“When hope is lost, people turn to violence and they think they can create change through violent means,” said Yamam Nabeel, the founder of Football for Unity. “Team Iraq is able to create high profile football events to change mindsets in a positive way, and get young people to create change. Democracy is a culture that needs to be learned, and we want to use football as peaceful cultural transition to democracy and the formation of a civil society. Football provides a platform without labels, where all politics and religions can come together in a common place. “
Football for Unity, or FC Unity, is working to give positive opportunities for the 60 percent of Iraq’s population who are under the age of 25. FC Unity believes that football, or soccer as it is known in the United States, is one of the few activities capable of unifying Iraq’s population in wake of the current period of violent ethnic and religious conflict, and extremism.
The conflict in Iraq led to the complete destruction of grassroots sports facilities, and the virtual elimination of opportunities for young people to play sports. FC Unity’s project, Team Iraq, has begun to turn this situation around. It is using the power of football to bring together young people from all ethnic, religious and social backgrounds, through a number of football-related initiatives that create local youth-led programs which develop, empower, and ultimately employ young people.
“On any sports field, you chose players because of their skills and how they will most benefit the team,” said Nabeel. “The team structure takes over everything else. One national paper printed our football lineup, indicating ‘Shia’ or 'Sunni' after the players names. We made sure that they knew we were not happy about that. People in Iraq are, first and foremost Iraqi, and then come their religion and ethnicity.”
Nabeel, a native Iraqi who fled the country with his family at the age of three, was working as a television sports producer in the United Kingdom. A few days before the fall of Bagdad in April 2003, Nabeel interviewed the then-head of Iraq football team, Bernd Stange, in Germany. “His commitment to football playing a defining and positive role in nation building, conflict resolution and peace building played a vital role in a strong friendship and working partnership we created together since our first meeting,” said Nabeel. “His friendship, personal and professional support led to the creation of the Goodwill UK tour of the Iraq National Team in 2004 which demonstrated the positive impact of football has in bringing countries and cultures closer together.”
To date, FC Unity has worked with over 5,000 young Iraqis on ninety men’s and five women’s teams, and created positions for over 200 people to lead its programs. They have hosted a series of events, workshops, lectures and debates in various parts of Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala and Mada’in and plan to host events in several other provinces including; Anbar, Basra, Kirkuk, Al Muthana, Mosul and Salah Al Din.
“This [FCUnity] festival has Iraqis from all backgrounds coming together, talking, playing football and smiling,” said an Iraqi student, Hussam. “Look around -- everyone is smiling and dancing. This is our future.”
Nabeel believes that when young people learn to respect football rules, FC Unity can build on this by creating citizenship training and workshops that give young people the power to change their own community. “Football can bring people physically together in stadiums, but it is the development opportunities that change people’s mindsets for people,” said Nabeel. “When they know that they have opportunities to provide for themselves in a peaceful environment, then they have a life that they can control.”
Nabeel also hopes to work with international business leaders to create professional leagues that are free of fraud. He also wants to bring corporate sponsors to create a central administrative body that not only supports elite athletes, but also employs administrators, referees, and coaches, in the model of the United States professional sports teams’ US $19 billion industry.
“We hope to bring in expertise from places where football is more developed as a business,” said Nabeel. “In Iraq, people don’t think of teams as a commercially viable business. Now, they assume that you can get on a team by paying money. We want to create a model for a meritocracy where people get things because of hard work and performance, not because of corruption, and use this system to engage the community in a dialogue about Iraq’s future.”
Nabeel believes that tours of the Iraq National Team demonstrated the positive impact of football has in bringing countries and cultures closer together. He asserts that by exposing young Iraqis to other cultures and ideas, they will see a diverse range of cultures and embrace and incorporate the best. His commitment to unity was even further demonstrated in May 2009 when FC United brought the Iraqi and American armies together for a weekend that included football, coaching, and citizenship training. 
“Look around at the thousands of young Iraqis, men and women together in this stadium, Iraq’s national stadium,” said Adnan Kadhum, FC Unity’s Iraq program manager. “There are no labels, no religion, no politics here. We are one nation. We can do this. We work with these people every day, through football and through our every day work and we are building a nation. It will take some time, but I am hopeful. We have come a long way -- a long, long way!”
Team Iraq was the UK Regional Prize winner in Changemakers and Nike's Changing Lives Through Football competition.
Website: www.fcunity.com
By Changemakers contributing writer Carol Erickson
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