RIO DE JANEIRO – Left hand on their teammates’ left shoulder, right hand on their heart, two Syrians, two Montenegrins, two Bosnians, an Egyptian, a Croat, a Cuban, a Spaniard and a Frenchman stood together Tuesday morning and sang along to their national anthem. It was the same song.

Learning “as-Salam al-Amiri” is expected of the men who join Qatar’s national handball team. Over the last three years, as the Connecticut-sized peninsula nation that shares a border with Saudi Arabia has grown in population by nearly 50 percent, it has prioritized its modernization by stressing nationalism in the most obvious way: sports. And no sport allows foreigners to play for their non-birth country quite like handball.

The International Handball Federation rule is simple: Those who haven’t played on their country’s national team in three years can naturalize to another nation. In order to attract foreigners to Qatar, the government used it greatest resource – oil money – and built a nascent super team in the high-paced sport that combines the speed and physicality of football, the rules of basketball and the throwing of baseball.

Though most of Qatar’s players are past their primes, the nation shells out millions of dollars in salaries for a sport where scratching out a living often can entail a second job. The money has worked: Qatar won the silver medal at the 2015 Men’s Handball World Championships, held in its capital city of Doha, a result that rankled the tight-knit community. Players complained. Officials sneered. No less authority on right and wrong than Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president who resigned amid oceans of corruption, said Qatar’s recruitment of foreign players reached “the point of absurdity.”

The potshots continued Tuesday after France, the team that won gold in the world championships last year, thrashed Qatar, 35-20, in a qualifying-round game at Future Arena. Of the 14 players on Qatar’s roster, 11 were born in another country. At some junctures during the game, all seven of Qatar’s players on the court were naturalized.

“We play for the love of the game,” French handballer Valentin Porte said, “and they play for the money.”

This is a constant refrain when it comes to Qatar, which last year brought former Barcelona star Xavi to play in its soccer league and has done the same with Raul, Pep Guardiola and Gabriel Batistuta. Hamad Al-Obaidly, the Qatar Olympic Committee’s press attaché, scoffed at the notion that players are coming to Qatar strictly for the payday.

“I do not agree with him,” Al-Obaidly said. “I stay with our players, all of them. Nobody plays for money.”

He paused.

“The money is good,” Al-Obaidly said. “And everybody wants more money. Me and you and everybody. As for our players, they play for loyalty.”

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About 15 years ago, Boris Vrhovac moved to Qatar. He was a physiotherapist, and work was sparse enough in his native Serbia that a move to the burgeoning country of 600,000 felt right. Qatar’s population has grown four-fold since – more than 80 percent of Qataris are believed to have immigrated there – the power of petrodollars luring people from around the globe.

“The money,” Vrhovac said. “It’s perfect.”

The modernization of Qatar, and especially its resplendent capital, Doha, dovetails with a campaign called Qatar National Vision 2030. It is essentially a plan to turn desert land into an economy that doesn’t rely strictly on oil. And athletic success is at the center of it.

“Sports is as important as any other sector,” said Al-Obaidly, the press attaché. “Culture, economics, education, health – sports is one of the important things of our vision.”

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