The final whistle blew and the men in burgundy shirts sunk to the floor. Some were on their knees, heads in hands, others prostrate on their backs. They were exhausted and disappointed – but once the dust has settled, they will look back on their performance with pride. For 86 minutes, Qatar had held at bay a Colombia team featuring James Rodriguez, Juan Cuadrado and last season’s Serie A top scorer Duvan Zapata. They had worked and worked, maintaining an impressive level of tactical discipline and, when needed, had put their bodies on the line. But as the end drifted closer, Los Cafeteros extra quality shone through. James picked out Zapata with a delightful outside-of the-boot pass and the man who has hit the net so many times for Atalanta in recent months angled a perfect header into the far corner of the net. The Qatari frustration was understandable. But at this year’s Copa America in Brazil, where they are taking part as one of two invited Asian teams, it is not really the result that matters. Instead their eyes are firmly fixed on 2022, when, as hosts, they will be under pressure to put in a respectable display at the World Cup. When they were awarded the tournament – in a selection process that has since been shrouded in accusations of corruption and took a further hit with the recent arrest of Michel Platini – Qatar were 113th in the FIFA rankings, wedged uncomfortably between Thailand and the Central African Republic. At the time, it would have been fair to assume that they would struggle to hold their own, even with the games played on home soil. And when the entire point of the tournament is to project a certain image of the country to the world, a dire display would have been embarrassing. But since then, the Qatari national team’s on-pitch progress has been remarkable. They won the Asian U19 Championships in 2014, took the senior version of the title earlier this year and, as the most recent marker of their development, are going now toe to toe with some of the best players on the planet. “[The Copa America] is a huge experience for us,” Qatar centre-half Tarek Salman told me in the mixed zone after the game, sporting an immaculate blue suit and proudly clutching James’ number 10 shirt. “[We are playing] good games with a high rhythm, different from our league or our Champions League. Also, we are young players. Some of our players are 21, 22, so it’s good for us to get this high rhythm so we can be ready for 2022.” All of their squad play their domestic football in the Qatar Stars League, so tournaments like this are invaluable for gaining an understanding of what it takes to play against better sides in unfamiliar conditions. Mohamed Saadi, a football commentator for Qatari television channel Al Kass, believes that this is the team’s biggest challenge to date. “We need to go to the next level,” he says, “and [the Copa America] is better than the Asian Cup.” “You see Brazil with Neymar before the injury,” he continues, “you see Argentina with Messi, Colombia with James, Falcao and Cuadrado. They are players we see on television; they play in the Champions League.” This new-found success has not come by chance, but is the result of a long and expensive process. Fifteen years ago, Qatar laid the foundations of the Aspire Academy, a sports training facility in Doha that Saadi tells me is the biggest in the Middle East. Over a third of the current squad came through at Aspire and a few have progressed all the way through the ranks under the tutelage of Felix Sanchez, who climbed the ranks with them, finally taking over as head coach of the senior team in 2017.