Iraq's Journey to the World Cup: A Story of Resilience
The road to Mexico began on roads that barely deserved the name.
For Iraq’s players and staff, the final step towards a first World Cup in 40 years did not start with tactics boards or recovery sessions. It started with eight-hour bus rides to Baghdad, headlights cutting through the dark, families left at checkpoints, and a country at war pressing in on all sides.
From there, the journey became even more surreal.
“They had to travel from different cities to Baghdad by car or bus,” recalls René Meulensteen, assistant to head 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. The other Asian-based players made their own way to Amman, so they could all travel together.”
Airspace closed. A nation dragged into the Middle East conflict. A team trying to reach Monterrey.
Fifa had arranged a private charter out of Amman. Even that lifeline frayed. A nine-hour delay on the tarmac. An eight-hour slog to Lisbon. Two hours in transit. Then 12 more in the air to Mexico. By the time Iraq finally landed, they had been in motion for the best part of two days.
This was the build-up to what Meulensteen, the former Manchester United coach, calls “the most important game in their lives”.
And still, they were ready.
A nation on the line
In Monterrey, with legs that should have been heavy and minds that had every excuse to wander, Iraq beat Bolivia 2-1 to grab the last ticket to the World Cup. The stands told their own story.
“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 atmosphere turned unexpectedly partisan. The underdog arrived exhausted and found itself carried.
For Iraq, the venue meant more than logistics and jet lag.
“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.’”
The circle closed. The country that had last seen Iraq on the world stage in 1986 now watched them claw their way back.
Back home, night gave way to something wilder.
“It was absolute madness in Baghdad, where it was early in the morning,” Meulensteen says. Videos flooded his phone: streets jammed with cars, flags waving from windows, fireworks, dancing. “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.”
This is a football story, but never just that. It rarely is with Iraq.
Fourth place at the 2004 Olympics, when they beat Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal. The 2007 Asian Cup, won in the middle of a civil war, a trophy briefly holding together a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart. The 1986 World Cup appearance, now echoed in Mexico again, also played out 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.”
Yet in the middle of that, a squad that sings.
“You should hear them on the bus to training and matches, singing and listening to music. It’s absolutely brilliant.” The coach who once helped hone the edges of Ronaldo’s game now finds joy in the noise and chaos of a group that has dragged itself to the game’s biggest stage.
Into the hardest group
Fate has not rewarded Iraq’s effort with comfort.
They have landed in what might be the tournament’s toughest group: France, Senegal and Norway. One world champion, one African powerhouse, one Scandinavian side brimming with talent.
“It’s like Manchester United against Grimsby,” Meulensteen says, leaning on a cup upset to explain the scale of the challenge. The twist, of course, is that Grimsby actually won that Carabao Cup tie at Old Trafford last August. The punchline is clear: the favourite does not always walk away unscathed.
Meulensteen has been here before with Arnold. At the last World Cup, their Australia side were written off in a group with France, Denmark and Tunisia. They advanced anyway, beating Denmark and Tunisia and pushing 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.”
The blueprint is familiar: organisation, belief, and the willingness to embrace a role others see as hopeless.
Iraq’s squad reflects a broader story too. Some players were born in the country, others come from the diaspora, carrying Iraqi heritage from different corners of the globe. Not all of them speak Arabic. Meulensteen, now 62, bridges some of the gaps with his intermediate Arabic, picked up during his early coaching years in Qatar.
That move, back in 1993, came with its own cultural adjustment. To live there, he had to marry his girlfriend because living together out of wedlock was not allowed. Football has always taken him into worlds where the job is about more than a training pitch.
From Carrington to Baghdad
Meulensteen’s path to this point runs through one of the most successful club sides of the modern era.
He arrived at Manchester United eight years after that first Gulf trip, brought in via academy director Lee Kershaw and a recommendation from Dave Mackay, who had met him while managing Qatar’s under-17s. At first, Meulensteen worked in the academy. Then came individual sessions with first-team players. Then, crucially, with Ronaldo.
“I had several sessions with him on and off the pitch, using videos to show certain things,” he says. The focus was sharp: finishing, movement, decision-making. “We focused on the key aspects of finishing, dividing the penalty area into zones to make him aware of his positioning, the type of crosses coming in and the best finish for each situation.”
The message to Ronaldo was simple but ruthless: less show, more kill.
Meulensteen encouraged him to shift his game away from pure flair and towards efficiency. “I told him it’s all about being as unpredictable as possible, varying your game … Over the years, he mastered that perfectly.”
What struck him most, though, was Ronaldo’s obsession.
“At Carrington, we had this fenced cage with rebound boards. 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.”
All the work of that season – the drills, the video breakdowns, the conversations – ended up on a DVD Meulensteen put together for Ronaldo. “It was basically a PowerPoint presentation with video clips, in which I also explained the importance of setting goals, how people with clear targets are far more successful than those without them.”
Targets quickly became numbers. At the start of the 2007‑08 season, after Ronaldo had scored 23 goals the previous year, Meulensteen asked him for a new aim. Ronaldo said 30. Meulensteen pushed: “What about 40?” Ronaldo agreed. He finished with 42 as United won both the Premier League and the Champions League.
In the summer of 2008, Meulensteen’s role expanded again. Promoted to first-team coach, he was handed responsibility for designing and leading training sessions. Sir Alex Ferguson gave him the framework on three flipchart sheets.
“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.’ When you look back, during the period when we were at our best, you could see all those elements.”
Those four words – pace, power, penetration, unpredictability – now travel with Meulensteen, from Manchester to Fulham, to the US, Israel, India, Australia and on to Iraq. The environments change. The principles stay.
Coaching fear, not just football
Since leaving United in 2013, Meulensteen has collected experiences that go far beyond chalkboards and cones. One recurring theme is how players deal with doubt.
“If they experience fear, I ask them to give it a shape,” he explains. “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.”
The language matters. So does the approach. Instead of ripping up a player’s game, he asks them to “add” things, layer by layer, rather than change who they are. The idea comes straight from one of his greatest influences.
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, when fatigue set in and concentration wavered, Ferguson would often stroll past, tap Meulensteen on the shoulder and quietly deliver that exact phrase.
The bond between the two men grew beyond football.
“He is a great storyteller and has very broad interests,” Meulensteen says. “He reads a lot and knows a great deal about politics and history. He is absolutely fascinated by the American civil war; he knows so much about it. But also about movies, actors and actresses, you name it. He was incredibly well rounded.”
On team buses and trains to away games, the staff would fire up Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on Meulensteen’s iPad. Ferguson, predictably, dominated. “The number of times we made it to the end is unbelievable. He knew things I would have never known.”
They still meet now and then, away from the noise.
“Every now and then they meet up for a cup of tea,” Meulensteen says of their relationship, slipping briefly into the third person as if telling someone else’s story. “We’ll sit there for an hour and a half, two hours, and the time just flies by. It’s fantastic.” United, he says, was a “beautiful period” of his life.
The next chapter is being written on different soil.
In Iraq, he has a squad that sings on buses, a country scarred but straining towards something brighter, and a World Cup group that looks unforgiving on paper. He has players who have travelled for days just to get to a qualifier, then flown halfway around the world to Mexico for one game that could change everything.
He knows the odds. He has heard them before.
The question now is not whether Iraq belong at this World Cup. They proved that in Monterrey. The question is how far this unlikely, road‑hardened group can push those four old Ferguson principles against France, Senegal and Norway – and how much more madness might yet unfold in the streets of Baghdad.
