![The New York Times]()
March 12, 2005
Off the Soccer Field, a Qaddafi Has Big Goals
By CRAIG S. SMITH
ERUGIA, Italy
WITH a black knit cap tugged down over his ears, Saadi el-Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, trotted slowly around the soccer field in a bitter cold wind here recently while his teammates played a practice game.
With only a few months to go on his two-year contract, Mr. Qaddafi's professional soccer career is flagging. He has been plagued by health problems, including appendicitis and a herniated disk, and was suspended for three months last year after testing positive for steroids that he was taking for his back. In fact, he has played only one game in his European career and that was against the dominant Italian team, Juventus, which he knows well because he negotiated Libya's purchase of a 7.5 percent stake in it.
But Mr. Qaddafi, 31, is not the typical fading athlete, trying to hang on. Having failed to secure a position in European soccer by playing the game, he has embarked on expanding Libya's international presence in the sport another way: by buying it.
"The engineer," as his underlings call him (the term is an honorific often used in the developing world for people with a college education), is hoping to purchase the controlling share of a well-known British soccer team for $300 million. He is negotiating another potential $300 million sponsorship deal with Juventus on behalf of Tamoil, a Libyan oil company that owns gas stations across Italy.
Mr. Qaddafi, of course, comes from a colorful family used to making headlines. His only sister, Ayesha, is studying law in Paris and has signed on to Saddam Hussein's defense team. His youngest brother, Hannibal, has a penchant for speeding and getting into scuffles with the police: earlier this year he reportedly brandished a 9-millimeter handgun after beating up a woman in a Paris hotel. Another brother, Moatassim, was caught four years ago trying to buy tanks and short-range missiles for his personal army brigade. "My father said, 'These are very aggressive weapons and you are still young, maybe when you get a bit older,' " Mr. Qaddafi said, laughing.
But Saadi el-Qaddafi has kept out of trouble, focusing his efforts on sports, particularly his campaign to rescue soccer from the bizarre political strictures imposed by his father and establish it as a regular sport in Libya.
He stood out as a player on Libya's national team, so much so that he was invited to play with Perugia, though some observers snipe that the team hired him only for the attendant publicity. Last year, with his playing career foundering, he began looking beyond the playing field, embarking on what many people saw as a quixotic campaign to win the right for Libya to be the host country for the 2010 soccer World Cup.
Few people were very enthusiastic about the Libyan bid: government ministers balked at the $6 billion price tag, and Mr. Qaddafi's father muddied the waters by insisting on bringing in four other African countries as co-hosts. South Africa won.
"For me, the 2010 bid was a very bad experience," he said, adding that he did not think he would try again. "I'm still very upset."
IMPROBABLE as Mr. Qaddafi's various projects are, he has almost single-handedly reintroduced Libya to international soccer, a world that was long closed by his father's odd ideas. Soccer all but disappeared after Colonel Qaddafi declared in his Green Book, an ideological guide for Libyan society, that "sport is a public activity that must be practiced rather than watched."
For a time, professional sports were banned and team sports largely curtailed. Spectators were deprived of anything to watch other than periodic mass games featuring events like tug of war.
But young Saadi, widely regarded as the elder Mr. Qaddafi's favorite son, nonetheless grew up with a soccer ball at his feet and his eyes fixed on matches overseas. "When I was 10, I started pushing it," Mr. Qaddafi said after his workout, sitting in a luxury Perugia hotel that he uses as a second home.
He gradually persuaded his father to loosen the rules on team sports, but even after Libyans began playing soccer again politics often intervened. The young Mr. Qaddafi recalls that in the 1980's, when his father was miffed about political opponents who had found refuge in neighboring Algeria, he ordered Libya's national team to forfeit a game against the Algerians who had come to Tripoli to play. With the stadium full and cameras rolling, Algeria kicked off as required by international soccer rules, but there were no Libyans on the field.
"Always, my father looks at things in a political way," Mr. Qaddafi lamented, adding that his father did not understand fans. "They aren't political, and I've told him I don't want any of that stuff. Every day I'm with him, I explain to him the mentality of the fans, how it helps young people, how it's like breath for youth."
In 1996, he became president of Libya's soccer association with the intent of building up a semiprofessional league. He paid for premium players to go to Libya and hired one of the world's best coaches, Carlos Bilardo, who led Argentina to victory in the 1986 World Cup, for Libya's national team. He continued cajoling his father to ease the rules that ban professional sports in the country.
His success has been one of the least heralded changes in Libyan society, but one that made a huge difference in many people's lives. Soccer matches between the 14 teams of Libya's national soccer league are now wildly popular, providing the most regular entertainment available for idle young men who might otherwise look in less salubrious places for excitement.
SITTING on a veranda of his rented villa with a view of Assisi on the far side of the Umbrian valley, Mr. Qaddafi rubbed his right leg. He had back surgery last year, but he is still having problems. "I'm having a lot of pain," he said. "I'm worried because it's the same feeling as before the operation."
He is proud of bringing at least one aspect of Libyan society into the mainstream. And if his playing career is truly over, he said, he wants to establish himself as a soccer maven - and, perhaps, make films.
He has an idea for a movie about Hannibal, the legendary military commander of ancient Carthage, that would be filmed in Libya. But when Mr. Qaddafi approached Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax boss, at a film festival in Venice late last year, Mr. Weinstein cut him off, telling him curtly that if he wanted to do movies with Miramax, Libya would have to recognize Israel first. "The first touch was a very hot touch," said Mr. Qaddafi, laughing quietly about his brief brush with Hollywood. "I didn't have time to breathe."
He would not say which British team he was trying to buy, saying that it was "very sensitive" because the British soccer world was already uneasy over the purchase of the Chelsea Football Club by a Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, and ownership of the Fulham team by an Egyptian, Mohamed al-Fayed.
"It's like the Anglican Church, they don't want foreigners to take control," he said. "But it would help broaden Libya's image."
Guglielmo de'Micheli for The New York Times"Always, my father looks at things in a political way," says Saadi el-Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Qaddafi.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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