Twenty-eight months, 21 games, four rounds, a 117th-minute penalty and a playoff. A coach stuck in Dubai where he watches war start over the water, bombs shaking everything. A team trapped in Baghdad first and Jordan next, missiles flying around them. A scrambled 9,000-mile trip to Mexico where it all rests on one night, the very last country to make it. And, when they do finally land, the hero whose goal took them there is held up by the FBI and the man whose photographs are due to document history is turned back. There may never have been a journey to a World Cup quite like Iraq’s.

“It’s been an experience,” Graham Arnold says. And the 62-year-old Australian coach who led them through it all – the “football nut” who is their other “dad” and gets mobbed everywhere he goes – is adamant that it’s not over yet. “Now it’s time to show the world what we’ve got.” Listening to him, you can’t help but believe it. Not least because he did when no one else would.

The day Arnold’s agent called about the Iraq national team, he started by telling his client that an offer had arrived but he wouldn’t want it. To which Arnold replied: why not? It was May 2025, less than a year since he had resigned as Australia coach because he felt “cooked”. Iraq had sacked Jesús Casas and almost the entire staff after a 2-1 defeat to Palestine in the third round of the Asian qualifiers. And they wanted an answer fast, Arnold given three days. The response seemed a no-brainer but that’s the way he likes it, so he said yes instead. Twelve months later they landed in Chicago for their first World Cup since 1986.

“At first the family wasn’t that supportive and friends were worried because of the perception of Iraq,” Arnold admits, “but I was out of the game for six, seven months after the Socceroos and I was going a bit stir crazy. When you coach, every day you have a purpose, a challenge. When all of a sudden that’s not there, mentally it’s not easy to deal with, which is when I got the offer. There’s one thing really: I’m a football nut, I just love coaching. It was all about their team.

“I had played Iraq over the years. One game sticks out in 2007 when they beat us [Australia] 3-1. Every time I watched them, it seemed to me that they had good players but there was something not right. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t qualified for a World Cup. My decision was based on the players’ quality. If they had qualified six or 10 years ago I probably wouldn’t have done it but the fact that they hadn’t qualified for 40 years was a great challenge, a great opportunity to make 46 million people proud and happy.

“They’re completely obsessed with football; I was shocked at how much passion there was,” Arnold says. “The day I arrived in Baghdad was Real Madrid against Barcelona and it’s a public holiday so everyone can watch. They watch the Premier League and everything. When top [Iraqi] teams play there are 30,000, 40,000, 50,000. And they were desperate to get to the World Cup, for the country’s flag.

“A lot of that went on to the players. One of the first things I saw was that when the boys came into camp they were nearly having panic attacks because it was so much pressure. But I’m big on psychology, big on the brain, big on building the belief, not just of the players as individuals but as a group. There’s a lot of negativity around Iraq. They feel like, with the wars, they never get any luck in life, they don’t get appreciated, that type of stuff. I saw 26 players obsessed with their telephones so I banned social media. If they do that, I’m not going to select them. They’ve realised social media is full of lies and negativity.”

Arnold told them he was their dad and they were his boys. His staff were his brothers and thus their uncles. There were things he was determined to change and things he was determined not to. “The first day I wanted to do a presentation and four players turned up late. I said: ‘If you’re not prepared to be on time, you have no chance of qualifying’. [But] I’m Australian, I couldn’t come and make everyone Australian. I lived in Baghdad for eight months because I wanted to work out what they were like as human beings, their culture, daily life. I had to change my ways. A small example: it’s stinking hot – 45C, 50C – so no one goes out during the day. They’ll have dinner at 11 at night. That affects training sessions, so does prayer times.”

Nor was it just the coach. Nine of the squad were born in Europe: Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway and the UK. A couple had never been in the country and they too had to understand Iraq, Arnold says. Then there was the language. “About 80% speak [Arabic] and that even affects on-field performance. When I started, I played the best players to their positions and strengths but then I realised some couldn’t speak the language so there was no communication; what I’ve done lately is pretty much English-speaking players on the left side of the field and Arabic on the right. And a centre-back and central midfielder who speak both so we can get the communication across, all on the same page.”

Arnold arrived during the third round, Iraq finishing third. In the fourth, they missed out to Saudi Arabia on goals scored, with the coach calling it “wrong” for games to be played in supposedly “neutral” Saudi Arabia. In the fifth in November 2025, they drew 1-1 against United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi with five players missing. The day preparation for the return began in Basra, the electricity went, the bus broke down and the floodlights failed. Then there’s the story of Arnold heading downstairs at the hotel to ask thousands of fans to keep quiet because he and his players couldn’t sleep, the drummer replying: “Sure, coach, what time can we start up again?” and being told 5pm – which they did on the dot.

In the 17th minute of added time at the end of the return game, the referee was called to the pitchside monitor for a handball. Arnold hadn’t seen it and he didn’t see the penalty with which Amir al-Ammari put them through to the playoff either: he was hiding behind the bench with his interpreter, the former Sydney FC player Ali Abbas. Which, he says, isn’t surprising given the penalties taken in training the night before. However, Al-Ammari scored and sent Iraq through to face Surinam or Bolivia in Monterrey, Mexico, but more serious obstacles followed. “With the wars going on there was a bit of a distraction,” the coach says, which is one way of putting it.

Arnold, who had been woken by the sound of helicopters at 4am and driven to Kuwait on advice from the Australian ambassador after the US embassy in Baghdad was evacuated seven months earlier, was in Dubai watching a player when Israel and the US attacked Iran on the morning of 28 February, killing Ali Khamenei. Barely 2km away across the water, he describes it as the loudest noise he’s ever heard, the hotel moving. Due to fly back to Iraq to prepare for the playoff that day, en route to the airport he was told the airspace was closed. Arnold was stuck for 10 days, while his team and staff were trapped in Baghdad.

“I asked Fifa to postpone the game. Fifa call it Fifa Fair Play. Well, it wasn’t really fair that we couldn’t get the players and the backroom staff out of Baghdad. They ended up helping, getting us a charter flight to Amman, Jordan. The players had to do a 28-hour bus trip. Then when they got there they were stuck for 36 hours because of the missiles and bombs going off around the hotel. Eventually they got to Lisbon and from there to Monterrey.”

When the Iraqi players arrived at the hotel at 2am, Arnold was waiting for them. “The first thing I did was say: ‘Right, what are we going to use this war as? An excuse? Or motivation? Because if it’s going to be an excuse, we may as well go home today.”

Iraq beat Bolivia 2-1, taking the final World Cup place. The man who scored the winner, Aymen Hussein, was stopped at O’Hare airport heading into the US for their final World Cup preparations. Two days later, the Somali referee Omar Artan was barred from entering. “Everything’s fine [now],” Arnold says. “Aymen got interviewed with six other players. He got stuck for about eight hours with the FBI and US security [but] he’s here with us, training well and seems fine. America have their ways with passports and visa control. It’s sad and you want everything to be about football but these things happen.

“Iraqi airspace just closed again too, so probably the worst thing at the moment is that the players who were hoping to bring their families across for games can’t get [them] out of Baghdad. Hopefully the airspace will get reopened and they can get here to watch their sons, husbands, family, make the country proud.”

Being there at all does that, but there is more. Victory over Andorra and a 1-1 draw with Spain increases confidence. “This will be my fourth World Cup and results don’t always go the ‘right’ way: at the last, Saudi Arabia beat Argentina,” Arnold says. “It’s about getting players mentally ready. We’ve got a very, very tough group with Norway, France and Senegal but it’s a great opportunity. People say Group of Death, but it’s the Group of Excitement. I feel we’ll be even better at this World Cup than through qualifying because the weight is completely off their shoulders now.

“We have absolutely no pressure at all because everybody – even in Iraq – expects us to lose all three games. The most important thing is that when we cross that white line we’re brave, play with energy and excitement. It’s a privilege to be against fantastic players like Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé and Sadio Mané. It’s huge: a chance to show what we’ve got. I’m big on making them believe we’re capable of doing something that will shock the world and I truly believe that at this World Cup it will happen.”