Iraq's Unforgettable Journey to the World Cup
The convoy to a World Cup rarely looks like this. No police escort, no luxury coach, no smooth hop on a charter jet. For Iraq, it began with battered cars and crowded buses crawling across a country still bearing the scars of war.
Players and staff drove for up to eight hours from scattered cities just to reach Baghdad. From there, the real slog started: roughly 15 hours on rough, broken roads to Amman, the Jordanian capital, one of the few places in the region where flights were still taking off. Airspace closures, the shadow of the Middle East conflict, and a nation on edge formed the backdrop to a journey that would decide everything.
“They had to travel from different cities to Baghdad by car or bus,” recalls René Meulensteen, assistant to Iraq’s 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.”
Twenty qualifiers had already taken Iraq to the brink. One more match, a playoff in Monterrey, Mexico, would decide whether they reached their first World Cup in 40 years. It was billed as the biggest game of their lives. The route to get there felt like something out of another era.
Fifa laid on a private charter from Amman, but even that came with a nine‑hour delay. When the plane finally lifted off, it was only the start: eight hours to Lisbon, two hours waiting on the ground, then another 12 hours across the Atlantic and on to Mexico. A World Cup dream hanging on the end of a 40‑plus‑hour odyssey.
Meulensteen, who once worked alongside Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, knew the preparation was far from ideal. Yet Iraq arrived with enough time to breathe, to loosen stiff legs, to clear heads. When the whistle went in Monterrey, the travel chaos faded. The team found clarity.
They beat Bolivia 2-1 and claimed the final ticket to the tournament.
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. Monterrey turned into a patchwork of borrowed allegiance and long-distance loyalty, Mexicans roaring on a team they had only just adopted, Iraqis from the diaspora clinging to something that felt like home.
There was symbolism in the setting. Iraq’s only previous World Cup appearance, in 1986, also came in Mexico. The staff leaned into that history.
“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 bedlam.
“It was absolute madness in Baghdad, where it was early in the morning,” Meulensteen says, having watched videos of the scenes. Fireworks, horns, people flooding the streets. A country that has known too many nights of sirens and smoke finally had a different reason to stay awake.
“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 the first time Iraqi football has cut through the gloom. The national team finished fourth at the 2004 Olympics, beating Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal along the way. In 2007 they won the Asian Cup, a triumph that briefly stitched together a country riven by civil war. The 1986 World Cup, the Olympic run in Athens, the Asian title in Jakarta – all arrived with conflict humming in the background.
“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 inside the squad, the mood is anything but bleak. Meulensteen, now 62, revels in the noise and colour of this group.
“You should hear them on the bus to training and matches, singing and listening to music. It’s absolutely brilliant.”
The draw, however, has been merciless. Iraq have landed in what many would call the group of death: France, Senegal and Norway. World champions, African power, European upstarts – and Iraq, the supposed minnows.
“It’s like Manchester United against Grimsby,” Meulensteen quips. On paper, it is a mismatch. Then again, Grimsby actually beat United in the League Cup last August. The Dutchman knows what it means to defy logic and reputation. He and Arnold did it with Australia at the last World Cup.
“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 went on to beat Denmark and Tunisia and pushed Argentina hard in the last 16. That experience, that sense of upsetting the script, now feeds into Iraq’s belief.
The squad itself is a blend. Some players were born and raised in Iraq; others come from the diaspora, with Iraqi heritage but lives scattered across Europe, the Gulf and beyond. Not all of them speak Arabic fluently. Meulensteen helps bridge that gap with his own intermediate Arabic, picked up during his early coaching years in Qatar.
That move to the Gulf in 1993 came with its own twist. To comply with local rules, he had to marry his girlfriend before they could live together. It was one of many turning points that would eventually lead him to Old Trafford.
He joined United eight years later, brought in by academy director Lee Kershaw on the back of a recommendation from Dave Mackay, who had crossed paths with Meulensteen while managing Qatar’s under‑17s. At first, he worked in the academy. Then his role expanded, moving into specialist individual sessions with first‑team players.
After a short spell as Brøndby head coach, he returned to United in 2007 with a more defined brief: sharpen the stars. One of those stars was Ronaldo.
“I had several sessions with him on and off the pitch, using videos to show certain things,” Meulensteen says. They broke down the art of finishing into details. Dividing the penalty area into zones. Understanding where he stood, what kind of cross was arriving, and which finish suited each situation.
He urged Ronaldo to trade some of the showmanship for ruthless 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 Meulensteen most was Ronaldo’s relentless hunger. At Carrington, United’s training base, there was a fenced cage with rebound boards. After sessions, Ronaldo would often slip inside for another 10 or 15 minutes alone, hammering the ball off the boards, testing his touch, experimenting with new ways to receive and release.
Meulensteen added structure to that obsession, designing exercises around those boards, then packaging the work from that season into a DVD – essentially a PowerPoint with clips and voiceover – for Ronaldo to keep. It included not just technical points but also the psychology of targets and ambition: how people with clear goals tend to go further than those without.
At the start of 2007‑08, Meulensteen asked Ronaldo for his scoring aim. The forward had hit 23 the previous year. Ronaldo said 30. “What about 40?” came the reply. Ronaldo accepted the challenge and finished the season with 42, as United lifted both the Premier League and the Champions League.
In the summer of 2008, Ferguson promoted Meulensteen to first‑team coach and effectively handed him the keys to United’s training ground. The manager laid out his philosophy in three flipchart sheets: defensive principles, ideas in possession, and a final page that, in his view, defined Manchester United more than anything else.
“When we attack, I want to do so with pace, power, penetration and unpredictability,” Ferguson told him. “And I want you to apply those four things in every training session in some way.”
Look back at United at their peak under Ferguson and those four words – pace, power, penetration, unpredictability – run through almost every goal.
After leaving United in 2013, Meulensteen’s path became more nomadic: a spell at Fulham, work in the US, Israel and India, then the role with Australia that took him back to the World Cup. The variety has hardened him as a coach and deepened his understanding of players’ minds.
“If they experience fear, I ask them to give it a shape,” he explains. Fear of what? Failure? Consequences? The weight of a nation? “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.”
He prefers to “add” to a player’s game rather than tear anything down. That language matters. Ferguson knew that too. “He always said the two most important coaching words are: well done,” Meulensteen says. Late in sessions at Carrington, Ferguson would often stroll by, tap him on the shoulder and deliver exactly that.
The two men forged a bond that went beyond football. Ferguson, a voracious reader, would dive into politics, history, film – and, in particular, the American civil war. On away trips, they would sit on the bus or train playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on Meulensteen’s iPad. They reached the final question more often than you would think.
“He knew things I would have never known,” Meulensteen says, still sounding faintly amazed.
They still meet for tea from time to time. Ninety minutes, two hours, gone in a blink. Stories, reflections, the odd tactical debate. For Meulensteen, United remains “a beautiful period” of his life.
Now, as Iraq prepare to walk into a World Cup group that looks stacked against them, he stands on the edge of another chapter. The journeys are longer, the roads rougher, the odds steeper. But if there is one thing his career – and Iraq’s route to Mexico – has taught him, it is this: the game rarely follows the script.
