While the World Cup is first and foremost a sporting affair, international politics sometimes spill over when the planet’s leading powers assemble in one place to compete in front of billions of spectators.
In 1938, fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini told the Italian players to “win or die” ahead of their quarter-final tie with France – which they did, before eventually triumphing in the final too.
In 1974, East and West Germany met in the group stages for the only football match ever between the two sides of the divided nation. The former ran out 1-0 victors, while the latter won the whole tournament.
And in 1986, Argentina and England met in the quarter-finals, four years after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. A reportedly “cagey” and “bad-tempered” affair was largely overshadowed by Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal.
This time around, the tournament is unfolding against the shadow of the war between the US-Israel alliance and Iran, which began in February and whose repercussions have already made things awkward before a ball has even been kicked.
Last month, the Iranian football federation demanded a series of assurances from FIFA and the US, which is hosting alongside Canada and Mexico.
Their stipulations included guaranteed visas for those on the team who have completed IRGC military service, which is classed as a terrorist organisation in the US and Canada, as well as asking for enhanced security during the tournament and that their flag and national anthem would be respected.
Those requests failed at the first hurdle. The Iranian side subsequently claimed that visas were denied to “key managerial and administrative members” of their delegation.
As such, the Iranian squad – which is making its fourth consecutive appearance at the World Cup, and its seventh overall – relocated to Tijuana in Mexico, having originally planned to base itself in Tucson in the US state of Arizona.
Upon landing in Mexico on Sunday, players wore lapel pins for the more than 150 people killed – among them over 100 children – by a missile, likely of US origin, that struck a primary school in Minab.
The players – most of whom have not played a competitive match since February after the Iranian domestic league was suspended at the outbreak of the war – will only be allowed to enter the US the day before their matches.
In the group stage, they will face – barring any further complications – New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, and Egypt in Seattle. They will have to leave shortly after the matches end, albeit there has been dispute between Mexican and US government officials about how soon this is, and about how it might affect player performance.
Meanwhile, Iran’s national team has three star players, who have all had respectable careers in Europe: Mehdi Taremi, Alireza Jahanbakhsh, and Sardar Azmoun.
The last of these, Azmoun – who has scored an impressive 57 goals in 91 appearances for the national team – was omitted from the squad for this tournament, with local media in Iran suggesting the decision was linked to perceived disloyalty to the regime.
During the 2022 protests following the death of Mahsa Amini – a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died under suspicious circumstances after she had been arrested for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with regime standards – he posted a message of solidarity on Instagram.
It read: “At worst I’ll be dismissed from the national team. No problem. I’d sacrifice that for one hair on the heads of Iranian women. This story will not be deleted. They can do whatever they want. Shame on you for killing so easily; long live Iranian women.”
Azmoun, Taremi, and Jahanbakhsh have all publicly supported the protests in Iran which took place between December 2025 and March 2026 and saw tens of thousands of civilian casualties at the hands of the IRGC.
Complicating matters further, this week the Iranian football federation claimed that its entire allocation of fan tickets has been revoked, leaving fans who have already travelled to the US or planned to do so unable to attend the matches.
And Iranian sports minister Ahmed Donjamali suggested this week that the Iranian side would abandon the match if there are “political slogans” in the stadiums, as well as in the event that the Lion and Sun flag (Iran’s pre-revolutionary flag) is brought into the crowd by spectators.
All of this seems to make for an unusually tense setting for a World Cup.
However, cast your mind back just four years, to Qatar in 2022. At that tournament, more than 6,000 migrant workers were estimated to have died in the preparations for the tournament, prompting global outrage.
The competition was additionally shrouded in controversy surrounding LGBT and women’s rights, treatment of Jewish and Israeli visitors, and, of course, the ability to drink alcohol at the tournament.
The 2018 World Cup in Russia had its own complications; a doping scandal within the Russian squad and diplomatic tensions in the aftermath of the Skripal poisoning in England.
In Brazil in 2014, there were various safety issues including the death of eight workers during construction, a monorail collapse, and thousands of houses, including an entire favela, destroyed to make way for redevelopment.
And so on. Between the 20th century events that turned World Cup fixtures into microcosms of wider conflicts and the contemporary political crises that sometimes threaten to overshadow the sporting action, it is hardly unusual for events beyond the pitch to take centre stage.
This year is no different. Whatever happens at this summer’s tournament, many of us will be watching the off-field friction almost as closely as the drama on it.
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