The World Cup is never just about sport. With Iran set to participate in the quadrennial tournament hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, geopolitical tensions are unlikely to remain outside the stadium gates.
Last week, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced that her country would host Iran’s national team during the World Cup amid ongoing US-Iran peace talks in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated that Iran’s national players would be welcome to compete, while warning that individuals tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) could face restrictions.
Such statements are not without precedent. In Iran, sport has long been inseparable from politics.
Iran is a football-mad nation. Alongside wrestling, football occupies a near-sacred place in public life, functioning almost as a secular religion. Iran’s national squad, known domestically as Team Melli, arrived at the last World Cup in Qatar in 2022 with one of the strongest squads in its history, earning monikers from some supporters as the “Brazil of Asia.”
Even in Doha, the Islamic Republic treated the tournament as far more than a sporting event. Iranian authorities aggressively managed the country’s image abroad, coordinating with the Qatari government to restrict three journalists from Iran International, an anti-government Persian- and English-language broadcaster, from freely covering the tournament.
When the Iranian team refused to sing the national anthem in their opening game against England – in an apparent act of solidarity with protesters back home – Iranian state TV censored the footage and the IRGC warned the players afterwards that their families back home would face imprisonment and torture if they did not “behave.” In their second game against Wales, the players complied and bellowed out the national anthem.
In Iran, athletic success is often contingent on political loyalty. Dissent, on the other hand, can oftentimes jeopardise an athlete’s career, or life.
In June 2022, Voria Ghafouri, the celebrated captain of Tehran-based Esteghlal FC, was dropped from the national squad traveling to Qatar after publicly criticising the regime for civil rights abuses back home. Months later, he was arrested.
The politicisation of Iranian sport stretches back decades. In 2006, FIFA suspended Iran from international competition after then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was accused of interfering in football federation affairs by pushing for the sacking of its president.
During years of interviews with Iranian athletes inside Iran and in the diaspora for my book, Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt, two themes repeatedly emerged.
First, there is a deeply entrenched revolving door between Iran’s sports institutions and the IRGC. Mohammad Reza Davarzani highlights that nexus. Before serving as deputy sports minister and head of Iran’s Volleyball Federation, he was a senior IRGC commander who later became embroiled in corruption scandals.
Second, dissent is often a fast track to forced retirement or exile for Iranian athletes.
Sardar Pashaei, Iran’s 1998 junior world champion wrestler, had his eyes set on the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. When I spoke to him, he described how Iranian authorities barred him from leaving the country because of his Kurdish background and because his father had taken part in anti-government protests in 1979.
“These IRGC commanders wear suits instead of their army clothes and present themselves as sports people,” he told me.
Since leaving Iran, Pashaei has become an outspoken critic of the regime’s grip on sport. He helped lead United for Navid, the campaign named after the champion wrestler Navid Afkari, who was executed by the Islamic Republic in 2020 despite international appeals, including a public plea via Twitter from President Trump.
The World Cup will no doubt be a great spectacle. For many Iranian athletes competing, however, the greatest test may not be on the field, but against an authoritarian system that demands unflinching loyalty before talent.
Jonathan Harounoff is the author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt and currently serves as Israel’s international spokesperson at the United Nations
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