Iraq's Journey to the World Cup: Overcoming Adversity

The road to Mexico began on a road to Baghdad.

Not a metaphorical one. A literal, grinding slog of eight-hour bus and car journeys from scattered cities across a country still scarred by war, just to reach the capital. From there, Iraq’s players and staff climbed into buses again and rattled for roughly 15 hours over broken tarmac to Amman, one of the few gateways left open to the world.

Only then could they even think about boarding a plane.

“They had to travel from different cities to Baghdad by car or bus,” recalls René Meulensteen, assistant to Iraq’s coach, Graham Arnold. “Some of those journeys took up to eight hours. Then, from Baghdad they travelled roughly 15 hours on bumpy roads to Amman, in Jordan, where occasional flights were still operating.”

Iraq’s airspace was closed, the Middle East war tightening around them. The World Cup, the first in 40 years for this football‑mad country, lay on the other side of the globe. The last step of qualification would be a playoff in Monterrey, Mexico. Getting there felt almost as daunting as winning it.

A journey like no other

By the time the squad finally gathered in Amman – home-based players from Iraq, others flying in from clubs across Asia – they had already spent more time on buses than some European teams do in an entire qualifying campaign.

Fifa stepped in with a private charter. Even that didn’t go smoothly. A nine-hour delay on the tarmac. An eight-hour flight to Lisbon. A two-hour stopover. Then a 12-hour haul across the Atlantic to Mexico.

This was the build-up to what Meulensteen, the former Manchester United coach under Sir Alex Ferguson, calls “the most important game in their lives”. No perfect sleep cycles. No pristine training camp. Just exhaustion, jet lag and a chance.

They still found a way.

In Monterrey, in front of a crowd that turned surprisingly, and powerfully, in their favour, Iraq beat Bolivia 2-1 to seize the final ticket to the World Cup. The stadium swelled with noise that sounded, at times, like Baghdad had been lifted and dropped into northern Mexico.

“All the remaining tickets were given to local Mexicans, so they were there in a big number, together with a large group of Iraqis based in the US,” Meulensteen says. The neutral fans took to the underdogs. The diaspora brought the emotion.

The setting mattered. Iraq’s only previous World Cup appearance, in 1986, had also been in Mexico. For Meulensteen and Arnold, it felt like football’s strange symmetry at work.

“We told the players: ‘Let’s realise what kind of journey we’ve had to get here and perhaps the match is meant to be here, as Iraq’s previous World Cup participation was staged in Mexico.’”

They believed it. Then they made it real.

A nation erupts

Back home, the timing only added to the surrealism. The decisive game kicked off in the small hours in Baghdad. When the final whistle went, the city didn’t go back to bed.

“It was absolute madness in Baghdad, where it was early in the morning,” Meulensteen says. Videos flooded his phone: fireworks, car horns, streets jammed with people draped in flags. “The whole nation has been craving something to celebrate and this gives people a huge boost of energy and hope. You can really feel the sense of pride; there’s a genuine feelgood factor.”

Iraqi football has lived this role before – the sport as a fragile bridge over conflict. Fourth place at the 2004 Olympics, beating Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal on the way. The 2007 Asian Cup, lifted in Jakarta while the country was being torn apart by civil war. Even that 1986 World Cup appearance came against a backdrop of conflict.

“Iraq is still a country that is really feeling the aftereffects of the second Gulf war,” Meulensteen says. “You can see that in the cities. They are recovering, but logistically and organisationally you can’t compare it to Dubai or places in Saudi Arabia.”

And yet, inside the camp, the mood is anything but bleak. Meulensteen, 62, has worked in some of the most sophisticated football environments on the planet. What he hears on the team bus with Iraq is something else.

“You should hear them on the bus to training and matches, singing and listening to music. It’s absolutely brilliant.”

Thrown into the deep end

The reward for all that toil? A group that looks like a cruel joke.

France. Senegal. Norway.

On paper, it is a draw to make even seasoned coaches wince. Meulensteen doesn’t hide from the scale of it. “It’s like Manchester United against Grimsby,” he says, evoking last August’s shock cup tie when the minnows stunned the giants. Iraq, in his mind, are Grimsby. And Grimsby won.

He and Arnold have walked this path before. At the last World Cup with Australia, they were dropped into a group with France, Denmark and Tunisia. Few gave them a chance. They beat Denmark and Tunisia, and then pushed Argentina hard in the last 16.

“We had France, Denmark and Tunisia in our group and weren’t given much chance of going through either,” he says. “But that’s where our biggest strength lies: the element of surprise.”

Iraq will need every ounce of that unpredictability now.

A team stitched from different worlds

This squad carries more than one identity. Some players were born and raised in Iraq. Others grew up in Europe or elsewhere, children of Iraqi heritage returning to a flag they barely knew as kids. Not all of them speak Arabic.

Meulensteen bridges some of the gaps himself. His Arabic is at an intermediate level, picked up during his early coaching years in Qatar in the 1990s. Even that story has a twist.

To make the move in 1993, he had to marry his girlfriend because living together out of wedlock was not allowed. It was a personal decision shaped by professional ambition, the sort of compromise that has marked much of his career.

From Qatar, his path eventually led to Manchester United. Lee Kershaw, then academy director, brought him in after a recommendation from Dave Mackay, who had met Meulensteen while managing Qatar’s under-17s. The Dutchman started in the academy, then moved into specialist work with first‑team players.

That role exploded in importance after a brief spell as Brøndby’s head coach. By 2007, he was working closely with Cristiano Ronaldo at the very moment the winger turned into a phenomenon.

Shaping a superstar

Meulensteen’s sessions with Ronaldo became part technical lab, part psychological workshop. He used video to dissect finishing, dividing the penalty area into zones so Ronaldo could read where he was, what kind of cross was coming and which finish suited each situation.

He pushed Ronaldo to strip away some of the needless flourishes and replace them with something even more devastating.

“I told him it’s all about being as unpredictable as possible, varying your game … Over the years, he mastered that perfectly.”

What struck Meulensteen most was not just talent, but obsession. “What really stood out with Cristiano was his drive for perfection. And that’s still the case.” At Carrington, United’s training ground, there was a fenced cage with rebound boards. Training would end. Ronaldo often wouldn’t.

“After training he would often go in there by himself for another 10 or 15 minutes. I also showed him exercises using those boards to handle the ball in different creative ways. He absolutely loved that.”

By the end of that season’s work, Meulensteen bundled everything – drills, clips, ideas about mentality – into a DVD. Technically, it was a PowerPoint presentation stitched to video, but it carried a simple message: set clear goals. People with targets, he told Ronaldo, go further than those without.

At the start of the 2007‑08 season, he put that theory to the test. Ronaldo had scored 23 goals the previous year. Meulensteen asked for his new target. Ronaldo said 30. Meulensteen pushed back: “What about 40?” Ronaldo agreed.

He finished with 42. United won the Premier League and the Champions League.

The Ferguson blueprint

In the summer of 2008, Meulensteen’s influence grew again. Promoted to first‑team coach, he was handed the responsibility of designing and leading training. Ferguson gave him a guide – three sheets on a flipchart that summed up his vision of Manchester United.

“It covered principles both defensively and in possession. But the final sheet, he said, was the most important, as it defined Manchester United the most. He said: ‘When we attack, I want to do so with pace, power, penetration and unpredictability. And I want you to apply those four things in every training session in some way.’”

Those four words – pace, power, penetration, unpredictability – became the spine of United’s football in their most devastating years. Watch them at full tilt in that era and you can see the blueprint at work.

Meulensteen left Old Trafford in 2013, but the lessons travelled with him. Fulham, the US, Israel, India, then Australia and another World Cup adventure. Each stop added layers – tactical, cultural, psychological.

Coaching fear, not just football

With Iraq, that experience surfaces in quieter moments. Not in team talks, but in conversations about doubt.

“If they experience fear, I ask them to give it a shape. What exactly is that fear? It could be the fear of the consequences of not winning a match. You don’t always have control over everything that comes into your head, like what you see and what you hear. But I encourage them to focus on what they want, their desires – like playing well, scoring a goal or reaching the World Cup.”

He avoids the language of ripping things up. Instead, he asks players to “add” to their game rather than change who they are. It is a subtle distinction, but one that keeps confidence intact.

Ferguson, he says, understood the power of words better than anyone. “He always said the two most important coaching words are: well done.” Late in training sessions at United, the manager would often wander past, tap Meulensteen on the shoulder and offer exactly that.

The bond between them runs deeper than football. Ferguson is, in Meulensteen’s eyes, a polymath: politics, history, films, actors, the American civil war – he devours it all. On away trips, they would often sit together on the bus or train and play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on Meulensteen’s iPad.

“The number of times we made it to the end is unbelievable. He knew things I would have never known.”

They still meet for tea from time to time. Ninety minutes, two hours, gone in a blink. “It’s fantastic.” United, he says, was a “beautiful period” of his life.

Now he is chasing another.

This summer, with Iraq thrown into a group that looks impossible on paper, Meulensteen will try to combine Ferguson’s four attacking pillars, Ronaldo’s ruthless goal-setting and the raw, defiant energy of a nation that has learned to celebrate against the odds.

The buses have already rolled. The flights have already landed. The hardest part, in some ways, is done.

The question now is simple: after 40 years away, how far can Iraq’s journey really go?