“Support Your Team.”

- Jeem Cup

Jeem Cup 2016/2017.

Summary.

The Jeem Cup was an under-12 football tournament for clubs across Arab nations, played in Doha’s premier stadiums. In 2016, 14 teams competed in 8-a-side matches structured into four groups, culminating in a final watched by QFA President Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed al-Thani and senior sports officials. The following year expanded to 16 countries, reinforcing the Cup’s role in nurturing grassroots talent and promoting healthy lifestyles among children, objectives echoed by Generation Amazing and Challenge 22, Qatar’s flagship football-for-development initiatives.

During the opening-ceremony preparations, I photographed the stage assembly, team visitations and rehearsals—images that highlighted the tournament’s professionalism and scale. These behind-the-scenes shots underpinned press releases and social-media teasers that drove early ticket sales and online buzz. On match days, I covered key fixtures, ensuring the story was documented for weekly highlight reels and post-match summaries distributed via Aljazeera Children’s channels.

Embassy visits—such as the Palestinian and Moroccan squads touring their diplomatic missions in Doha—provided rich cultural context. My photographs of these visits were repurposed in human-interest features, reinforcing the Jeem Cup’s unifying ethos and amplifying its reach among expat communities

The Jeem Cup Vision.

Capturing Moments.

As Aljazeera Children’s in-house photographer and Social Media Officer for the 2016 and 2017 Jeem Cup tournaments, I documented every facet of the event—from the meticulous setup of the opening-ceremony stage to the euphoria of playing in front of a crowd, creating a rich visual and narrative archive. These assets powered weekly match summaries, drove social-media engagement across the Arab region, and generated data on youth participation and fan behaviour that fed into the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy’s Generation Amazing programme, as part of Qatar’s broader World Cup 2022 research and legacy strategy

Strategic Impact & World Cup Legacy.

The visual and engagement data generated by my work informed Generation Amazing’s strategy ahead of Qatar's 2022 World Cup. The Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, established in 2011 to oversee World Cup preparations, leveraged football-for-development initiatives, like Jeem Cup, to leave a lasting social legacy. Insights into participation patterns, content preferences, and cross-cultural interactions gleaned from the Jeem Cup experience guided the playbooks for community engagement and fan-experience design at the Qatar World Cup.