His mother left Iraq before he was born. She left during the first Gulf War — one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who packed what they could carry and found a new country to hold the rest. She came to Manchester. She built a life there, alongside a man from Pakistan who had arrived in the city aged seven, who loved cricket the way Mancunians love football, and who watched his new country’s game closely enough to eventually understand it was the one language the world reliably spoke. They had a son. They named him Zidane.
Not because they were naive about the weight of it — Zinedine Zidane was, by any measure, the finest playmaker of his generation, a man whose football contained something close to philosophy. They named him Zidane because naming a child is an act of aspiration, a statement of intent delivered at the moment before anything has been decided. The boy was given a name that meant: we believe in what this could become.
On Tuesday night at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Zidane Ammar Iqbal of FC Utrecht and the Iraq national team will walk out for Iraq’s opening Group I match against Norway. He is 23 years old. He is the first person of Pakistani heritage to appear at a men’s World Cup. He plays for the country his mother fled as a child. He carries his father’s homeland on his right boot and his mother’s on his left. And he wears the name his parents gave him before any of this was remotely foreseeable.
The technical biography is well-documented. He joined Sale United at four, Manchester United’s academy at nine — old enough to know what it meant, young enough to treat it as simply the next thing. He progressed through United’s youth system with the quiet, unremarkable consistency that the academy demands, developing into a central midfielder with technical quality and the kind of composure in tight spaces that coaches at that level spend years trying to teach and cannot.
In December 2021, Erik ten Hag gave him a Champions League debut against Young Boys. He became the first British South Asian in almost twenty years to play for Manchester United in European competition — a distinction that arrived without fanfare, absorbed into the noise of a club where the standard is so high that individual milestones are quickly filed and forgotten.
Utrecht came calling in 2023 and he went — not pushed, but pulled. “I needed to leave Manchester United to grow,” he said. Two injuries disrupted his Eredivisie development. He came back from both. The stubbornness that kept him going through a United academy that produces far more rejections than professionals showed itself again in the recovery rooms of a Dutch club most English football fans cannot immediately locate on a map.
Iraq’s qualification for this World Cup required 21 matches — more than any other nation on earth. They played through rounds that most qualified sides never encounter, through a playoff that came down to a single match against Bolivia, through the particular torture of being the last team confirmed for the tournament. Iqbal scored a crucial goal against Indonesia in qualifying — a moment he describes as surreal, the payoff for everything the journey had demanded. Iraq are back at a World Cup for the first time since 1986. That tournament was also in Mexico. He was not born yet. Neither were most of his teammates.
Group I contains France and Norway — the latter carrying Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard, which is an amount of quality that ought to embarrass most group draws. It also contains Senegal, African Cup of Nations finalists, a physical and technically formidable team. Iraq are the underdogs in every calculation. “If we lose, people expect us to lose,” Iqbal says. “If we win, we shock the world.”
That framing — the underdog’s gift of playing without pressure — is not merely a coping mechanism. It is the cleanest description of what makes Iraq’s presence at this tournament genuinely exciting. Expectation is a kind of weight. They carry none of it. What they carry instead is the culmination of a 21-match journey, a 40-year absence, and the particular pride of a nation that has never had it easy and knows what it costs to finally arrive.
In Pakistan, 240 million people who have never had anyone to support at a World Cup are supporting Iraq. They are supporting Iraq because Zidane Iqbal’s father is one of them, because the Pakistani flag is on his right boot, and he wears it with the same seriousness he wears everything else.
His mother’s country. His father’s flag. His namesake’s position. A World Cup in the country that bombed his mother’s homeland. They named him Zidane because they believed in what he could become. Tonight, they find out.
Read more – Iraq vs Norway – Match Preview, Prediction and Team News
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