Two flags, one boot each: Zidane Iqbal and the world cup history Pakistan has waited a lifetime for

By MNTV Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (MNTV) – When Zidane Iqbal laces up his boots at the 2026 World Cup, he carries two countries onto the pitch — quite literally.

On one boot, the flag of Iraq, the nation whose shirt he wears.

On the other, the green-and-white of Pakistan, the country of his father.

It is a small, deliberate gesture, and it has turned a young midfielder’s tournament debut into a moment of history for nearly two billion people across South Asia who have almost never seen themselves at football’s greatest event.

Iqbal, 23, is set to become the first player of Pakistani heritage ever to feature in a men’s FIFA World Cup.

He qualified not with Pakistan — whose national team has never reached the finals — but with Iraq, the “Lions of Mesopotamia,” who themselves ended a 40-year exile from the tournament when they edged Bolivia in an intercontinental playoff in Monterrey this spring.

Two long waits, it turns out, ended in the same young man.

“I didn’t even know it myself”

The remarkable thing is that Iqbal almost missed the milestone attached to his own name.

He learned he was making history the way most of his generation learns anything — from a social media post. He told BBC Sport, “To be honest, I didn’t even know it myself,” before sending the news straight to his father.

The two of them, he said, were as surprised as anyone.

That father, who is Pakistani, is the figure Iqbal credits above all others for his career — the person who drove the early mornings and late nights that turn a talented kid into a professional.

Born and raised in Manchester to a Pakistani father and an Iraqi mother, Iqbal grew up eligible to represent three nations: England, Pakistan, or Iraq.

The Pakistan Football Federation tracked his progress.

In the end he committed to his mother’s homeland, making his senior Iraq debut in 2022.

But he has never hidden the other half of his story. He has visited Pakistan; he wears its flag on his right boot; he speaks of his heritage with evident pride.

From Old Trafford academy to world stage

Iqbal’s football education began at Manchester United, the club he joined as a boy and spent more than a decade with. There he made a piece of history that still feels under-celebrated: he became the first British South Asian player in roughly two decades to appear for United in the Champions League, coming off the bench against Young Boys at Old Trafford.

For a community vastly underrepresented at the elite level of English football, it was a quiet landmark.

Searching for the regular minutes a young midfielder needs, he later moved to the Netherlands and FC Utrecht in the Eredivisie, where he has become a key figure in Iraq’s plans.

His goal in qualifying — including a strike against Indonesia — helped power Iraq through one of the most punishing routes to a World Cup any nation has ever run: a 21-game qualifying marathon, more fixtures than any other team played to reach North America.

A nation adopts a team

The reaction back in Pakistan, and across its sprawling diaspora, has been striking.

In a country where cricket reigns and football scarcely registers, Iqbal has given fans a reason to care about the World Cup for the first time. Ahmed Shahzad, who runs the social media account Pakistani Talents, told the BBC that the response had been overwhelming, describing Iqbal as a genuine inspiration for young Pakistanis at home and abroad who want to believe a path to the top exists.

As Shahzad put it, many Pakistanis now feel they finally have a team to follow — and they will be backing not just Iqbal, but Iraq itself, to go as far as it can.

For young footballers inside Pakistan, that pride is personal. Faheem, a club-level player from the mountain valleys of Hunza, says Iqbal’s rise has landed hard among him and his teammates.

“Zidane’s story has been really inspiring for us all,” he told Muslim Network TV.

When someone of Pakistani heritage reaches the international stage, he added, it quietly redraws the limits of the possible: “We feel that we too might make it some day.”

Yet for others, the same moment carries a sharper edge. Ibrahim, a club footballer from Karachi, is glad for Iqbal but reads the story as a verdict on the system that produced it.

“I’m happy for Zidane,” he said. “But his case also shows that if you want to make it, you have to represent some other team.”

The football infrastructure at home remains thin, he noted, and Pakistan’s footprint on the global game has been built almost entirely by players raised abroad. What he wants is simpler, and still out of reach: “We want to see players in our own colours. We want to see Pakistan on the big stage.”

That sense of shared ownership — and the ache running beneath it — speaks to something larger. For the Muslim world, the 2026 tournament is already a landmark, with a record number of Muslim-majority nations competing.

Iqbal sits at a particular intersection of that story: a player who links two Muslim nations — one returning to the World Cup after four decades, the other still dreaming of its first appearance — through a single family in Manchester.

The “group of excitement”

The football itself will not be gentle.

Iraq have landed in a group alongside France, Norway and Senegal — a draw Iqbal himself wryly called the “group of death,” though his coach prefers to frame it as a group of opportunity.

Few expect Iraq to advance.

But few expected them here at all.

Whatever the result, the symbolism is already secured.

When Iqbal steps onto the grass, a country of more than 240 million that has spent its entire footballing history on the outside looking in will, at last, have one of its own on the inside.

Two flags, one player, and a milestone a lifetime in the making.

This feature is part of Muslim Network TV’s ongoing coverage of the Muslim stories of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.