the state of the world and knowing that the same people hosting are the ones perpetrating so much evil. We've gone from an unmatched celebration to a tournament where fans, staff, media, and even players are actively being denied entry into the US. And the ones who do make it? They are treated like criminals, getting searched right on the tarmac before they even step foot inside a terminal.

Honestly, my biggest hope for this tournament is just that no one gets hurt, or God forbid, killed.

This is the first time in my life I haven't looked forward to a World Cup. I'm keeping my eyes wide open to see what the Western media puts out, and I just hope this heavily sanitized, chaotic edition doesn't ruin the World Cup for future hosts. I already know the next edition in Morocco and Spain is going to be a million times better.

But at the end of the day, I love the game. So I'll watch.

Oh, and it's FOOTBALL!!!!