Duckens Nazon was looking forward to a few days off. The 32-year-old striker was enjoying a successful inaugural campaign with Iran’s most-decorated soccer club, Esteghlal. Back in August, Nazon had signed a deal with the Tehran-based team that would avail them of his services for the following three seasons. By late February, things were going well. With a record of 11-8-3, Nazon’s club sat atop the Persian Gulf Pro League standings, two points ahead of rival Tractor S.C. with just two matches remaining. With his players having won four of their last five matches, club manager Sohrab Bakhtiarizadeh decided to give the players two days off. Nazon thought it might be nice to get out of the country for a bit and see his family in France. Doing so, he would soon learn, proved to be far harder a task than he could have ever expected.
Tensions in Tehran were high at this time. In the preceding weeks, high-level nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran had broken down, and the Americans and the Israelis had begun to issue repeated warnings of an impending strike. Nazon, who was brought up in the Paris suburbs by Haitian parents, had grown somewhat numb to the U.S. and Israel’s repeated pump fakes. “At the beginning, I said, ‘Okay, maybe they will attack.’ But after two or three times, I said, ‘They’re not actually going to do it.’”
The Warning
Nazon received a concerned call from a friend playing in Israel about “movement” he was seeing in front of his hotel on the evening of Friday, February 27, and warned the footballer to “be ready to go,” but Nazon didn’t take it seriously enough. “I could have [left Tehran] with my teammate who took a flight at six o’clock [the following morning],” Nazon tells me during our meeting on an early spring afternoon in lower Manhattan. “But I was up playing PlayStation, so I just delayed my flight to 10 o’clock. I said, ‘Okay, I will take my time to sleep and wake up and go.’”
The next morning, Nazon caught his 10 a.m. flight, and, as the plane sat on the runway preparing to take off, he received another message from his concerned friend in Israel. “He said to me, ‘Oh bro, you’re so lucky you’ve made it.’”
“Made it”? What did that mean? Unbeknownst to him, while he sat preparing for takeoff, the year’s biggest geopolitical bombshell was quite literally exploding all around him. The friend informed him that the “war alarms” were ringing in Israel. “When he sent me that, I said ‘Thank God I’m gonna take off right now … it’s top timing.’”
Sadly, that feeling of relief didn’t last very long. Minutes later, the plane’s captain got on the intercom to inform the cabin that the airspace had been closed and the flight had been grounded.
What followed was a trying three-day odyssey that saw Nazon travel back into Tehran amid falling missiles, procure a ride to the Azerbaijani border, sleep at said border for 32 hours as he awaited a “code,” receive said “code,” travel to Baku, then Istanbul, and finally home to France. Reflecting on the ordeal, Nazon tells me, “I wasn’t scared, you know? I was just like, ‘When is this going to be finished?”
A Journeyman’s Path
This Iranian episode is just one of the many unexpected roadblocks that Nazon has had to navigate across a long, decorated career that has taken him from the Parisian suburb of Poissy to the heights of world soccer. In a little more than a decade as a pro, Number 9 has taken his talents to 13 different clubs, scoring goals everywhere from Kochi, India, to Sofia, Bulgaria. It was also another climactic moment in an unprecedented season that saw Nazon help the Haitian national soccer team do something that it hasn’t done in over 50 years.
Last November, Nazon and “Les Grenadiers” capped off a magical run with a triumphant 2-0 win over Nicaragua to clinch Group C in the CONCACAF World Cup qualifiers. In doing so they earned a spot in soccer’s largest tournament for only the second time ever and the first time since 1974. For Nazon, who has dressed for the national team since 2014 and is the side’s all-time leading goal scorer, it was the culminating moment of lots of hard work, disappointment and resilience. “I’ve played with the old generation, the new one, and in between also. You understand? So I make three different generations.” As the team’s elder statesman, Nazon has been the glue for the squad, the foundation that their success has been built upon.
No Home, One Mission
November’s triumph was especially sweet considering that Les Grenadiers haven’t actually played a game in Haiti in five years. In the wake of the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, the Caribbean nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince, has been enveloped by violence as rival gangs have fought to fill the power vacuum. By some estimates, over a million residents of Haiti have been displaced by the violence and disorder. In March 2024, the Haitian Football Federation put out a statement claiming that Les Grenadiers’ typical home field, Stade Sylvia Cator, had been occupied by gangs. Most recently, the team has played their “home” matches in Curaçao.
Ask Nazon what it’s like to carry the flag for a country his team can’t even play in, and he frames it of a piece with Haiti’s larger story. “I think Haiti would always struggle more than others … We are the first black [republic] independent in the world. For sure, we’re going to get some consequences.” But to him, staying resolute in the face of difficult circumstances is what Haitians do. “[Not being able to] play in Haiti for a while now is just another challenge. If God gave us this, it’s because we know we can handle it … And the proof is we made it. We qualified without playing any games at home.”
This has culminated in the greatest opportunity of Nazon’s soccer career and arguably in the history of Haitian soccer. And far from being content, Nazon is eager to show the world what he and his teammates can do. “I want to see the reaction of the people when they see what we can produce.”
The road will not be an easy one. Les Grenadiers find themselves in a group stacked with formidable competition. Their World Cup journey begins on June 13 in Boston against Scotland. A week later, on June 19, they will travel to Philadelphia to take on mighty Brazil in match two. And finally, match three will be a showdown with Morocco in Atlanta. It’s the moment of a lifetime, and Nazon is ready to turn some heads. “If we play our maximum and everything?” he pauses briefly before cracking a sly grin, “We will shock the world. You understand?”
