"I love being in the middle of nowhere,” David Beckham declares as he looks out from beneath a Bedouin tent across the Qatari landscape. Here in Qatar, Beckham has even been asked to sell sand in the desert.
It is among a number of heavily scripted lines the former England captain delivers in a video that features on the Qatar Airways flights transporting tens of thousands of people to Doha for the World Cup. “It’s one of the best spice markets I’ve ever been to,” says the man who married a Spice Girl, before suggesting that “the modern and the traditional fuse to create something really special” in this Gulf state.