Iran defeated Wales in a big game with major ramifications for Group B.
For a few hours on Sunday afternoon, a week before the Qatar World Cup was due to kick off, it appeared Sardar Azmoun’s tournament was over before it had even begun.
Iran’s most prolific striker would usually be one of the first players picked for the national team.
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The 27-year-old has scored 41 goals in just 65 games for Team Melli, as they are known in Iran.
Although he had stuttered somewhat since moving to Bayer Leverkusen this year there was no way, unless he was injured, he would not be on the plane to Doha. But then the announcement for Iran’s World Cup squad, due to be delivered by coach Carlos Queiroz, was mysteriously postponed.
The information vacuum became a social media miasma of rumour, conjecture and anger: that Azmoun had been left off the list; that powerful forces had intervened to make sure that Azmoun was excluded from the national team; that Queiroz, a famously rambunctious character on the touchline and off it, had threatened to resign if he wasn’t allowed to pick who he wanted to play without political interference.
Azmoun was eventually called up.
However, the episode begged the question: if this was all true, why would the Iranian regime want to have a say on who appears for the national football team?
The answer goes back more than 40 years, back to the Islamic revolution that swept the Shah from power and brought in a theocracy headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but also to more recent times.
In September 2022 a young Iranian Kurdish woman by the name of Mahsa Amini died in custody after being picked up by the Gast-e ersad, Iran’s hated religious police.
Her crime? Not covering her hair properly. Her death sparked outrage across the country and has fuelled an uprising against the regime and its religious rules that has shaken the government and seen horrific acts of brutality by security forces as they try to reassert control.
Read more: Female Iran fans fear state ‘spotters’ are spying on them at World Cup games
Some of the social media footage that people have managed to leak out has been brutal. Brave women throwing off their hijabs and being shot or beaten to death in the streets. Young men protesting alongside them, executed in their cars. The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group says that at least 326 people have been killed across 22 provinces, including 43 children. Other estimates suggest that 15,000 people have been arrested, their fates largely unknown.
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The protests are the biggest threat to the regime’s survival since 1979, and the protesters have demanded the support of the most famous and influential Iranians who have huge social media platforms away from the heavily censored media; actors, musicians, poets and, especially in a World Cup year, its footballers.
But speaking out against the government is a dangerous game in Iran, even for footballers who live abroad.
Their families can, and often are, threatened if a player speaks out.
“The government finds different pressure points for each person and uses that,” says Sina Saemian, a regular on the Gol Bezan Iranian football podcast. “Even for the European-based players, the majority of their family will still be based in Iran.”
And so any support from the players these past weeks and months has been indirect — not celebrating goals in the Iranian league, wearing black wristbands, or broad declarations of support for the Iranian people without mentioning the protests specifically.
However, protesters have seen this as being too obtuse. Much of this has played out on Instagram, which is extremely popular and is not, at least for now, permanently banned in Iran. Players have millions of followers and their (perhaps understandable) reluctance to step up has angered many people.
“People didn’t want these players to start calling for the fall of this regime, they just wanted (them) to show some sort of empathy toward what is happening in Iran,” says ‘Sara’, the founder of Open Stadiums, an activist group that campaigns to lift Iran’s unofficial ban on women attending football matches.
“Anyone that didn’t show empathy,” she says, “people are really calling them out.”
In the west, it has been erroneously reported that the country’s national team has unequivocally stood up for the protesters.
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Read the comments, in Farsi, underneath players’ Instagram posts, one of the few free public spaces in Iran, and you will see a different story.
Many are furious the national team’s players have not done enough. “They do find themselves in a difficult position,” admits Saemian. “But I think there comes a time where they also have to, rather than sitting on the fence, make a decision, and make a conscious decision to acknowledge and support this cause and the suffering that the people are going through.”
Azmoun was one player who was more explicit.
He posted an Instagram Story to his five million followers that said: “The ultimate (punishment for speaking out) is to be kicked out of the national team, which is a small price to pay for even a single strand of Iranian women’s hair. Shame on you for easily killing the people and viva women of Iran. Long live Iranian women!”
Later, before a training camp in Austria, he posted that he and the rest of the team were being prevented from showing support for the protesters. He later posted an apology to his team-mates for making the remark.
As a result of its enormous domestic fanbase, football has become highly politicised in Iran.
Iran’s successful World Cup qualifiers in 1997 and 2005 resulted in massive celebrations in the streets of Tehran, while Team Melli’s elimination during the World Cup qualifiers in 2001 led to rioting.
But today, the Iranian government is more worried that the World Cup, and the national team, could offer a global platform for dissent, which they fear could add fire to the increasingly volatile political demonstrations that have paralysed Tehran in recent nights.
“When there is no freedom of speech, then it’s very simple,” former Iranian national team coach Afshin Ghotbi tells The Athletic. “People use opportunities and platforms that they have to speak what’s in their hearts.”
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The sheer popularity and power of football in Iran was clear when they beat the USA, the Great Satan, 2-1 at France 1998.
In Tehran a million people took to the streets and it was the first time women were seen openly defying the compulsory hijab law. But it was also excellent propaganda for the regime. Ayatollah Ali Khomenei — who replaced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he died in 1989 — was particularly keen to celebrate the success. “Tonight again,” he said in an address to the national team on state television, “the strong and arrogant opponent felt the bitter taste of defeat at your hands. Be happy that you have made the Iranian nation happy.”
When Iran next qualified in 2006 they headed to Germany as international pariahs.
The populist firebrand mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had just been elected president. He was a huge football fan and would often turn up to training and pose for pictures with the squad.
Ahmadinejad was also an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. When Team Melli turned up in Germany, European politicians demanded Iran be kicked out of the tournament, or at the very least that Ahmadinejad would be arrested if he attended for breaking Germany’s strict Holocaust denial laws. In the end, he didn’t show up but thousands of protesters did; pro-Israel and Jewish organisations held protests in every city that Iran played in. They were eliminated in the first round.
Three years later, the players would again become the focus of protests, but this time for different reasons.
Ali Daei had retired and then been hired as the coach of the national team. But results were poor and he was replaced by Ghotbi who was a popular but controversial choice. He left Iran as a teenager before the revolution and settled in California where he became a coach, eventually working his way into the US set up for France ’98. When he returned to Iran to coach Persepolis in 2007, it was the first time he had been home for 30 years.
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Due to his American citizenship, he was initially viewed suspiciously by the Iranian FA, which has close links to the government and the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard. But he won the title with Persepolis, and with qualification for the 2010 World Cup in the balance, he was hired on a three-game contract — for the final games against North Korea, the UAE and South Korea.
The timing of the home game against the UAE couldn’t have been worse. Iran’s presidential election was due to take place at the same time and it was likely that Ahmadinejad would lose to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who had campaigned on a reformist ticket. The regime was worried defeat against the UAE might actually swing the election.
Ghotbi couldn’t understand why the Azadi Stadium, one of the most intimidating places to play when it’s full of more than 100,000 fans, was half-empty for the UAE game. “Already the protests were starting and we were surprised because the Emirates game should have a full stadium,” he recalled of that 1-0 Iran victory. “We had Ali Karimi and the team had a chance to go to the World Cup and the stadium was half empty. We found out that some paths to the stadium were blocked, and people couldn’t come to the stadium. They were afraid that people would come into the stadium and maybe with 100,000 people they would create security problems.”
Just a few hours after the polls closed for the June 12 presidential election, Ahmadinejad was announced as the winner, an impossibility according to the opposition who alleged massive voter fraud. The result sparked huge demonstrations — the start of the so-called Green Movement — that saw millions of Iranians taking to the streets.
In Seoul, Ghotbi and Iran were preparing for the final must-win game against South Korea. But news had reached the players of the brutal crackdown on protesters. The players, led by the captain Karimi, wore green wristbands to show their support. Just before the age of social media, their team photo became an iconic symbol of protest.
In the 82nd minute, a Park Ji-sung equaliser for South Korea eliminated Iran from World Cup qualification. Ghotbi believes the pressure may have played a role in the defeat.
The Green Movement was crushed and Mir-Hossein Mousavi was placed under house arrest.
The players, especially Karimi, were threatened with reprisals, although Ghotbi insists that the threats of arrest, travel restrictions and national team bans were never followed through.
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Before the 2018 World Cup, which Iran had qualified for at a canter under Queiroz, the issue of women being banned from Iranian football matches had come to a head.
At the start of the year, just before Persepolis was due to play Esteghlal at a packed Azadi stadium, the biggest game on the Iranian football calendar, 35 women were arrested for attempting to enter the stadium, some dressed as men. The women had also fallen foul of the Gast-e ersad morality police and were taken to the same Vozara detention centre where Mahsa Amini would die four years later.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino was in attendance, although he didn’t bring up the issue of the arrests publicly during his trip.
The team captain Masoud Shojaei was less reticent. When the team was invited to visit the palace of then-president Hassan Rouhani, Shojaei used the opportunity to ask Rouhani to lift the ban. His remarks were cut from the TV broadcast and Queiroz would later come under pressure to drop Shojaei from the World Cup squad.
Queiroz, who has skilfully negotiated Iran’s competing power centres to become the country’s longest-serving foreign coach, faced a near-impossible diplomatic situation. Shojaei was dropped from the team but later brought back into the World Cup squad and played in their first game, a dramatic last-second injury-time victory against Morocco in St Petersburg. “My job was to read the situation, cool it down. Let the dust go down,” Queiroz told me in 2018.
Today it is far more dangerous to speak out.
Former national team player and Persepolis veteran Hossein Mahini was arrested whilst several members of the Persepolis team were brought in for questioning over their social media posts.
Daei and Karimi, the two former captains and legends of Iranian football, have been the most vocal. Daei declared to his 11 million followers on Instagram that he won’t be attending the World Cup in Qatar. “I prefer to be next to you in my homeland and express my sympathy with all the families who lost loved ones over these days,” he wrote. However, some Iranian reports have suggested that Daei has been handed a travel ban by the regime.
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Karimi has perhaps become the most outspoken public critic of the government. His posts to his 12 million followers on Instagram has seen him charged in absentia with “assembly and collusion with the intention of acting against national security”. He is thought to be in exile in Dubai. Unsurprisingly, Karimi didn’t reply to requests for an interview.
The chaos has sparked calls for Iran to be kicked out of the World Cup altogether.
Open Stadiums published an open letter to FIFA president Infantino to call for Iran to be expelled as the Iranian FA is “an accomplice of the crimes of the regime” and a “direct threat to the security of female fans in Iran and wherever our national team plays in the world”.
Others, like Ghotbi, believed the government might withdraw the team themselves, for fear that anti-government protests would use the huge platform the World Cup provides.
They will play the US, a replay of that famous France 1998 match, as well as England and Wales.
Matches against the Great Satan and Little Satan, as the UK is sometimes referred to in Iran, will be imbued with deep political significance for Tehran.
The domestic-based members of the squad were invited to a reception to meet the current president Ebrahim Raisi on November 15, before they left for Qatar.
Unlike in 2018 when Masoud Shojaei took the opportunity to press the president on the issue of women’s rights, the players seemed deferential in comparison. “People are so angry,” said Sara, the founder of Open Stadiums. “They even bowed down to the president.”
However, the pressure had been building after Iran’s beach soccer team was filmed not singing the national anthem before a game. Iranian politicians have called for any players to be excluded from the World Cup squad for not singing the anthem, a song which is tied to the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“Every human being’s first reaction to anything is to try to preserve and protect his family, himself, his future,” says Ghotbi when I ask him about the pressure the players face. “And I think what maybe a lot of players are contemplating is: what do they give up by speaking out? They’ll give up their professional career, they’ll give up their livelihood, maybe their safety, their family’s safety.”
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But Ghotbi also sees that everyone will soon be asked to make a choice. “I think we’ve come to a point where there’s no turning back, because there’s just too many people that are getting hurt. And we’ll see sooner than later that most people will speak out.”
As the World Cup has neared, the protests have not abated, and it looks certain that, barring a last-minute development, Iran will play England later today. The team has arrived in Qatar and Queiroz has already spoken publicly about his players having the right to protest and speak up about what is happening in their country. But as the match approaches, the squad has become more bellicose. Queiroz seemed to cryptically suggest he would lose his job if he answered a question about representing a country with a poor record on women’s rights, then left the room.
Another player, former Brighton forward Alireza Jahanbakhsh, seemed to suggest publically that English journalists were asking human rights questions to destabilise the team. But then, the day before the game, captain Ehsan Hajsafi became the first player to publicly back the protesters at the World Cup. “They should know we are with them. And we support them.”
Iran captain Ehsan Hajsafi said: “Before anything else, I would like to express my condolences to all of the bereaved families in Iran. They should know that we are with them, we support them and we sympathise with them.
“We cannot deny the conditions — the conditions in my country are not good and the players know it also.
“But we are going to have a very important game and of course whenever you start a competition the first games are very important. We hope to reach a favourable result and I hope we can make our people happy.”
Pushed on the situation in Iran, he added: “Well, we have to accept that the conditions in our country are not right, and our people are not happy. We are here but it does not mean that we should not be their voice, or we must not respect them. Whatever we have is from them.
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“We have to fight, we have to perform the best we can and score goals, and to present the brave people of Iran with the results. And I hope that the conditions change to the expectations of the people.”
Iranian football podcaster Sina Saemian believes it is inevitable there will be anti-regime protests “from before the game right to the end. The majority of the fans will go to the stadium for the purpose of protesting”. However, several activists told The Athletic that protests might be muted as there will likely be undercover regime agents among the crowd. One pro-government newspaper published a list of exiled sports journalists who should be detained and, if possible, repatriated if they turned up in Doha. London-based news network Iran International also claimed its journalists had their World Cup accreditations removed after the Iranian government, which accuses them of being Saudi-funded, designated it a terrorist entity. Qatar denied it had ever approved any accreditations for Iran International. Iranian journalists have also been warned by government officials not to talk to their foreign counterparts.
Many Iran fans back home will boycott the World Cup altogether. The UK’s Iranian Community Network (ICN) tells The Athletic: “Football goes on its way, saying everything is hunky-dory. They say, ‘Football is separate’. No, it is not separate from the lives of people. I could see people were getting excited about the World Cup. But Iranians here and elsewhere also see this as the last straw. They want to take a stand.”
But the key moment will come seconds before kick-off. Will the players sing the Islamic Republic’s national anthem? Either way, it will be seen as a signal to the protesters back home.
“If they end up singing that national anthem, when the national anthem is everything that people are fighting against, I think that would be a genuine disappointment,”said Saemian. “And maybe a little bit heartbreaking as well.”
(Top image: Sam Richardson for The Athletic)