When Palm City FC lifted the UAE FA Cup in late April, it completed one of the most extraordinary arcs in the country's footballing history. A club that did not exist two years ago and born from a social media challenge, had become champions of the UAE Second Division and FA Cup winners in the same season.
The main driving force behind it all is Soheil Var, a 27-year-old Austrian entrepreneur and content creator with more than two million social media followers and an almost radical belief in the power of visualisation.
In an exclusive interview with The National, Var discusses the journey to create Palm City FC, and what the future holds.
The beginning
Before founding the club, Var had spent years chasing a professional football contract, documenting every setback and triumph on social media in a series he called 365 Days to Signing a Pro Contract. That journey took him across Europe and ultimately to Dubai, where he arrived with barely enough money to rent a car.
He eventually signed with Gulf United in the UAE Second Division, only to be released. Rather than surrender, he reimagined his plans.
Short on funds at the airport, Var stood at a row of car rental booths, working out the mathematics of survival in a new city. He pulled out a dollar bill from his wallet, a note he still carries today, and saw the sign for Dollar Car Rental.
“I just came to Dubai. I don't know anybody here. No connections, no network, my family's back home, and I have this dream. And I don't really have any resources. And I thought to myself, 'Sohail, you have a dollar and a dream. Now go make that dream happen.' And I looked up and in front of me was Dollar Car Rental. And I was still like, 'Which one should I go with?' And in that moment, I'm like, 'I'm going to go for a dollar because I have a dollar and a dream.' So I walked up to the booth. I got a Toyota Yaris and I made my way driving all the way over to Sports City. I had an Airbnb booked for a week and I told myself, 'I'll figure out the rest later.'”
Building the club
After his release from Gulf United, the idea of creating his own club crystallised quickly. Part of his frustration stemmed from the attitude of clubs towards his social media presence, regarded as a distraction rather than an asset.
“Some of the clubs, they gave me a bit of negative energy because I had a social media presence as a player. And that actually frustrated me. And I decided to be like, 'OK, why are these clubs judging me in a bad way just because I have a social media presence? Let me build my own club. Let me make the social media so good and support the players, the staff, the community. If they want to be part of it, they can. And I'll dominate the whole market. There was a bit of that competitive feeling that summer. I'm going to build my own club, spotlight the social media and go crazy.”
The method he used to build the club was the same one that had propelled his personal brand: community engagement, relentless documentation and what he calls the ‘magnet effect’.
“I came up with the idea to build a pro football club in 365 days and document the whole process on social media, which was the key because what I realised was this club was built off of my personal journey as a football player and that journey of 365 days to signing a pro contract.
“With that journey, what I realised is by documenting my journey, I attracted the right opportunities to come my way. I was able to network and build a brand to meet different types of people and I thought to build a pro football club is an insane challenge. You need resources, funding, you need the right people to come on board, a lot of things. I thought, if I document this process, I can use what I call the magnet effect.”
From thousands of suggestions, the community chose the name Al Qabila. Millions of views followed, built around a vision and, at that point, nothing more.
“I think this is actually a beautiful case study as to why Dubai is Dubai, the city it is, and why the UAE is such a beautiful country. You can come with absolutely nothing but an idea and 110 per cent work ethic, and if you're willing to work, believe in the vision, stay positive and find solutions to challenges, there's going to be people around you,” he says.
“Because the energy of Dubai and the UAE is one where, out of nothing, if you truly believe in your vision and back it up with hard work, it can actually happen. And that's the case study of our football club. Two years ago, we had no football club and now we've just won the FA Cup.”
The vision
Central to Palm City's identity is a philosophy that extends beyond victories on the pitch. Var speaks about creating what he calls “multidimensional athletes”, players equipped to thrive beyond their playing days.
“The reality is that in professional football, there's 0.1 per cent of the players who make it to the highest level in football and earn enough money to live for the rest of their lives. The reason that I wanted to create a platform where people can build a personal brand is because it allows them to have something outside of the football pitch as well – to monetise and to also make a bigger impact because so many football players are more than just football players,” he explains.
“People often look at players and they're like, 'Oh, you're just a football player,' but you're not. There's so much more to life. There's your mindset. There are relationships. There's the impact you want to make. Maybe there are skills and passions that you have that you can teach someone else. There's the importance of finances, health, diet, nutrition. Life is 360. And my idea was I want to give that 360 approach to the players.”
Among those “magnetised” into the orbit of the project was Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan bin Khalifa bin Zayed, who encountered Var at the UAE Super Cup, where TikTok had invited the content creator to film pitchside.
“I met him and he said, ‘Sohail, I've been following your journey, first as a player, the journey to signing a pro contract. I admire your dedication. You're full of positive energy. You're always inspiring people and now you're building a pro football club in 365 days. That's really cool, we should connect.’ And so we connected on that day and then a couple weeks after, we went to play touch tennis, football, paddle, and we became friends. After a roller coaster couple of months, he officially came on board as club president.”
“I loved who he was as a person,” Var smiles, and that bond was there for all to see when the two men lifted the FA Cup together at Al Maktoum Stadium, the very ground where they had first met.
The future
The rebrand from Al Qabila to Palm City, undertaken ahead of this season, was designed with greater ambitions in mind. The name was chosen deliberately with the Palm evoking Dubai instantly. So what’s next?
“Next is UAE First Division next year and our long-term vision is we want to go as high as possible. We want to become an Adnoc Pro League club and eventually compete in the Asian Champions League,” Var says.
“But of course, step by step. So next year, UAE First Division. It's going to be a challenge because we've got the rules changing now in terms of how many foreign players we can have,” he continues. “And what else is next is we want to commercialise the club even more and make it a bigger community club.”
For Var, none of this represents an unlikely outcome. The FA Cup victory was not a surprise. “Everything we've achieved, I've seen it coming. Because I'm big on manifestation and visualisation. So anything that we've achieved, I always see it coming.”
