After a 20-month qualifying campaign that included four draws with the continental heavyweight Iran, Uzbekistan will compete in the 2026 FIFA World Cup as the first Central Asian country to participate in the world’s most watched sports tournament. 

Uzbekistan’s World Cup debut crowns three-and-a-half decades of rapid progress in soccer since independence. A cash-strapped national team that struggled for recognition from the rubble of the Soviet collapse now stands behind professional clubs, youth academies, Europe-based stars and a domestic soccer infrastructure capable of producing internationally recognised players. This achievement is not only a milestone in the nation’s recent history, but also the latest chapter in the much longer history of soccer in Central Asia, whose origins can be traced to the late tsarist period in a city at the crossroads of the Russian and Qing Empires. 

Soccer in Central Asia began in the Ferghana Valley city of Kokand, presently in modern-day eastern Uzbekistan. It is a region whose commercial importance goes back to the early Middle Ages. Kokand’s soccer significance can be traced to the late tsarist period, when the city’s now obsolete role as the former capital of the Kokand Khanate intersected with Russian colonial rule, Muslim reformist culture, and the movement of people and goods between Russian Turkistan and Kashgaria (East Turkistan).  

The club now known as Kokand 1912 preserves this history in its name. Founded in 1912 as Muskomanda (Musul’manskaya komanda), or the “Muslim team,” it marks the inception of football within a local Muslim urban milieu rather than as an English import or Russian/Soviet imposition. 

Soccer entered the Russian Empire through the same channels that carried many modern sports across the late 19th-century world: maritime traffic, British expatriate communities, industrial workplaces and elite sporting societies. British sailors played informal matches in the port cities of St Petersburg and Odesa as early as the 1860s, while British and German engineers, factory managers, and textile workers later formed clubs in St. Petersburg, Moscow and industrial towns such as Orekhovo-Zuyevo, 53 miles (85 kilometres) east of Moscow. 

Within a few years of its arrival in the Russian Empire by sea, soccer reached the empire’s newly conquered Central Asian borderland by land. The first opponents that Muskomanda faced were not English sailors or merchants, but tsarist soldiers stationed in Kokand and other garrison towns of the Ferghana Valley. 

Local residents watched their games, imitated their playing fields and improvised equipment before organising teams of their own. In Central Asia, unlike in the ports and industrial centres of the European part of the Russian Empire, soccer entered the former capital of a recently vanquished khanate under colonial rule, where educated Muslim residents encountered the game through imperial institutions and incorporated it into their own urban and associational life. 

Kokand’s emergence as the crucible of soccer in Central Asia was not accidental. It reflected the city’s long-established political, commercial and cultural position in the Ferghana Valley. The valley’s dense settlement, intensive agriculture and routes through Andijan and Osh toward Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan made it one of the principal zones of contact between Transoxiana and Kashgaria (West and East Turkistan). 

After the Russian capture of Tashkent in 1865 and the annexation of the Kokand Khanate in 1876, Ferghana became part of Russian Turkistan and Kokand was reduced from a khanate capital to a colonial outpost. The older trade routes through Andijan and Osh toward Kashgar nevertheless remained active. Kashgari merchants, migrants and religious figures continued to frequent the towns of eastern Ferghana, while Andijani and Kokandi commercial networks adapted to new regimes of passports, customs, consular protection, policing and subjecthood. By the turn of the 20th century, Kokand remained a place where colonial institutions, Muslim commerce, cross-border movement and the memory of the khanate converged. 

This late imperial setting also helped spread Muslim cultural reform to Kokand. Sports fit neatly into this agenda, which combined modern forms of schooling and sociability with a self-consciously Islamic vocabulary of progress, discipline and collective improvement. On the eve of war and revolution, soccer entered a city that was already familiar with new forms of Muslim sociability and civic organisation. 

The date of Muskomanda’s founding in Kokand is nothing short of striking: 1912, 36 years after the annexation of the Kokand Khanate and only three years after the founding of Orekhovo Sports Club (Klub sporta “Orekhovo”), the predecessor of the fourth-division side FC Znamya Truda Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Russia’s oldest surviving football club. A Russian abbreviation cantered on a Muslim identity, Muskomanda’s original name unequivocally marked the team as a local Muslim institution within a colonial urban order rather than as a Western import. 

The Russian Revolution radically reshaped Kokand’s political and cultural life. In November 1917, Muslim delegates proclaimed the Turkestan Autonomy in the city, designating Kokand as the centre of a project that sought Muslim self-government within the collapsing imperial order. 

Kokand’s destruction by Bolshevik forces in early 1918 marked a violent disruption in the history of the city and the wider region. The institutions that had sustained Muslim reform, public association and local political initiative did not disappear immediately but were increasingly subordinated to the new Soviet order. In the following years, education, culture, sports and public life were reorganised through revolutionary committees, party institutions and the emerging Soviet apparatus. 

The creation of the Uzbek SSR in 1924 further displaced Kokand from the institutional centres of the new Soviet republic. Soviet national-territorial delimitation reordered the political map of Central Asia. In the same year, Bukhara, following its integration into Soviet Uzbekistan, acquired a football stadium and its own soccer team, a revealing sign that Soviet physical culture was being organised in new administrative frameworks and under new ideological priorities. Kokand’s early role in the history of Central Asian soccer did not disappear, but it receded from the public spotlight. 

The recent rise of Uzbekistan’s national soccer team has unfolded at some distance from the city where the local game began. Recently promoted to the top division of Uzbek soccer, Kokand 1912 over the years has passed through a succession of names, from Muskomanda to Kokand, Mehnat (“labour”), Avtomobilist, Temiryo’lchi (“railroad worker”), and finally Kokand 1912, each reflecting a different political setting. 

Far from the centre of Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet soccer boom, Kokand 1912 preserves the layers of history through which the sport first became local in Central Asia by honouring the year it arrived in the region. 

The Uzbek national team participating in the 2026 FIFA World Cup features players already visible beyond Central Asia. For example, Abdukodir Khusanov, a defender, plays in the English Premier League for Manchester City, and Eldor Shomurodov, a striker, was a key player on the AS Roma team that won the 2022 UEFA Conference League trophy. 

Uzbekistan’s first test in Group K is challenging but not hopeless. It opens on June 17 against Colombia in Mexico City, and later faces Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal in Houston before meeting DR Congo in Atlanta. If the Uzbek squad advances from Group K, the team would most likely face a knockout match against the winner of Group L, with England and Croatia the leading contenders.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.