SPORT IS BURDENED WITH expectations. It is presumed to unite, heal, provide redemption. When it fails, as it has in Iraq, it is a catastrophe. If people cannot come together to play or watch others play, hope has lost its best ally.

Iraq is a football-loving nation. In 2002, the national team was ranked 51st in the world, higher than Scotland and Wales. Before the war, crowds of up to 50,000 flocked to support clubs that had evolved from institutions such as universities, police and the army.

Last October the national league was reconvened, though sensibly divided into four regional divisions. Almost inevitably, it foundered. Teams struggled to negotiate roadblocks and potholes to reach grounds; matches were abandoned partway through; attendances (understandably) were low if not non-existent; and one club, Diwaniya, disappeared altogether. The problem is more complex than sheer logistics and security fears. If sport is a barometer of a country’s health, all that is wrong in Iraq is wrong with its football. The corruption and paranoia engendered under the regime of Saddam Hussein remains, though perhaps in a more invidious guise.

Saddam’s sadistic son, Uday, used sport as his plaything. His megalomania had no limits. He took over a club, al-Karkh, changed its name and forced the country’s best players to join. Matches were fixed and he incarcerated under-performing players: two days for a defensive mistake, three weeks for a missed penalty. Players were sometimes ordered to attend “training sessions” in the early hours, when Uday would join in; no player dared to tackle him and risk a beating with lengths of cable or being forced to kick a concrete “football”.

The game’s administration was choked with Baath Party members, levering money and prestige from their association with Iraq’s fêted sportsmen. Genuine football men, such as Ammo Baba (“the Arab Pele”), had a choice: yield and appear complicit in the gangsterism or abandon the sport. Protest was not an option: dissenters were routinely executed. Baba, who had coached the national side on seven occasions, escaped physical punishment but under Uday’s tyranny, his dignity was undermined until he succumbed, like many others, to self-delusion and paranoia.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) recognises that the resumption of regular football is a vital step towards “normalising” Iraq.

Like much of the coalition’s strategy, the handshake has sometimes been a punch. At first they used the people’s national stadium, the al-Shaab, as a parking lot for tanks, causing extensive damage which has taken months to repair. Although American soldiers have thrown footballs to children by the roadside as gifts, may Iraqis feel their invaders’ historic indifference to football is further evidence of a cultural chasm.

A Scottish solicitor on secondment to Iraq, Mark Clark, is trying valiantly to connect the various factions within the Iraqi Football Association (IFA). He is, like those supervising the police and other state institutions, finding it a dispiriting task A collection of individuals, from shysters to dreamers, has moved into the vacuum, eager to lead Iraqi football (which is hugely popular across many countries when televised) from collapse into the arms of corporate endorsement. A typically bungled episode saw Iraq arrive in England last summer for a “Goodwill Tour”. It closed ignominiously with a match played against part-time players in front of 2,500 people (all allowed in free) at Macclesfield Town FC. Amazingly, the team had left their doctor and interpreter in Iraq to accommodate various IFA hangers-on who left England without paying a string of bills.

The years of neo-fascism have left a legacy of fear, partisanship and suspicion deep within the psyche of Iraq’s people. The chosen few who “did well” under the old regime are reluctant to see power wrested away, while the majority are unwilling to forgive, riven by mistrust and cynicism. Simon Freeman, after 200-odd pages of intelligent and thorough research, can conclude only that in football, like everything else in Iraq, the situation is “mad, and sad”. For now, there is no more to say.

If the word “hopeless” comes in its absolute, most sorrowful definition when applied to Iraq, it takes on a bracing, comic air affixed to East Stirlingshire FC. They are, officially and conclusively, hopeless. They pay their players £10 a week, house their directors in a Portakabin and closed their season at the bottom of Scotland’s third division with a goal difference of minus 56.

Jeff Connor shamelessly bunged the club £2,000 for the penance of spending a season with them. He found precisely what you might expect at football’s fag end: the mad, the sad, the dangerous and the dodgy.

The “characters” step forward obligingly. Dennis Newall, the manager, is the master of profanities, while Alan Mackin is that serpent among football folk — the property developer-turned- club chairman. The supporting cast is direct from the latest Mike Leigh film, passionate but slightly dotty in their six-toggle, knee-length, sand-coloured duffel coats. And that’s just the players.

Connor, as he is duty-bound, plays it for laughs: the chubby striker is told to “pretend the ball’s a pie” and when the goalie is injured the sympathetic cry is, “Call the vet”. Paradoxically, the tour of Scotland’s dingy footballing outposts and the roughhouse towns they represent is baleful. At least the games are completed and everyone gets home safely. They dream of such things in Baghdad. by Simon Freeman

BAGHDAD FC: Iraq’s Football Story
by John Murray
£12.99; 240pp
£11.69 (free p&p)

POINTLESS: A Season with Britain’s Worst Football Team
by Jeff Connor
Headline, £16.99; 212pp
£15.29 (free p&p)

0870 1608080

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy