Baghdad FC: Iraq’s Football Story

By: Bob | December 4th, 2006

One of the best things about sports is that they can distract us from the realities of the world. We can all argue whether Cristiano Ronaldo dived this past weekend (ok, that isn’t much of a debate, he did), look forward to this week’s killer Champions League games and generally ignore the sometimes terrible realities of this world by worrying about grown men kicking a ball. Occasionally sports get mixed in with those terrible realities and try as we like we can’t escape it.

On Sunday, the chairman of one of Iraq’s leading football clubs was found dead several days after he was kidnapped. In the chaotic environment that is Iraq today, football athletes and officials are not exempt from the dangers haunting everyday Iraqis.

I recently read a book called by Simon Freeman called Baghdad FC: Iraq’s Football Story - A Hidden History of Sport and Tyranny that was published a couple of years ago. While it is not always the most cohesive or well written book in the world, it does offer some fascinating and horrifying insight into the role sports played during the Saddam Hussein regime. The main figure is Saddam’s son, Uday, who ruled Iraq’s sports world with an iron fist, torturing athletes and officials if they did not comply with his wishes.

For example: in 1984-85, with Iraq losing the war against Iran, it was decreed that the Army win the Iraqi national league. Writes Simon Freeman: “In a game against al-Talaba the Army was losing 1-0 after 90 minutes. The referee played another half-hour and then awarded the Army a penalty, from which they scored. Against the Trade club the referee played an extra 13 minutes until the Army scored the only goal of the game. Then he blew full-time.

“In the final, crucial game of the season, the Army had to beat Air Force to win the league. After the Air Force scored two goals in the first half, the referee was told at half-time that his life depended on the result. In the first few minutes of the second half, he sent off two Air Force players.”

If you’re looking for a book chock full of unbelievable anecdotes both tragic and comic, Baghdad FC fills the role nicely even if it does remind us all that sports are not immune from politics and that the Beautiful Game is often not so beautiful.