Open Season

When I spoke to Hussein Saeed, the president of the Iraqi Football Association, he was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Amman, Jordan.

It was too dangerous for Saeed, or the Iraq football team, to be based in its own country at that time.

"You are welcome to come and spend time with us," he told. "Whatever you want is yours."

This was just prior to the 2007 Asian Cup, a tournament that Iraq would eventually win - shocking the football world (actually, make that simply, the world) in the process.

But the team's coach had a broader insight into Iraqi football dynamics. As a foreigner, Jorvan Vieira could also see and do things differently to an Iraqi.

The players? While in Iraq Sunni, Shia, and Christians were experiencing "difficulties" with one another, on the football team individuals were simply "Iraqi".

But football politics?

"It is a real Arab souk," Vieira told me.

Two years later, after the shine of the Asian Cup win has truly worn off and Vieira is just one of several foreigners to have coached the national team, politics are even soukier (if that can be a word).

FIFA has suspended the Iraqi FA claiming "government interference" in the sport's administration.

That interference is actually the government wanting elections to be held for positions within the Iraq FA.

As The New York Times recently reported: "Some Iraqi officials complain that the football association is still tainted by its old relationship with one of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday, who once ruled Iraqi sports with a whip hand and a foul temper."

Some claim that Hussein Saeed, who was in charge of Iraqi football during Saddam Hussein's reign, plays a key role in Iraqi football's fractured politics.

According to The New York Times, Saeed's critics say he was an accessory to the torture of sports figures; his supporters say that, like all of Iraq's athletes, he had no option but to endure the abuse.

"They are all lies and fabrications," Saeed said in response.

"These people should not use terroristic methods against the athletes."

Insiders believe FIFA will end the ban and that common sense will take precedence regarding elections.

But as anyone with the most basic knowledge of life in Iraq could explain to you, expectations and common sense rarely ever prevail.


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