In Iraq’s preparations to face Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland, not to mention Sadio Mane and Michael Olise, it would have been easy to get hung up on individuals. Head coach Graham Arnold has naturally been emphasising the collective, the shuttling backline, which is basically the only way to face a task that otherwise would be overwhelmingly daunting.
The surprise Asian qualifiers arguably have the tallest task at the entire World Cup 2026. They are considered the team that everyone else will beat in what would usually be known as the group of death.
Such terms feel absurdly out of place when you consider what Iraq have been through. If a trio of games against France, Norway and Senegal are more difficult than anyone else has at this tournament, this team knows all about overcoming difficulty.
That naturally applies to much more than their long route to qualification, the difficulties in even getting to the play-off against Bolivia in Mexico due to the Iran war, or even star forward Aymen Hussein enduring hours of questioning on trying to enter the United States.
The striker, who scored the goal that beat Bolivia to bring Iraq here, has a personal story that illustrates enough.
In 2008, when Hussein was barely out of childhood, his father was killed by Al-Qaeda. A few years later, on returning from a training camp in Turkey with the Iraqi youth football team, he learned his brother had been kidnapped during a period when ISIL (also known as Islamic State) had taken control of his home Kirkuk area.
Hussein’s story is a vignette of the kind of strife this squad have had to endure, as well as their families. However, that’s just one side of this team’s story.
It’s a side that will inevitably receive a lot of focus but Hussein’s football career offers the other side – the perseverance, the joy.
The young striker actually wanted to quit the game amid his family’s difficulties, but his mother insisted on continuing. It meant too much to people, to his family, to himself, and to the Iraqi people.
Arnold realised the magnitude of that upon taking the job and qualifying.
This is a football-obsessed nation of 48 million people who were crying out for World Cup qualification. It is one of those aspirations that countries outside the elite naturally dream of, imagining it might someday be possible, only for the actual reality of it to be so much greater than can be conceived.
You only have to hear the noise when Amir Al-Ammari scored a 107th-minute stoppage-time penalty against UAE to take them to the play-off, and then the scenes after Hussein’s goals to make it 2-1 against Bolivia.
Such collective joy naturally came from “playing as a team”, as Hussein put it.
Arnold has shown his nous there, too. When he arrived, he noted how the Iraq squad were sitting at multiple separate tables. Some of this was a natural split between those who grew up in the country and children of the diaspora.
Arnold insisted on one big table.
It fits a theme, not only with the team but the country’s football history. If a second World Cup qualification will naturally bring references to their last appearance, in 1986, more relevant might be the historic 2007 Asian Cup win.
That was a vintage story of defiance and victory over every challenge possible, that has infused the spirit of Iraqi football.
It says much they’d never even won a game in the competition heading into the tournament, to go with a long ban from international football, before you even get to how the squad had been preparing in a country ravaged by international sanctions and several wars, with infrastructure and institutions almost totally destroyed.
They inevitably faced similar challenges to now, overcame passport issues and team being left in a hotel without transport.
And they kept persevering, beating favourites Australia in the groups, until a Younis Mahmoud header against defending champions Saudi Arabia ensured the most improbable of tournament wins.
It says much that the ball from that match, signed by all the players, is now up for auction in New York. The dirt from the Indonesia pitch is still on it. There is considerable ex-pat interest.
You can’t buy the kind of spirit that Iraq have, though. Their very journey here illustrates that.
