Lights of Rome tells of how the UAE beat the odds to reach the 1990 Fifa World Cup finals

In 1990, the UAE shocked the football world by reaching the 1990 Fifa World Cup finals in Italy. A new film The Lights of Rome tels the remarkable story.

The UAE failed to win a match in the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy, but they did score a goal against the eventual champions, West Germany. Image Nation.

When thinking of great World Cup moments, a few obvious contenders spring to mind – 17-year-old Pele’s dazzling performance in 1958, Geoff Hurst’s goal crossing the line, or not, in the 1966 final, Maradona’s infamous “hand of God” in the 1986 quarter-final.

One World Cup story less well known – but in its way every bit as fascinating – is that of the UAE national team’s unlikely journey to the 1990 finals in Italy, the first and still the only time the country has qualified.

This unlikely tale of team of young Emirati underdogs and their battle to reach the biggest stage in world football is told in a new documentary film, Lights of Rome. It had its world premiere at the DOC NYC festival in New York last month, and is screening at selected Vox and Reel cinemas from today to coincide with the National Day festivities.

The film was a labour of love for director Ali Khaled, a former journalist at The National. The task of collecting archive footage and tracking down the players took about three years after Abu Dhabi production house Image Nation came on board, though Khaled says the film's genesis goes back at least six years.

“I was working as a sports journalist in 2010,” he says. “With that year’s World Cup in South Africa approaching, it struck me that it was the 20th anniversary of the UAE’s qualification, and I decided to start working on a story to commemorate the date. Just a simple piece – I didn’t really expect it to become anything major but that story was basically the beginning for what would become Lights of Rome.”

The film makes a valiant attempt to trace the history of football in the UAE – the country played its first international match against Qatar in March 1972, just three months after the foundation of the UAE, in the second Gulf Cup, held in Saudi Arabia (the UAE won 1-0).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how new the country was at the time, tracking down details and footage of the national team’s early footballing history was one of the most challenging aspects of the production.

“I realised quickly, when I started researching the story, there was really very little out there,” says Khaled. “A few clippings from the Arabic press at the time, that was really it.

“There was nothing on YouTube or Google like you might find with a football story today. I interviewed a few people that had first-hand memories of the 1990 campaign, and realised that they were contradicting each other on dates and scores and so on. So I started trying to pin down the facts. It became a full-time job.”

So began a painstaking process of searching through dusty archives and tracking down the players from those fledgling national teams. Every member of the 1990 squad eas found, although not all were available to appear in the film.

Meanwhile, producer Hana Makki was part of the team charged with finding archive TV footage.

“It took us about a year and a half to hunt down all the footage,” she says. “It was a challenge, though in the end it wasn’t actually as hard as we initially feared. Abu Dhabi TV was a major source of footage, and we were really impressed with their archiving system.”

Khaled says that some players were reticent to take part in the documentary.

“I think if anything, they were perhaps too modest,” he says. “None of them were really seeking personal attention. They’d all got jobs and families now, and they really weren’t sure about being in the limelight again. We explained to them that this was a real historical document, not just for this generation, but for future generations. It’s a story that was in danger of being lost in history.”

A true underdog tale in the style of the great sporting movies, it is a story well worth hearing, regardless of nationality or even whether you like football.

The squad that lived the dream of qualifying for the 1990 World Cup had an average age of just 19 – the same age as the country they represented.

It is a feat no UAE team has managed to repeat, so while we wait for the next time the film offers a chance to learn the forgotten story of the country’s original football heroes.