By David Owen
June 19 – Anyone with an eye for such things might have noticed, as much-fancied Belgium laboured to get the better of Algeria in Belo Horizonte on Tuesday, that the kit worn by world football’s other Red Devils bore an unfamiliar logo.
Where you might have expected a swoosh or three stripes or a big cat was, well, what exactly? A wavy, abstract shape that just might be a flag; or a magic carpet.
This is because coach Marc Wilmots’s squad is one of the five teams at this World Cup not to be sponsored by one of the Big Three of Nike, Adidas and Puma. Instead, Vincent Kompany and Co’s kit is supplied by a comparative minnow of shirt-making, Burrda Sport.
To understand who Burrda is and how it picked up the deal to supply a squad widely seen as dark horses to win the entire tournament, I was steered eventually to a Paris-based company called SM2B and the manager in charge of communications for Burrda, Marie Gérard. And what a fascinating story it turned out to be.
Burrda, Gérard told me, was a brand created in 2007 by the current Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “Burrda”, it seems, means “fabric” in Arabic. And, once the Qatar link is established, you can see how that at first rather baffling logo echoes the maroon and white Qatar national flag.
The company is owned by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), a well-known name in European football since it transformed the prospects of France’s Paris Saint-Germain by taking control three years ago.
Burrda is not, though, as one might expect, PSG’s kit supplier: this remains the province of Nike. Indeed, its portfolio of football teams remains decidedly limited, including, besides Belgium, the Tunisian national team, Olympique Nice, a French club whose best days were in the 1950s, and Al Sadd of Qatar.
Burrda has made impressive inroads into the sport of rugby union, however, supplying one of the top English clubs, Northampton Saints, Llanelli Scarlets of Wales, Biarritz of France and most of all Jonny Wilkinson’s latest club RC Toulon, winners of the Heineken Cup, the sport’s European championship, for the past two seasons.
According to Gérard, the opportunity to take on Belgium came in 2010, a year dominated on planet football by a second-consecutive World Cup to take place without them, and which started with Belgium ranked 66th in the world, below the likes of Macedonia and Lithuania.
With that sort of performance level, it would be fair to say that the Red Devils were not exactly the hottest property in international football. Since then, though, a spectacular recovery has taken place, sparked by the maturing of the so-called golden generation, and the team has been ranked as high as fifth.
The detail about Burrda that some INSIDEworldfootball readers will, I suspect, regard as the most interesting of all, however, emerges when I ask Gérard if the company has a European manager. It does, and his name is Laurent Platini, the son of Michel.
Platini père has found himself at the eye of the storm over FIFA’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, particularly since revealing that he was one of 14 FIFA Executive Committee members who voted for the Gulf state in a secret December 2010 ballot.
Just before the World Cup, Platini used the French sports newspaper L’Equipe to make a robust and passionate defence of his moral conduct as UEFA president, denouncing what he claimed was a deliberate campaign to discredit him and saying that, despite all the allegations over Qatar staging the 2022 tournament, the decision was the right one for football.
“I voted for Qatar in order to give the Arab world something they have been wanting for a very long time,” Platini is reported to have said.
“The Gulf is a wonderful place to hold the World Cup and it was about promoting the development of football. We’ve already been to the United States, as well as Korea, and Japan… It was a new approach. Full stop. That’s the only reason.”
I cannot recall if he has revealed this as well, but I have long believed that Platini was one of four Exco members who voted for the frequently brilliant joint Holland-Belgium bid in the contest to host the 2018 competition, which was won by Russia.
Given that their team will have his company’s shirts on their backs, it would certainly be no surprise if Platini fils had a soft spot for Belgium in the World Cup currently unfolding in Brazil.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734803098labto1734803098ofdlr1734803098owedi1734803098sni@n1734803098ewo.d1734803098ivad1734803098