KARACHI, March 18: The Qatar Football Association (QFA) will not be holding the ‘Dream Football League’ but it will be supporting Pakistan in the uplift of football.

On Monday, The Times issued a climb-down of a story it had published last week that the Gulf state, which will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, will hold a glittering summer tournament to rival the UEFA Champions League which will see 24 top European teams taking part.

The QFA had denied that report with the British newspaper’s Football Editor Tony Evans describing it as a “journalistic nightmare” while admitting that the paper “had been duped”.

An eight-member delegation of the QFA headed by its president Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, meanwhile, was in Lahore in Sunday where they met with Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) president Faisal Saleh Hayat with the two bodies agreeing upon establishing a long-term partnership for development of the sport in Pakistan.

Also present in the QFA delegation was Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee secretary General Hassan Al Thawadi, who will be a candidate for the FIFA Executive Committee position in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) elections slated for May 2.

Al Thwadi is a favorite to secure the four-year mandate which will see him represent the AFC in world football’s governing body.

Sunday’s meeting, thus, makes good reading for Pakistan, who have enjoyed good relations with Qatar with regards to football.

The now disgraced former AFC chief Mohammed Bin Hammam from Qatar was committed to improving the football standard in Pakistan during his tenure and also had close ties with the PFF president which led to several ‘Vision Asia’ programmes being launched in the country.

“We’ve had very good ties with Qatar in the past,” PFF secretary Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi told Dawn on Monday. “This is, in fact, a progression of those relations.”

Now, the QFA has agreed to provide technical support to the PFF in various fields such as youth development, coaching courses and women’s football.

“The QFA will assist the PFF in up grading its infrastructure and allied facilities vital to the development of football in Pakistan,” said a PFF media release on Monday.

With Tariq Abdul Aziz Al-Naama, the deputy chairman of the Aspire Academy, also present in the meeting, Pakistan players might also get a chance to use the state-of-the-art facilities offered by the Doha complex.

The QFA has also agreed to offer Pakistan’s national team training facilities in the Gulf state whenever required.

The Aspire Academy is one of the world’s most advanced complexes where Europe’s top clubs regularly seek refuge during their winter break.

English Premier League leaders Manchester United were the most recent visitors when they trained there in January with German giants Bayern Munich also having held a camp in December during Bundesliga’s winter break.

The academy boasts seven full-size outdoor pitches, as well as hundreds of individual training areas, including performance-enhancement laboratories, two altitude laboratories and biomechanical labs with mental training and sports psychology areas also in place.

And Lodhi reckons those facilities will help Pakistan’s national team develop further.

“We don’t have such amazing facilities but they have offered us to come over and train and it will hopefully prove beneficial,” he said. “They have even asked us to send our youth teams to training camps there.”