Iraq Stars League
association football league
The Iraq Stars League (Arabic: دوري نجوم العراق, romanized: Dawrī Nujūm Al-'Irāq) is the highest level of the Iraqi football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the Iraqi Premier Division League. It is governed by the Iraqi Pro League Association.
The league was formed by the Iraq Football Association in 1974 as the Iraqi National Clubs First Division League, the first nationwide league of clubs in Iraq, and later became known as the Iraqi Premier League. In 2023, the competition was rebranded as the Iraq Stars League and transitioned into a fully professional competition. The current format sees 20 teams playing 38 matches each (playing each team in the league twice, home and away), totalling 380 matches in the season.
Of the 83 teams to have competed since the inception of the league in 1974, eleven have won the title. Al-Zawraa are the most successful club with 14 titles, followed by Al-Shorta (8), Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya (8) and Al-Talaba (5); these four clubs together contest the Baghdad derbies. The current league champions are Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya, who won the title in the 2025–26 season.
History
Origins
Up until 1973, leagues in Iraq were organised on a regional basis, reflecting the country's administrative and geographic divisions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Iraq Stars League” as association football league. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as association football league. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q248512. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 2023, 2025 and 1973.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Iraq Stars League primary sources, Iraq Stars League archive and Iraq research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iraq Stars League” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.