Each time Iraq announces its national football squad, the same argument repeats itself. Are Iraqi players raised abroad deserving enough to represent the country in their national team? Or should places go only to those who built their careers at home?
This debate has been a recurring feature of Iraqi football for years, but it takes on renewed urgency with every Iraqi football success or failure. Blame and praise are equally dispersed in attempts to settle the debate.
Earlier this year, when Iraq qualified for the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 40 years, the debate reignited. Amidst a regional war that is still ongoing, Iraqis celebrated in the streets in April 2026 when the team finally qualified in a match against Bolivia.
However, after the team’s predicted group-stage exit, underlying issues quickly re-emerged. The 2007 Asian Cup win was a high point for Iraq’s national football team, but it also marked the beginning of a period of upheaval in how Iraq determines who can represent the nation. The debate is rooted in a much longer history, including issues related tothe mass exodus of Iraqis dating back to the 1980s which has created a dispersed global diaspora that now includes second- and third-generation Iraqis.
Within this diaspora, numerous Iraqis holding dual citizenship have represented the national team at the highest levels. However, the assumption that this is straightforward, that Iraq simply draws upon whatever talent is available, inside its borders and out, oversimplifies a far more complicated reality.
In each cycle of games in which players are called up to represent the national team, spanning the first team and youth levels (U17, U20, U23 – Olympic), questions and arguments emerge from players, fans, and officials alike on who is more deserving of representing Iraq, local or expatriate players. Not only is this a harmful question to ask, but the very basis of its framework is also flawed. The debate over who is more deserving to represent Iraq reveals a deeper question about the nation’s relationship with its diaspora.
A case study of flawed logic
The perceived tension between local and diaspora players in Iraqi football has erupted into open controversy following media statements by prominent players, as well as social media comments disparaging the ability of one side or the other.
Numerous debates have emerged surrounding this question, referring to it as a struggle, a lit fuse, or an aimless interjection of diaspora players without any real national strategy.
Players who are regulars in Iraq’s national team have also argued that some diaspora players join the national team only to play before leaving indifferently. Some players have complained about perceived favours done for them at the expense of local players.
These were not the words of fringe players or unknown figures in Iraqi football. They were made by Ibrahim Bayesh, Iraq’s vice-captain at the World Cup. Meanwhile, the new Iraqi Football Association president, Younis Mahmoud, the hero of Iraq’s 2007 Asian Cup triumph, has been on record arguing that Iraq’s local players are better and more deserving of representing the national team, and was forced to apologise.
Mahmoud’s position is significant, not only as the president, but as an icon carrying immense symbolic capital in Iraqi football. This represents a wider sentiment that has taken root within Iraqi football, one that frames diaspora players as outsiders, as temporary or transactional participants in the national project.
At the same time, some expatriate players and coaches have been caught bemoaning certain aspects of the approach of local players to football, such as diet and training methods.Jesus Casas, the former national team head coach, said himself that a change is needed in local Iraqi football culture.
Rather than ask what such sentiments signify, it seems more pertinent to ask what such a sentiment achieves. It seems to imply that Iraqis operate within a hierarchy of belonging, and diaspora players occupy the lower rung.
It was not unusual for arguments to be made that expatriate players have not “drunk from Tigris and the Euphrates”, or that they have not suffered through the difficulties of living in Iraq,and are therefore not truly eligible to represent the nation.
However, it is difficult to engage in this rhetoric as the entire framework of who is “deserving” is fundamentally faulty. It treats footballing quality and what it means to be Iraqi as both a zero-sum game and as operating on the same spectrum, as though a player’s birthplace determines their commitment to the national cause. It also ignores a reality of modern football in which many Iraqi players also partake which is that local players who excel aspire to move to top leagues abroad.
The dichotomy collapses when a ‘local’ player moves to a foreign league. If a player born and raised in Baghdad signs for a club in Europe, do they suddenly, or after some arbitrary amount of time, become less deserving?
And yet, in practice, players in the national team continue to espouse a strong and healthy relationship between diaspora and locals. Prominent stars in the Iraqi side such as Aymen Hussein and Zidan Iqbal have both come out separately denouncing this divisive and harmful discourse.
Hussein even reiterated the flawed basis of such rhetoric, placing himself in the ambiguous position of wanting to play abroad. “We should not even use the word expatriates. We should say a professional player, the same as any Iraqi…[one day] I might travel [to play overseas] as well.”
This can be taken further to suggest that this perceived divide between local and expatriate players is, in fact, a political instrument used to delegitimise certain players and shift attention away from the failings of the footballing administration. While harmful to Iraqi football, and the broader project of strengthening an Iraqi national identity, it distracts from the notable flaws in the way the Iraqi Football Association is being run. This was underscored recently with numerous reported scandals during the presidential race.
These divides have little to do with football ability. Instead, they keep the conversation locked in a binary of local versus expatriate, as if this is the central failing of the Iraqi national team. If the team loses, one side is blamed. If they win, it is despite one side’s failures. T In the end, should this conversation continue to be centralised, Iraqi football will lose.
More broadly, Iraq’s inability to normalise diaspora participation is an indictment of post-2003 state-building. The state has failed to create a national identity that can accommodate the millions of Iraqis living abroad.
Morocco and Senegal, whom Iraq lost to during the World Cup, are often held up as the model here, though neither is entirely free of the same suspicion. Morocco’s squad, mostly born and trained in Europe, has faced recent backlash from critics who call the national team fraudulent as a result. Senegal’s diaspora strategy has drawn brain-drain criticism from within African football. Even so, both countries have managed this tension more effectively than Iraq. Meanwhile, nations who dominate world football, such as France, continue to try and recruit players who hold multiple nationalities or heritage, while seemingly, through squad selection, encouraging players to play for clubs abroad.
In fact, France, one of the World Cup semi-finalists, has fielded an average of two players per game who play locally in France, while the rest play abroad in high-level leagues such as for England, Germany, Spain, and Italy.
Apart from countries with especially high-level domestic leagues such as England and Spain, most countries which are ranked higher than Iraq tend to rely on expatriate players. This appears to be the standard in modern football.
Iraq continues to operate on a clear divide between the two categories. Iraq’s exceptionalism in this regard is a symptom of dysfunction. The question is not whether Iraq should use diaspora players, but rather why Iraqi football culture treats this as a question at all, when much of the rest of the world has moved on.
Diaspora and the rules of the game
Even from afar, diaspora communities include transnational actors capable of influencing politics and society in their country of origin. They are more than groups of people living abroad.
Noting this connection, sporting bodies have increasingly turned to ethnic or descent-based citizenship to make it easier for diaspora players to represent their countries of origin, navigating the legal tension in citizenship rights between jus sanguinis (the right of blood) and jus soli (the right of territory). Iraq has notably employed committees, both formal and informal, of expatriate player agents, that are focused on completing the – at times tedious and bureaucratic – paperwork of players in the diaspora to have them ready to represent Iraq.
Meanwhile, international football is fundamentally changing. Acknowledging this evolution, FIFA has reframed its eligibility rules on who is able to represent a country after it also found certain nations offering temporary citizenship to players simply to have them represent their football team.
Changes are also occurring on the pitch. In club football, players oftentimes avoid celebrating against their former teams when scoring as a sign of respect – an informal rule that has typically not been needed in international football since players cannot represent more than one nation. However, in this World Cup, Yasin Ayari scored for Sweden against Tunisia and then raised his hand apologetically, refusing to celebrate. This may become increasingly common as globalisation deepens and players carry multiple layers of identity.
In Iraqi football, this concept of layered identity is sometimes met with resentment. Prominent players such as Bassam al-Rawi, whose father represented Iraq in the 1990s, faced a severe media backlash for choosing to represent Qatar, the country of his upbringing as opposed to his country of origin, despite insisting that he had tried to represent Iraq and was rejected.
Players of Iraqi origin have begun to emerge at the highest level of world football. Ameen al-Dakhil and Noah Darwich, for example, have represented Belgium and Germany, respectively.
In the Iraqi context, the numerous waves of displacement that have created one of the world’s most significant diasporas has made this dynamic especially pronounced.
Since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, Iraqis have endured multiple wars, UN-imposed sanctions, a US invasion, sectarian conflict, the collapse of state institutions, endemic corruption, the violent repression of social movements and, most recently, the US-Israel-Iran War into which Iraqi actors were inevitably drawn.
The diaspora continues to grow with each wave of turmoil. This diaspora has become a structural feature of Iraq’s contemporary history and is itself a transnational political force. The debate over expatriate players is a microcosm of a larger question: how does Iraqi society and its diaspora relate to one another, and how can they be reintegrated at a meaningful level? Football has become one of the arenas where this question is being fought out.
Whose team is it?
Thus, the question becomes why, if we truly want international success, do we implicitly and explicitly discourage players in the diaspora from representing Iraq, or discourage local players from playing overseas at the highest level?
Is it not a positive step for players to explore and bring back the standards, expertise, and football cultures found in the world’s top footballing nations? Furthermore, when Iraqis feel that their national team does not welcome them when playing at home or abroad within some binary of what intra-Iraqi identity they carry, it perpetuates a sense of exclusion that mirrors the political fragmentation that has plagued Iraq since 2003. This set a dangerous precedent that much of the nation can no longer tolerate. The 2019 Tishreen movement was, in part, a rejection of that fragmentation.
Ultimately, this is not simply a case for normalising diasporic participation as is the case in Morocco. In fact, to demand that Iraqi football culture adopt a model of inclusive nationalism that recognises the diaspora as an integral part of the Iraqi nation is a disservice to Iraqi society that is seldom as unwelcoming as this debate suggests. Rather, this flawed local-expatriate divide is seemingly more attributable to a perpetual interjection at the top-level of the footballing pyramid. Perhaps, the lesson is that we, as fans, need to start taking a more forceful stance against such divisive discourses.
