My friends,
I love football. I have loved it for as long as I can remember, and I am sure there are many, many people who wish I would shut up about it.
But I am not special. There are around 46 million Iraqis who also happen to love football, maybe not as much as me, but some of them truly considerably more (perhaps this applies to my dad).
And Iraq is not special either, as the devotion for the sport truly goes beyond borders across the entire region.
Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, these teams are regional powerhouses, whether historically or currently. Football has been on the rise in other countries in the area too, like Qatar, who are back-to-back Asian Cup champions, and Jordan, who are recent runners-up in both the Asian Cup and the Arab Cup, alongside being first-time debutants in the last World Cup.
Go to Cairo, Riyadh, Casablanca, Algiers, Kuwait, and it is the same story. This region lives for the game, and it is arguably one of the few things every Arab country has in common, and one of the few things that can bring an entire nation to a standstill for ninety minutes.
I can go on and on about this, and it does extend to club football too. Man there was a time in Jordan as I was growing up where a person would not ask you which team you supported, no, they would ask you "Madridi? Wila Barshalooni? [You support Madrid? Or Barcelona?]", and so on and so forth.
Which is why we are told, constantly, that football unites us. It does not. Or at least, not in the way we are told it does.
I refer first to the Gulf Cup, which is on right now in Saudi Arabia. It started in Bahrain in 1970 with four teams, and for most of its life it has sat outside the FIFA calendar, which means it was essentially a friendly. Local league players, no ranking points that matter, no World Cup or Asian Cup place at stake. On paper, nothing. Just a really cool trophy:
The slogan is "Khaleejna Wahad", our Gulf is one. And then Iraq plays Kuwait and all hell breaks loose, as nobody in the stadium has forgotten 1990, which is why Iraq was not even allowed back into the tournament until 2004. Or Qatar hosts in 2019 during a blockade imposed against them by Saudi, the UAE and Bahrain, all three of which decided to turn up at the last minute. Or you play Yemen, who are not even part of the Gulf? I mean, Iraq really isn't either but you can make a case for Basra. Yemen tho? I guess it is the history of the cup.
This edition is different, too. For once it falls within the FIFA international window/calendar, so the teams were allowed to call up their best players, wherever the club they play for is. For context, if an international fixture is not within the FIFA window, clubs can outright refuse to release their players to the national teams. But this time, they had to, and the teams made use of it, so a tournament that has historically been so competitive, is now also a serious one between the partaking nations.
And last night it produced something I genuinely did not think was possible. Iraq and Oman finished the group level on everything. Same points, same goals scored, same goals conceded, even the same number of yellow cards. Oman had come from a goal down to beat Kuwait 3-1 in the last few minutes, while Saudi beat Iraq 2-0, and suddenly there was nothing left in the regulations to separate the two sides. At first the Omani players started celebrating, and I spent 20 minutes being rage baited by the scenario that had unfolded. Then, some spokesperson came out and said it’s a tie, and a lottery draw is to take place at midnight. So I spent a further two hours waiting anxiously for this bullshit draw.
And so the Federation drew lots. In a hotel in Jeddah.
Oman came out of the bowl and Iraq went home. FIFA's own rules now separate teams on world ranking in this exact situation, which would have sent Iraq through, and our coach Graham Arnold made that point loudly. The Gulf Federation did not care, “our tournament, our rules.”, they said.
And the reaction across the region told you everything. Omanis celebrating like they had won the entire thing. Iraqis (as always) calling it a conspiracy. Saudis, Kuwaitis, Bahrainis, all of whom had nothing to do with it, enjoying every second. And I thought the Bahrainis were chill.
Nobody was neutral. Nobody ever is.
Now let's widen the scope out to the Arab Cup, and it is the same thing across a bigger map.I love the Arab Cup. The 2021 and 2025 editions in Qatar, under FIFA, were some of the best Arab football I have watched. It too also has a very cool trophy:
But put these countries in one tournament and the history comes with them.
Morocco and Algeria, whose border has been closed for three decades, met in the 2021 quarter-final and it felt like far more than a quarter-final; Egypt and Algeria still carry 2009 and Omdurman (possibly one of the greatest World Cup qualifier stories of all time);
Tunisia and Algeria;
the UAE and Qatar;
Syria and Lebanon;
Kuwait and Iraq;
Saudi and Iraq;
Jordan and Iraq…. :P;
Egypt and pretty much anyone.
Every match has a backstory, and every backstory is a reason to hate somebody for the week. The real cherry on the cake here would be extending an invite for Iran to participate as well.
And notice who all these grudges are with. Never someone far away. Nobody in Muscat cares about beating Belgium the way they care about beating Kuwait. You do not hate a stranger, you hate the guy next door, the one whose accent you immigrate and whose food you eat, his cousin probably even married your cousin. The rivalry only works because we know each other so well. That is not the opposite of being close. It is what being close looks like in this region.
So yes I do love the Arab Cup, but it is far from perfect. My issue is the structure, and this is a criticism I have heard that I fully agree with. The Arab Cup is a FIFA tournament, but it is not on the FIFA calendar. European clubs do not have to release anyone. So Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, even Iraq, Syria and Palestine, whose best players are in Europe or North America or elsewhere depending on the diaspora, cannot bring their strongest sides.
The Asian Arab teams mostly can, because most of their players are in the local leagues. The North African Arabs end up calling up their domestic players or their Olympic squads. Which is how Morocco, without their starting players or their Europe-based players, beat Jordan's full team (bar Mousa Al-Tamari) in last December's final.
Don’t get me wrong it was a beautiful final, but it kind of ruins the illusion when the champions were not really "Morocco", but "Morocco B", and everyone knows it.
Where I disagree with the critics is when they go a step further and call these tournaments useless. Both of them, the Gulf Cup and the Arab Cup. Scrap them, they say, and focus on qualifiers.
No. This region loves football and lacks so much of it. Our leagues are uneven, our federations are a mess, and most of our players get a handful of competitive games a year against anyone decent. These tournaments are those games. They are where a local league player finds out whether he can handle a full stadium, and where a coach finds out who he can trust. You do not get better at football by playing less of it, and if it were up to me I’d even introduce a Levant Cup, a West Asia / Middle East cup, a North Africa Cup, and more. We love football, we love our nations, give me more of them together. Inject it into the veins.
And here is the irony. The tournaments where we hate each other the most are the same tournaments that build the teams we all end up cheering for. Jordan did not reach a World Cup out of nowhere, they were forged on the momentum and gains made through participating in the Asian and Arab Cups before, beating and losing to the same neighbours year after year. Morocco can win an Arab Cup with their B team because their depth was built the same way.
And then the World Cup actually comes around, and all of this disappears. Suddenly we are brothers. The Omani who celebrated Iraq's exit last night will be supporting Iraq at the next World Cup. The Algerian who will not say a kind word about Morocco was screaming for Morocco in 2022, like the rest of us. When Saudi beat Argentina that same year, the whole region celebrated like it was their own win. Every Arab team becomes every Arabs’ team, and the Talabat adverts come out, the "one nation" posts come out, the flags of other countries come out on balconies. And for a month, the unity everyone keeps promising indeed exists, and perhaps we can say, in this specific month, the celebration of football does indeed Unite the Arabs.
It exists because there is finally someone else to play. Spain, France, Portugal. We will probably lose but we will play! And the stories we get should the odd win come are far greater than any other story in football.
This past July, Egypt were 2-0 up against Argentina with eleven minutes to go. When Argentina scored the third in stoppage time and completed their comeback, I was Egyptian that day. I felt the pain. And I work with so many Egyptians, so when I went into work the next day, I too bought into the conspiracies. Again, that day, I felt Egyptian.
For decades we went to World Cups mostly to make up the numbers, so any Arab team getting anything felt like it belonged to all of us. We know how rare it is, because we have all been on the losing end of it together.
It's funny, it's textbook Arab family. I fight with my siblings all year, over the same stupid things, but the second an outsider tries to unsettle just one of us, we close the ranks. And once the outsider is cleared, it's back to fighting, and a few months after the World Cup ends, we are back in a hotel in Jeddah, pulling names out of a bowl, furious about it.
And I am no better.
When Jordan knocked out Iraq in the 2023 Asian Cup, in the painful manner in which it happened (a dubious conspiracy against Aymen Hussein, how can a player be sent off for celebrating!), I lost probably half my friends over it. But I still backed Jordan in the World Cup.
So perhaps football does unite us after all, just for one month every four years. But that one month only exists because of the other forty-seven, and for those forty-seven, we go back to being exactly who we were before it.
I mean come on, even Iraq, the team I love most, the love of my life, cannot unite the people on its own shirt. There are Iraqi Kurds who refuse to recognise the national team as theirs and want a Kurdish team instead. There are Shias and Sunnis who each want fewer of the other in the squad. There are Muslims upset that some of our players are Christian. And there are those who go as far as attacking the players who choose to play for Iraq, all in the name of sectarianism.
But the beauty is once Iraq won the Asian Cup in 2007, or once they qualified back to their first World Cup since 1986 earlier this year, it was all put aside.
Click the picture to return home.