Iran's World Cup participation fraught with political tension

Iran will present a major challenge to Fifa’s “football unites the world” slogan on Monday by becoming the first country in World Cup history to compete on the soil of a host nation with which it is at war.

The national team’s opening match against New Zealand in Los Angeles will kick off amid continuing hostilities between Iran and the US that have intensified in recent days, as a fragile ceasefire has failed to hold and attempts at reaching a negotiated settlement have sputtered.

The belligerent backdrop makes a mockery of the message of unity being peddled by Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, analysts say.

“Despite Fifa’s fever dreams that this could be an apolitical World Cup, it is the most politically combustible World Cup ever, and the Iran-United States-Israel war sits right at the centre of it,” said Jules Boykoff, a politics professor at Pacific University in Oregon and a former professional footballer.

“There’s never been a World Cup where one of the hosts is openly threatening war crimes against one of the participating nations, and that participating nation, in turn, is bombing other participating nations. The levels of newness is off the charts.”

Iran’s players will take the field at So-Fi stadium following months of speculation over whether they would be allowed to participate at all, after Donald Trump suggested it would be safer for them to stay away.

Doubts about their involvement were dispelled only this week after squad members were granted US visas, although several officials have been denied entry, including the president of Iran’s football governing body, Mehdi Taj, because he once belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The uncertainty has upended preparations and created organisational headaches that could complicate the team’s hopes of progress in the tournament.

Amid doubts about their reception in the US, the squad’s training headquarters was switched from Arizona to Tijuana, in northern Mexico, where the players arrived this week after three weeks at a camp in Turkey. The team will travel to Los Angeles on the day of the match and return to Mexico immediately afterwards to avoid staying in the US overnight.

The pattern will be repeated for subsequent games – against Belgium in Los Angeles on 21 June, and against Egypt in Seattle five days later. The Egypt fixture has already drawn controversy, after local authorities designated it the city’s Pride match to coincide with that weekend’s LGBTQ Pride festival, prompting protests from Iran and Egypt, where homosexuality is criminalised.

The outlook has been further clouded by an ideological tug-of-war between Iran’s Islamic regime and its opponents about who the team represents and where its loyalties lie.

In ordinary circumstances, the players could expect fervent backing in Los Angeles, home to a large ethnic Iranian community that has earned the city the nickname of “Tehrangeles”.

But fervent opposition to Iran’s theocratic rulers among many expats could dilute support.

A major salvo in what looked like a battle for the team’s soul came this week in the form of an officially sanctioned World Cup video posted on social media, depicting the players as representatives of the regime’s Shia Islamist ideology.

It shows footage of the players to the soundtrack of a religious eulogy that pays homage to the imams Ali and Hussein, the two most revered figures in Shia Islam after the prophet Muhammad, and refers to the seventh-century Battle of Karbala.

Alex Vatanka, the head of the Iran programme at the Middle East Institute in Washington, criticised the video. “The World Cup was a chance for Tehran to speak to Iranians as a nation. Instead, it chose to speak to them as an Islamist ideology,” he wrote, calling the video “a major own goal”.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, attacked efforts to portray the team as emissaries of regime ideology.

He has promoted himself as an alternative to the ruling theocracy and posted a video highlighting its persecution of footballers. “Today, many Iranians no longer see the national team as a team that represents the nation,” the video’s female narrator says.

After lobbying from the Iranian football federation, Fifa has banned displays of national flags predating the 1979 Islamic revolution, depicting a lion and the sun, symbols of the monarchy, which are still flown by many critics of the regime.

Pahlavi attacked the ban, and some regime opponents vowed to defy it by smuggling in the old flag under the official one.

Iranian officials have said the team will stop playing if banned flags are displayed or anti-regime slogans are chanted during a match.

Mahmood Ebrahimzadeh, a former Iran international now living in Maryland, predicted that many US-based Iranians would withhold support. “I would say the majority don’t want to support the national team,” said Ebrahimzadeh, who heads an organisation of retired Iranian athletes living in exile. “As a soccer player, it’s unfair.

“Everybody is expecting those players to speak out for the people against the government. But they are not strong enough in education to speak about human rights. And the country is in a very hard situation with the war against America and Israel, so its hard right now to use football to speak out.”