Abu Dhabi's unlikely teammates: How bankers, cabin crew and newcomers bond over football and padel

The road to finding friends in a new city is jagged, and perhaps a little zigzag. Sometimes you change course midway, or maybe the road branches out into several paths and there’s a friend waiting for you at the end of it.

Possibly, near a football pitch, a badminton or a padel court.

It’s the case for Abhijit Saha, among many others, who arrived in Abu Dhabi in 2024. "I belong to Kolkata, so I connected to a Bengali group, and so the Bengalis would gather to play," explains Saha, who works as VP in the Emirates Development Bank.

The game was badminton. However, friendships move quickly when sport is involved, and he ran into Nilanjan Dutta. "He's a close friend, and we have an Assamese connection too," Saha adds.

Dutta, a sales professional, wanted to open the games up beyond the Bengali circle, so he started a football group: Let's Football. It began with eight players and now has 14, most of them expatriates working in energy, utilities, banking, aviation, IT and telecoms. "We play for recreation, no competition, different nationality and age groups," Dutta says.

If you want to relax and still have fun, show up, essentially.

The system is analogue. Every Monday, attendance opens for the following Saturday, the most common day off. Once 14 players sign up, enrolment pauses; newcomers are still welcome, but they wait for a cancellation. The coordinator books and pays for the pitch as soon as ten names are in, trusting the rest will follow, and everyone settles up after the final whistle. Weekends are the anchor, mornings and, when they can manage it, evenings too. If a pitch comes free after work midweek, they take that as well.

For Saha, part of the appeal is just moving. "Most of the people here, are in sedentary jobs. So, it helps them when they come to play football," he says. Yet, the real bonds form afterwards, over tea, where the match gets analysed to pieces. "These small things help us return," he explains.

Krasen Tenev, a cabin crew member, found the group on Facebook and was eager to play. "I drive specifically for the games," he says. He isn't a stranger to community sport, having joined several groups across Abu Dhabi, and football has been the constant. "Since I was a child, I used to play football," he says. Not fond of the gym, he finds the game both more relaxing and a better workout. "And these aren't competitive, it's friendly and so approachable."

That, in a sense, is the point. Abu Dhabi is a city where nearly everyone came from somewhere else, and where the ordinary scaffolding of adult friendship, school friends and old neighbours, What fills the gap, for a growing number of residents, is just a friendly game of sport.

Similarly, Dr. Mohamed Osama Omar Abdelrahman, who has always been playing football since his college days, is glad to have run into the community too. As he explains, when he first arrived, he did face his fair share of struggles of finding time for games. "It's worse for me, if I don't play," he admits. It's fun, and it's a form of fitness too, and so he joins in the different games organised by a vast group of friends as well.

Let's Football is one community, in another corner of Abu Dhabi, ADSN (Abh Dhabi Sports Networking) kicked off for similar reasons. Aman Parmar had already lived in the region for 11 years when he returned to Abu Dhabi in 2022, and he still couldn't find a regular game. "Most games were either private, hard to access, or lacked regularity," he says. So two years ago he started his own. ADSN began as a single casual football match, built as an open door: every skill level welcome, no pressure, no barriers to entry.

The people who walk through that door tend to have a version of the same story. Sam Speed moved to Abu Dhabi in May 2024. "I didn't know anyone at all in Abu Dhabi or the UAE," Speed says. Working remotely meant there wasn't even an office to supply a few ready-made acquaintances. "I arrived very much by myself."

A Facebook post turned up a football game, and what sealed it was the tone: social football, not anything overly competitive. A few games became a habit, the habit became a circle of people, and when the group branched into padel, a sport Speed had never played, the circle widened again. "I'm now playing twice a week and have been for quite a while," Speed says. "Really good, really good people."

Sesegma Kadado came in sideways. She didn't know anyone in the group at first; she joined with friends from another sport. Then those friends drifted off, and she kept turning up anyway. "But now they have stopped playing, so I come on my own," she says. "It's been a nice way to meet new people."

Patton took the most traditional expat route of all: Asking around the office. A colleague added Patton to the ADSN WhatsApp group, and a year and a half later the weekly game is a fixture. "I've made a great group of friends and look forward to playing each week," Patton says. Asked what the group has meant, Patton doesn't hedge: Most of the friends made in the city, by Patton's own count, came through ADSN.

It would be easy to file all of this under expat loneliness. Reza Hakim thinks that misses it. "I think it's less to do with being an expat and more to do with age groups and keeping active," Hakim says.

The men and women on these pitches are, for the most part, past the age when sport is a career ambition and still a joy to play. "A lot of us have been playing football since we could walk," Hakim says, and now, in their 30s and 40s, they wanted to enjoy sports but also know that they can go home safe to their families afterwards.

That second clause is the silent engine. A social game is a different animal and, Hakim argues, a better way to actually know someone. "Playing sports naturally brings people together," Hakim says. "You learn where people are from, you learn about their families, what they do etc from short conversations before and after a game. In the game you learn about their character without needing a verbal conversation."

Then the distinction that matters: "That's not necessarily something you can do in competitive sports because your mindset is different."

Burcu Cetik, who works in project management in the oil and gas sector, describes the same atmosphere from the padel court. "Everyone is incredibly friendly and welcoming," she says. "There's no sense of competition or judgement outside the game itself."

The qualifier: outside the game itself, is duly noted.

Nobody pretends not to care about the score. Patton, who had never played padel before joining, now plays regularly and enjoys the bite that the platform's skill-based pairing allows: "Through the level match making, we can have competitive games which I really enjoy each week." The competition is real for an hour. Then it's switched off, and everyone goes back to being people with jobs and kids and a 7 am meeting.

Adult life has a way of strangling hobbies through logistics: The endless WhatsApp polls, the organiser chasing transfers, the game that dies because nobody confirmed. Let's Football solves it with a Monday roll call and a coordinator willing to front the pitch fee. ADSN's answer has been technology. The group launched its own platform, ADSN.me, with a mobile app in development, so players can browse sessions and claim a spot without the back-and-forth.

"It's a very easy community to enter, everything's bookable via an app as opposed to just whatsapp groups," Speed says. "You don't have to commit necessarily because if you book and pay in advance you can cancel within, I think eight hours notice and get your money back so that's nice."

The flexibility matters more than it sounds. "People aren't always able to commit to playing every week through work or family commitments," Patton says, "but is always good to see them when they return."

For Kadado, who works long hours, the game is the one fixed point she guards. "To be honest, I don't have much free time because I work a lot," she says. "It's my time to switch off from work, enjoy the game, meet people and simply have fun. I always feel happy when I'm on the court!"

Cetik, for her part, admits to a kind of weekly anticipation most adults reserve for payday. "I actually find myself looking forward to the next week's bookings opening!"

ADSN, meanwhile, has kept growing outward. Football and padel have been joined by go-karting, and by yoga and sound-healing sessions that sit, a little improbably, on the same calendar as five-a-side. Parmar describes the aim as combining "high-energy team sports with mindful recovery practices." Members also get discounts with partner businesses around the city, from recovery and dining to golf and car rental.

Yet it's the social events members talk about. "There's been other sports, one-off events and we've done some socials as well," Speed says. Cetik is more emphatic: "I also love that there are social events and activities organised outside of padel. It gives everyone another opportunity to get together, get to know each other better and strengthen those friendships."

Not everyone is there yet, and the honesty is part of the charm. "For now, we mostly just meet and play together," Kadado says. "I haven't really started socialising with everyone outside the games yet, but I enjoy the friendly atmosphere and getting to know people." Friendship among adults, it turns out, still takes the time it always took. The difference is having somewhere to spend that time.

Much of the credit, members say, goes to the person who keeps answering his phone. "He responds to messages so quickly and always makes an effort to make everyone feel included and comfortable," Cetik says about Parmar. "You really feel that he cares about building a community, not just organising padel games."

They're all present for the love for the sport, Hakim says, "And that's what bonds us with people we'd never have the opportunity to interact with in our day to day lives."

Cetik puts it more simply, and it may be the best description of adult friendship in a transient city that anyone has come up with: "You come for the sport, but you stay for the people."