Kurdish Football — Live

Giresun Sanayispor started the match with only nine players. Three more went off injured in the first half, leaving six — below football’s minimum. Under the rules the referee blew the whistle at 45+1 and the game ended there.

The club said the first half finished 7-0 in Amedspor’s favour and the opposition could not return for the second. The Turkish federation will determine the official result; Amedspor are expected to be awarded the win.

Amedspor’s women are in the top flight this season. Coinciding with the men’s promotion, it means football in Amed has climbed on two fronts in the same year.

He played the full ninety against Rostock and took the highest rating on the pitch. Against Bayern, no part of the Stuttgart side held.

The 30-year-old striker is contracted to Stuttgart until 2029. He played for Germany at the 2026 World Cup, where his double against Ivory Coast was among the tournament’s most visible Kurdish moments.

Stuttgart travel to Köln next, on 4 September.

The early goal proved decisive. Erbil kept a clean sheet for ninety minutes to take all three points.

After three matches they sit fourth on seven points with two wins and a draw, goal difference +3 — the best start of the Kurdistan Region’s three Stars League clubs.

Sherko Karim, who scored Zakho’s second, is among the most notable names in the club’s local core. But the 86th-minute equaliser cost two points.

Zakho have four points from four games — one win, one draw, two defeats — and sit fifteenth. Steadying the defence looks like the most urgent job of their season so far.

The table reads two ways: still unbeaten, yet only four points from four weeks and down in thirteenth.

Duhok won the Gulf Club Champions League in April 2025, the first Kurdish club to lift it. A start this level suggests the squad needs to rediscover the habit of winning.

He made seventeen appearances in all competitions last season, starting only three. Toward the end of the campaign he was left out of matchday squads entirely.

Dahoud was one year old when his family fled Syria for Germany in 1996. From the Mönchengladbach academy to Dortmund, then Brighton and Frankfurt, he built one of the longest top-level European careers of any footballer from Rojava.

The Kurdistan national team is a founding CONIFA member and won the 2012 VIVA World Cup. Rojava’s admission doubles Kurdish representation on the international stage.

Formal recognition through FIFA membership remains distant. But the CONIFA pitch is still the one place where the shirt, the crest and the flag appear in an international tournament.

Siyaband Agid opened the scoring on 66, Qadsia levelled on 70, and Marlon dos Santos won it at 90+3.

It was more than a trophy: a Kurdish club beat the Gulf’s established sides to a regional title. The clearest evidence yet that Kurdish football can travel beyond its own geography.