So far, 2023 has been good for football in Iraq. The under-20 national team reached the final of the Asian Championship in March to qualify for this summer’s World Cup in Argentina, where they are drawn with England, Uruguay and Tunisia. In January, the country hosted and won the Gulf Cup, an eight-nation regional tournament, lifting the trophy in front of 60,000 fans in Basra. If the year ends with the national team starting out on the road to the 2026 World Cup with qualifiers on home soil, then it really will be 12 months to remember.
The last time a World Cup qualifier was hosted in Baghdad was way back in 2001. The US-led invasion two years later and the ensuing instability and insecurity (not that things were much different in the previous decades, with the Iran-Iraq war and then the first Gulf war) has meant Fifa and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) have usually told the federation to play home games in third countries such as Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
