Noureddine Ould Ali declined to reach for the obvious excuse. Yemen had gone down 1-0 to Qatar in the Gulf Cup on Saturday, a defeat that eliminated his side from the eight-nation regional tournament with a group game still to play, and he could have pointed to a clear penalty his team was not given.
He could also have pointed at the opposition. Qatar were at the World Cup in the summer, have the Aspire Academy and state-of-the-art stadia behind them, and are managed by Julen Lopetegui, a former coach of Spain and Real Madrid. Yemen have none of those things. They have not played a home game since 2012, a 2-1 win over Palestine in Sanaa, and the reasons for that stretch far beyond football.
Two years after that match, the capital came under the control of the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group, provoking a Saudi-led intervention and years of fighting. A United Nations-brokered truce in 2022 did reduce hostilities, but the situation has escalated again: in early September the Houthis swept down the Red Sea coast in their first major military advance in five years and have been targeting Riyadh and other parts of Saudi Arabia with missile strikes.
At that time the national team had been training in Aden, the southern port city that is home to the presidential leadership council, Yemen’s internationally recognised, Saudi-backed governing body. “The situation in Aden was OK, we tried our best and had a training camp with local players and then we joined up with the rest of the squad in Jeddah,” Ould Ali said. “The situation is a political situation and it is not stable. In football of course, we have to be careful, we have a lot of attention on outside factors but we always try to focus on the football and to do better. In Saudi Arabia, the welcome has been great, the people are very friendly and there is a high level of training facilities, hotels and everything. It means that we could focus on football.”
On the pitch, the tournament brought its own lessons. A 4-0 opening defeat by the United Arab Emirates was a reality check, though the UAE can call on plenty of naturalised talent from overseas and, domestically, on figures such as Andrés Iniesta coaching in the second tier. Yemen, by contrast, barely have a top tier, with the local league inevitably affected by the fighting, yet they still finished the group stage by beating Bahrain 5-2.
“The league stopped for a long time and restarted this year and they finished the first half of the season,” Ould Ali said. “It is very important. The players need to play, need to keep fit and show their talent. The people support us. It is a religion in Yemen. Everyone likes football and the national team and follows their star players. The Yemeni people are the same as anyone else.” Most of his squad remain based at home, and before this 27th edition of the Gulf Cup Yemen were the only one of the eight competing nations never to have won any of the 26 previous tournaments and had never even escaped the group.
Keeping players fully focused while abroad is not straightforward. “They worry about what is going on in the country and they hope that their families are OK,” the coach said. “This is normal but they are professional and I ask them to try to focus on the games. I have lived this situation before, I have geopolitics experience in the region.” He is not unfamiliar with instability, having spent three years in charge of Palestine from 2018 to 2021 after more than four years as an assistant coach there. “Each situation is different. Yemen is a problem between Yemenis, not between outside countries. For a coach, Palestine was very difficult. The Israeli soldiers used to stop me for eight to 10 hours before I could go to work. The players are not free and when we played overseas, they stopped the players. It was a pleasure for me to work with Palestine, their difficulties are not made by Palestinians.”
The next chapter arrives in January, when Yemen return to Jeddah for an Asian Cup opener against South Korea and players such as Atlético Madrid’s Lee Kang-in, Bayern Munich’s Kim Min-jae and Son Heung-min. It will be a step up from the Gulf Cup, and the country will be watching. Yemen qualified for the tournament for only the second time in their history, beating Lebanon in June to become the last team to secure a place, and a reunion with Palestine is not impossible at the 2027 edition, which will also be hosted in Saudi Arabia. “It was a great day for Yemen football and we hope we could make people back home smile for a while and that is what it is all about,” Ould Ali said. “Again, we will try to make the people at home proud. It would be very nice to give the world a different headline about Yemen. When we are united we feel we can beat anyone.”