If there’s a mention of FC Barcelona’s youth soccer system, fans of the Blaugrana will think straight to La Masia, the academy that produced legends of the game like Lionel Messi, Carles Puyol, and – more recently – Lamine Yamal.
What they might not think about is the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Syria. Yet that is exactly the place the famed Catalonian club has decided to set up another six youth soccer schools.
Called the “Hope League,” the aim of this initiative, per the club, is to “promote social cohesion and prevent future violent conflicts and radicalization processes among new generations — with special attention to the sons and daughters of victims of the Islamic State.” Kurdish fighters and the Islamic State fought violently from 2014 to 2019 for control of parts of Iraq, with the former coming out on top.
Despite the victory over IS, Kurdish independence efforts have languished. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey formally disbanded last month after a four-decade struggle to achieve independence. Their Syrian contemporaries, who would have thought the fall of Bashar al-Assad would bring them respite, now face attacks from Turkey.
The Catalonian independence push has also hit a bad run of form, albeit a less violent one. In 2024, seven years after a Spanish court blocked an independence referendum, an anti-independence socialist won the local government election – it was the first time a unionist candidate won in 14 years.
“The so-called ‘Catalan process’ has gone very much down,” says Toni Roldán, a former Spanish congressman from Barcelona who opposes Catalan independence.
What has the Catalan cause got to with Kurdish independence? Certain Barcelona fans see them as one and the same: A group of Barcelona fans once unfurled a banner at a game that read, “Kurdistan is not Iraq, Catalonia is not Spain.”
“[Catalan separatists] always presented themselves as sort of an oppressed region without a state,” says Roldán. “And these they always look at places like Kurdistan as similar to them, because they have their own language, their own history, their own culture, but they don't have their own states.”
So these schools are an effort to get these independence efforts back on their feet? Not exactly. After all, Barcelona’s archrival Real Madrid – a team not exactly renowned for supporting independence movements – is opening their own schools in these Kurdish areas.
Nonetheless, there’s “clearly a political driver” for the Catalonian club’s decision to open these soccer schools, per Roldán. The leader of the schools initiative is former Barcelona right-back Oleguer Presas, who despite his position, is renowned for his left-wing, nationalist sympathies.
The can of worms: There will be some outside of Catalonia who might be upset, namely those in Iraq.
Football is by far the most popular sport in this war-torn nation – it is home to the largest contingent of registered Barcelona fan clubs outside of Spain.
“When there is any kind of championship or game between Barca or Real Madrid with other teams, all the coffee shops are full of youth waiting for the game,” says Raid Michael, the country director for Un Ponte Per in Iraq, one of the organizations behind the Hope League.
Michael claims that Iraqis love for football transcends political and sectarian differences, noting that, “with football, youth especially forget about all these tensions — they support football in the end.”
But the initiative certainly won’t land well in Baghdad. Iraq’s central government has long been sensitive to independence movements in its northern region, where residents have previously voted in favour of secession from the federal government. There, the Iraqi Kurds operate a semi-autonomous government, maintain their own armed forces, and oversee the region’s natural resource exports. Tensions rose again last month, as Iraq’s Oil Ministry criticized energy deals directly brokered between the Kurdistan Regional Government and US energy companies.
Now, one of the largest football clubs in the world is setting up schools in Kurdish areas. What’s Arabic for conceding a goal?
