Iraq's Journey to the World Cup: A Tale of Resilience
The convoy rolled towards Baghdad long before dawn, headlights cutting through a country still bearing the scars of war. Some players came by car, others by bus, bouncing along cratered roads for up to eight hours just to reach the capital. Only then did Iraq’s journey to the World Cup really begin.
From Baghdad it was 15 more hours on rough, unforgiving roads to Amman. No shortcuts, no chartered luxury. Just a squad inching across a region whose airspace had closed around them, determined not to let a conflict steal their moment.
“They had to travel from different cities to Baghdad by car or bus,” says 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.”
The other Asian-based players converged on Amman too, funnelling into the same staging point. Only there did the team finally feel like a squad again, gathered for the final push.
Fifa had arranged a private charter. It did not glide into action. A nine-hour delay kept them grounded, bodies stiffening, minds racing. Then came an eight-hour flight to Lisbon, a two-hour stopover, and a 12-hour haul across the Atlantic to Mexico.
Hardly the textbook build-up to what Meulensteen, the former Manchester United coach under Sir Alex Ferguson, calls “the most important game in their lives”. Yet when Iraq finally touched down in Monterrey, they had something just as valuable as rest: a story, and a sense of purpose that no sports science manual can script.
They recovered. They regrouped. And then they beat Bolivia 2-1 to take the last ticket to the World Cup.
The Estadio crowd tilted in their favour. “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. In the stands, Mexican families and Iraqi exiles roared for the same cause. On the pitch, a team that had crawled across borders ran like they’d never travelled at all.
There was symmetry in the setting. Iraq’s only previous World Cup appearance came in Mexico in 1986. “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.’”
Back in Baghdad, it was early morning. Nobody slept.
“It was absolute madness in Baghdad,” Meulensteen says, recalling the videos that pinged onto his phone. Horns blared, fireworks cracked, streets flooded with people. “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 not a country unfamiliar with football as a rare binding force. Iraq finished fourth at the 2004 Olympics, beating Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal along the way. They won the 2007 Asian Cup while civil war raged at home, a trophy lifted amid bombings and sectarian tension. Their 1986 World Cup campaign and that Athens run both unfolded 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 there is joy in this squad. Real, noisy joy.
“You should hear them on the bus to training and matches, singing and listening to music,” he says. “It’s absolutely brilliant.”
They will need that spirit. The draw has dropped them into arguably the tournament’s most unforgiving group: France, Senegal and Norway. Heavyweights, all of them.
“It’s like Manchester United against Grimsby,” Meulensteen jokes, recalling last August’s Carabao Cup upset, when the supposed minnows knocked out the giants. The implication is clear. Favourites lose. Scripts tear.
The Dutchman has lived that before. With Arnold, he helped take Australia to the last World Cup and out of a group that many thought would swallow them whole.
“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.” Australia beat Denmark, beat Tunisia and made Argentina work hard in the last 16.
Iraq will lean on a similar blend of grit and unpredictability. Their squad is a patchwork of those born in the country and players with Iraqi heritage raised abroad. Not all speak Arabic. Meulensteen meets them halfway with an intermediate grasp of the language, picked up during his early coaching days in Qatar.
That move to the Gulf in 1993 required its own personal shift. To live there with his girlfriend, he had to marry her. Rules were rules. He adapted, as he always has.
Eight years later, he arrived at Manchester United. Academy director Lee Kershaw and a recommendation from Dave Mackay, who had met Meulensteen while managing Qatar’s under-17s, opened the door. Meulensteen walked through it and started in the academy before taking on individual work with first-team players.
That role grew in 2007 after a short spell as Brøndby head coach. He began working closely with Ronaldo, then a brilliant but still maturing forward. They drilled specifics.
“I had several sessions with him on and off the pitch, using videos to show certain things,” Meulensteen says. “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: less decoration, more devastation. “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 Ronaldo’s obsession with improvement. At Carrington there was a fenced cage with rebound boards. Training would finish; Ronaldo’s work would not.
“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 of that work, all of those conversations, ended up on a DVD. A PowerPoint presentation stitched with video clips, it laid out not only technical details but also the psychology of targets and ambition. People with clear goals, it argued, outperform those without.
At the start of the 2007-08 season, Ronaldo had just scored 23 goals. Meulensteen asked for his new target. Ronaldo said 30. “What about 40?” came the reply. Ronaldo agreed. He finished with 42 as United won both the Premier League and Champions League.
By the summer of 2008, Meulensteen had been promoted to first-team coach. Ferguson handed him three flipchart sheets that defined how Manchester United should play. They became his compass.
“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.’”
Look back at United at their peak and those four words jump out of almost every attack.
After leaving Old Trafford in 2013, Meulensteen’s path took him to Fulham, then on to the US, Israel and India. Each stop added something: new cultures, new dressing rooms, new ways to manage doubt.
He now uses that experience with Iraq’s players, especially when anxiety bites. “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.”
His language is deliberate. He does not ask players to rip up their game. He asks them to “add” to it. Ferguson believed in that kind of nuance too. He also believed in the power of two simple words.
“He always said the two most important coaching words are: well done,” Meulensteen recalls. As training wound down at Carrington, Ferguson would often stroll past, tap him on the shoulder and say exactly that.
The bond between them runs deeper than football. Ferguson is, in Meulensteen’s eyes, a storyteller and an obsessive learner. He devours books on politics and history, is fascinated by the American civil war, and reels off film trivia with ease.
On away trips with United, they would sit on the bus or train playing 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. An hour and a half becomes two in a blink. Stories roll, time disappears. For Meulensteen, United was a “beautiful period” of his life.
Now he is trying to script another.
The setting is no longer Old Trafford under the lights but World Cup stadiums under a different kind of pressure. The players are not global superstars but young men who have rattled across deserts and borders just to be there. The odds, again, are stacked. The group is brutal. The journey has already taken them to the edge.
And yet, for a nation that has known far darker nights, what better stage than this to surprise the world again?
