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Bassil Mikdadi holds a unique position: he is the only independent reporter covering the Palestinian national soccer team full-time. On his Substack Football Palestine, Mikdadi, who is thirty-nine, exhaustively tracks Palestine’s far-flung campaigns to qualify for major international tournaments, scouting their opposition and breaking down their on-field performances just as if he were, say, the beat reporter for the Carolina Hurricanes. While Israel’s war on Gaza has invariably made its way into his reporting over the past few years, Mikdadi’s mission is to put the sport first. Media coverage of Palestine is almost universally focused on suffering. Mikdadi offers something else altogether. In 2025, while playing entirely away from their home stadium, Palestine came closer than they ever have to qualifying for the World Cup. Even after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was announced this month, Mikdadi’s focus remained on a spirited Palestine victory against Algeria. 

Mikdadi, who is Palestinian, was born in San Francisco and has lived in ten countries, in part due to his father’s job as an engineer for major infrastructure projects in developing nations. He originally came to Football Palestine as a reader when it was still hosted on the rudimentary Blogspot platform. Mikdadi became such an avid commenter that the original proprietor invited him to join as a contributor; Mikdadi eventually took over the site and gradually made it the professional operation it is today. About a year ago, after signing up enough paying subscribers, Mikdadi was able to quit his tech job and focus on Football Palestine full-time. 

“The first game I ever watched, staying up late as an eight-year-old, was the 1994 World Cup final,” Mikdadi says. “It was absolutely incredible; I got hooked. I started asking questions like, ‘Does Palestine have a team? Or is this another one of those things that we don’t get?’” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

AB: You started reading Football Palestine in 2008 before joining  as a contributor. What was the site like back then?

BM: It was just the rantings of two fans. By the time [Palestine] qualified for the 2015 Asian Cup, that was the inflection point. We stopped being a blog and started being a proper website. I ended up attending the Asian Cup as an accredited member of the media. The person who founded the Blogpost went to follow his own professional endeavors, and I kept it going. [Laughs] I don’t really know why. I just felt like I had to do this. 

For the longest time, I was doing this as a side hustle. I had a career in tech. I worked at Google, TikTok, a few other companies. I always had a job that paid really well. Now, for the last year or so, I’ve been a journalist full-time.

The wider stories of Gaza make it into your reporting, but you always foreground the sports reporting. 

I do want to call attention to what it’s like to live as a Palestinian person through the team, and I never shy away from saying They can’t host games for this reason, they couldn’t travel for this reason. But at the same time, Palestine, as far as FIFA is concerned, is the same as any other nation competing in football—it would be a disservice to not cover that in the way that you cover any other national team. Palestine exists independently of Israel—there are normal things in Palestinian society, Palestinian doctors and artists and footballers. I do still talk about the political influence and corruption in the Palestinian Authority [PA], which enters the Palestinian Football Association [PFA]. It kind of works how any organization loosely affiliated with the PA works, which is like a personal fiefdom. The head of the PFA, Jibril Rajoub, used to be the head of the Preventive Security Services. He has absolutely zero soccer background.

But I strive for the main topic to be the football. There’s a lot of people who can discuss geopolitics and the occupation, but there’s nobody else, especially in English, that covers the football team.

A few weeks ago, Israel and Hamas came to a ceasefire agreement. What are the implications for Palestine’s soccer team? Might they be able to return to playing games in their home stadium in East Jerusalem?

There is a sense of relief that the killing will stop, [but] no one will celebrate because the future remains uncertain. Hopefully Israel will be made to honor the ceasefire agreement. We had about seven weeks of respite earlier this year, and then Israel refused to go to stage two, and what was unleashed was even worse. Before we can even think about hosting home games, the [West Bank Premier] League needs to return—and the situation in the West Bank has been so bad that traveling between cities is rendered a game of Russian roulette.

As far as you know, are you the only independent journalist covering the Palestinian national team full-time?

I can tell you that with 100 percent certainty I am, because I’ve been to the three Asian Cups that they’ve participated in, and the other journalists there were either working for the [PA controlled] Palestine TV or the PFA has them on the payroll. I’m the only [independent] guy there for every single qualifying cycle and for the big tournaments.

The more prominent a sports team, the harder the access. It’s not the case with Palestine. I do the old-school journalistic work of just showing up. It’s a lot of just being annoying. I knock on a door, act like I’m supposed to be there. It’s progress by inertia—keep doing stuff and things happen. When I was employed full-time, I’d take time off my job and go do this in my vacation time. There was a time when I was in Dubai for a business trip, and Palestine had a World Cup qualifier in Abu Dubai. It worked out spectacularly well. I worked at my job until 5pm, closed my laptop, took a cab from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, and covered the game. 

It seems like the team had, for many years, ticked along without too much journalistic scrutiny. How have they responded to your work?

If you show up tournament after tournament, and you’re at qualifying games, you begrudgingly earn people’s respect. They have to be there. I’m just there because I like it. 

After a 2019 game in Singapore, the coach did have what I can best describe as a meltdown. I’d asked him, “Why didn’t you rotate your lineup?” He said, stupidly, “I don’t speak English.” I was like, “Okay—I’ll ask the question in Arabic.” He got flustered—he started screaming, “I’ll see you after, I’ll see you after!” And then he slammed the door and he called me a sharmoot. It means, I guess, man-whore. 

Palestinians who live in Israel and have Israeli citizenship can choose to play either for Israel or Palestine. What are the politics around a player forgoing Israel for Palestine?

The most famous example is Ataa Jaber. He declared for Palestine in 2023. He was the first Arab player to captain an Israeli national team—he captained the Israeli under-21s. When Jaber played for Israel, the Israeli media had lovely things to say about it. “Israel is a democracy, a state for all its citizens, look how open we are.” After he took the decision to play for Palestine, you had ministers in the government saying he should be stripped of his citizenship. It caused an earthquake. From a Palestinian perspective, these guys who made that choice, they’re super popular. Ataa Jaber, the fans love him. 

Major nations, including France and the UK, have recently recognized the state of Palestine for the first time. FIFA, which is the governing body for world soccer, has recognized Palestine since 1998. FIFA as an organization does not have the best reputation, but on this issue, was it ahead of its time?

FIFA is not doing us a favor. I appreciate that they made the decision in 1998—that decision means I am where I am today—[but] to me it’s like, you’ve been denying this country the chance to be represented for seventy years. They took a decision at a time when it was very different. That was in the midst of the Oslo peace process, and everyone [thought] that a viable, independent Palestinian state was going to come into existence.

A separate governing body, UEFA, has reportedly discussed banning Israeli teams from its competitions, though it’s unclear what the future holds post-ceasefire.

The discourse in Europe has shifted dramatically. I don’t know if it’s something that you can feel in the United States. There are all sorts of UEFA statutes about what could lead a country to get suspended. If it happens, I would be hopeful because it would actually show that there is a price to be paid. At the end of the day, it’s football, and there’s nothing like a genocide to make you realize that football is a dumb game where people run after a ball for ninety minutes. But culturally, it’s very significant. Getting banned from this, it’s getting banned from the sport. 

On a personal level, if I had to pick Palestine to qualify for the 2026 World Cup or Israel getting kicked out of FIFA or UEFA, I would pick Palestine to qualify every time. All the players that have died, the stadiums that have been destroyed—of course [FIFA and UEFA] should step in and do something. But I would be far happier if Palestine won a trophy.  

Over the course of the war, you’ve regularly reported on the deaths of Palestinian soccer players, from lesser-known ones to those who have gotten international attention, like Suleiman al-Obeid, the “Palestinian Pelé.” How do you make the choice to go beyond the sports news and cover the war?

These are all humans who died. People with families and dreams. Look at it in the aggregate: losing four hundred people from the football family in a small county like Palestine is a huge damage to the ecosystem. To produce any one of the players in the national team, it takes that entire ecosystem. That includes that part-timer in Gaza who barely makes the match-day roster, who works in a bakery or doing construction.

I didn’t want the last two years to be a focus on misery. I wanted it to be on football. I was unsure if Palestine would [continue to] compete. To not only compete, but also to achieve what we achieved—it’s a remarkable story that deserves to be told. And if I don’t do that, then it’s not out there.

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