For forty years, Iraq’s footballers watched the world’s biggest tournament from the sidelines.
Nine editions of the World Cup came and went. Generations of talented players, including what many consider the finest generation in the country’s football history, the 2007 Asian Cup winners, came and went too, their careers ending without ever stepping onto a World Cup pitch.
When Iraq finally secured their place at the 2026 tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico, it marked the end of an absence so long it had begun to feel permanent.
Understanding why it took so long, and what it took to end it, requires tracing a story that is as much about the history of a country as the history of a football team.
The 1986 anomaly
Iraq’s only previous World Cup appearance, in Mexico in 1986, was in many ways the exception that proved the rule. The team qualified during the Iran-Iraq war, a detail that reveals both the remarkable resilience of that generation and the scale of what they were up against.
FIFA ruled that Iraq could not play home matches on their own soil, stripping the team of home advantage for the entire qualifying campaign.
“In the 1986 World Cup qualifiers, Iraq was living through a bitter reality because of the Iran-Iraq War, which forced the team to play all its matches outside its territory by a decision of FIFA, and it was deprived of the support of its fans,” Ahmed Abbas, a football expert and former member of the Iraqi Football Association during the 1980s, told The New Arab.
That squad, shaped by coaches including the legendary Ammo Baba, earned their place through sheer collective quality. At the tournament itself, they faced Mexico on home soil, Paraguay, and Belgium, the latter finishing fourth.
Former international Shaker Mahmoud, who scored the goal against Syria that sealed qualification, recalls the emotional weight of that moment. “The most beautiful moments I lived were the moment of qualification and competing in the tournament,” he told TNA.
The matches, he adds, “were very difficult, but the team performed at a high level despite losing to Paraguay, Belgium and Mexico”.
What stayed with him most was something simpler. “We felt proud seeing the Iraqi flag raised among the flags of the participating countries in the World Cup. These are moments that cannot be forgotten.”
It would be the last time for four decades.
What the years between took away
The reasons for Iraq’s long absence are inseparable from the country’s modern history, and Abbas is direct about the structural reality.
The team “was forced to play qualifying matches on pitches outside Iraq from 1990 until the 2022 World Cup qualifiers”, a span of more than thirty years.
The causes were sequential and compounding: the Gulf War, the economic sanctions that followed, and the 2003 invasion each added new layers of difficulty.
The practicalities were punishing, as Abbas describes Iraqi national teams during the sanctions era travelling overland to Jordan before continuing to match destinations – a logistical ordeal that imposed exhaustion before a ball was kicked, and reflected a country effectively cut off from normal international movement.
The cumulative effect, he argues, “negatively impacted the team’s results and its qualification chances”.
Mahmoud identifies a parallel structural failure running through the same period: successive Football Association administrations that never built long-term plans.
“One of the reasons for Iraq’s failure to qualify in previous editions goes back to the successive Football Association administrations that did not put in place long-term strategic plans, but relied on temporary solutions,” he says.
“Preparation for tournaments and qualifiers usually started late, unlike the associations of other countries that work according to plans extending over years.”
Moreover, he adds, youth development was neglected, age-group competitions were under-resourced, and facilities lagged behind.
While other Asian federations were constructing multi-year roadmaps, Iraq was largely improvising, a consequence, at least in part, of a country where long-term planning of any kind had become a luxury.
Talent was never the problem
What makes the long absence particularly striking is that Iraq never lacked for players. Abbas and Mahmoud both point to the 1970s, 1990s, and the 2007 generation as periods producing exceptional talent.
Mahmoud is emphatic on this point. “Iraq had distinguished generations of players in the seventies and nineties of the last century, and also the 2007 generation, Asian champions, but the dream of participating in the World Cup remained out of reach until it was achieved with the 2026 generation.”
The gap between talent and results points to the structural and political environment rather than any deficiency in the players themselves.
The sanctions, the invasions, the collapse of institutions, the enforced absence of home matches – these were not marginal factors. They were, decade after decade, the story.
The long road to 2026
Iraq’s path to the 2026 World Cup was achieved through an unusually gruelling route. Abbas notes that the team “played 21 matches in the qualifiers, a number that exceeds what any other Asian team played”.
Broadcaster and journalist Ali Riyah, who covered the campaign closely, frames it even more starkly: the 21-match tally is “an unprecedented number among the world’s teams participating on the road to the World Cup”.
The journey included stumbles that, at various points, appeared potentially fatal: a draw against Kuwait, a defeat to Palestine.
The expansion of Asia’s World Cup allocation to eight and a half places kept Iraq’s hopes alive when earlier rules would have ended them, a structural shift that Riyah acknowledges was consequential in keeping qualification mathematically possible through the campaign’s difficult middle stretch.
The appointment of Australian coach Graham Arnold proved decisive. Captain Jalal Hassan, who will lead the squad in the United States, describes the change as transformative.
“The change of the technical staff and the contracting with Australian coach Graham Arnold contributed to making a big change, especially at the psychological and moral level of the players, which was clearly reflected in the team’s performance in the matches he led.”
Arnold’s player selection and his management of a group that had spent, in Hassan’s words, “two and a half years of fatigue, effort and travel” while challenging different climatic conditions between heat and cold were central to converting potential into results.
The play-off route, what Hassan calls the “long playoff matches”, produced the campaign’s hardest moments.
“Not qualifying directly from the second stage of the qualifiers, which granted two qualification tickets to the first and second place finishers, forced us to go through the long playoff matches, and there were very difficult moments that witnessed a lot of setbacks, but we were able to overcome them,” he says.
Abbas, for his part, credits the broader support structure as the team received great governmental support, in addition to the efforts of the Iraqi Football Association, while noting that Arnold “was at the level of responsibility”.
What awaits in 2026
Iraq enters the tournament in Group 9, alongside France, Norway and Senegal. Hassan speaks of the squad’s readiness.
“We are in full readiness to face this challenge that will begin in a few days,” Abbas stresses, but he does not obscure the difficulty of the draw, describing a group that includes France, Norway and Senegal as genuinely formidable, but stops short of writing off Iraq’s chances.
He notes that “if they perform at the level they showed in their friendly against Spain, they will be a tough opponent, and perhaps achieve results worthy of the name of Iraqi football”.
Riyah, who covered the 1986 campaign and the current one, draws a direct comparison between the two eras: where the 1986 side “included a large group of stars and was distinguished by its ability to come back in difficult matches and achieve positive results despite falling behind,” but today’s team is defined above all by what it endured to get there – a qualification campaign of a length and difficulty no other nation faced.
The group, Riyah says, “includes two different football schools: the European one represented by France and Norway, and the African one represented by Senegal. But football is not without surprises, and what our team showed in its friendly against Spain gives us hope for achieving positive results and surprising everyone”.
What comes after
Iraq has made it back. The harder question, which Abbas, Mahmoud and Riyah all raise, in different ways, is whether the Football Association can now build what was missing across the decades of failure: the long-term infrastructure, the youth pipelines, the strategic continuity that transforms a one-off qualification into a sustainable return to football’s highest stage.
Mahmoud, who scored the goal that started all of this forty years ago, is clear-eyed about what the 40-year gap actually represented: not a failure of talent, but a failure of planning, compounded by history.
“The dream of participating in the World Cup remained out of reach,” he says, “until it was achieved with the 2026 generation”.
Iraq qualified. Now comes the work of making sure it doesn’t take another forty years to do it again.
Mohammed Hannoun is an Iraqi journalist
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab
Edited by Charlie Hoyle
