I laughed loudly when they beat the UAE in the UAE to get to the final.
Doubt think it's their academy system though, if it's anything like their successful athletics program it mostly consists of poaching people from other countries rather than home grown talent. Suppose it's good news for the World Cup, since Qatar was at risk of being the weakest team ever to be in a WC via their automatic qualification.
Well, most of the team was born in Qatar and it looks like a good bit of the players came through the Aspire Academy. Their U-19 team was successful a couple of years back and they came through there. Football forums I am reading are very upset by this, well mostly Anglos, about how this slave state run by war criminals (er..) won through obvious corruption, etc.