World Cup 2026: For Iran, this is a battle on an unequal field
On a Sunday in early June, Iran’s footballers landed in Tijuana, Mexico, a few hundred metres from a border they were not permitted to cross except to play.
The squad had been forced to abandon its planned base in Arizona; the United States, which has placed Iran near the top of a list of nations under a comprehensive entry ban, issued the players’ visas 10 days before their opening fixture and refused several members of the delegation.
Days later, Fifa revoked the ticket allocation for the team’s three US-based games, so Iranian players will run out before stands emptied of its own supporters. This is, by most reckonings, the first World Cup in which a host nation has received the team of a country with which it was at war as the competition kicked off.
Apart from the diplomatic squabbles, intensified by a tournament held in a fractious year, there is something in the treatment of the Iranian team that deserves closer thought.
The team is allowed onto the grass, but hurried back across the border; required to enter and leave US soil on the very day of each match, which renders the team’s participation at once heroic and a mirror held up to US imperial hubris.
There is a long genealogy of heroic sportsmen in Iran’s cultural history, well before football. Athletes in Iran have rarely been entertainers in the sense of the modern sports industry. The physically trained body has long served as a moral and national text, even a mythology.
The lineage runs through the varzesh-e bastani and the zurkhaneh, the “house of strength”, where physical cultivation was inseparable from an ethic of chivalry, forbearance, and the defence of the weak. Mastery of the body conferred moral authority, not celebrity - and the champion, the pahlavan, was legitimate only when placed at the service of others.
Even now, when sport has been folded into the global circuits of capital, that older expectation is slow to fade: the athlete is an exemplar, if not an heir, to the heroes of the Shahnameh, Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s 11th-century Book of Kings, from whom ethical conduct - and, where necessary, sacrifice - are expected, a lineage that extends to the wrestlers of the 20th century.
Symbolism of sport
The exemplary figure remains the wrestler Gholamreza Takhti, an Olympian of the 1950s and 1960s, whose fame rested on the perception that he fused athletic supremacy with a dignified distance from the Pahlavi court and a loyalty to ordinary people. When he died in 1968, his funeral became one of the few mass gatherings at which opposition to the shah could be voiced under the cover of mourning.
His image, and model, circulates regularly across Iranian social media. The lexicon of the wrestling mat seeps into political speech at the highest level: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reached for it in 2013, licensing nuclear diplomacy as narmesh-e qahremananeh, “heroic flexibility”, casting a strategic concession as a wrestler’s tactical give, rather than a retreat in the face of a military threat.
Under both the monarchy and the Islamic Republic, the state has loaded sport with the duty of representing the nation, so that the athletic body becomes a stage upon which the legitimacy of the state is tested, and sometimes shored up.
Supporters from the Global South may well turn out in support of Iran's team, out of disgust at Washington's hubris and in solidarity with a country fighting an unequal battle
The best-known example was Iran’s qualification for the 1998 World Cup in a tense playoff match against Australia. The reformist administration of then-president Mohammad Khatami wished to claim the triumph and open a space for public participation.
Yet the celebrations it unleashed - with crowds filling the streets, and women pressing into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, from which they were formally barred - showed how quickly such joy could exceed the bounds of the permissible.
The role of athletes in public politics, meanwhile, has changed. A younger cohort, fluent in social-media influence, can address domestic and diasporic publics directly, outside official channels.
Kimia Alizadeh, the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal in 2016, defected several years later to denounce the state’s repression of women; the judoka Saeid Mollaei fled in 2019 rather than throw a bout to avoid facing an Israeli; and the striker Sardar Azmoun risked his place on the team to condemn the killing of protesters in 2022.
At the World Cup in Qatar four years ago, the Iranian national team stood silent through their country’s anthem before a match against England, a nation historically perceived as meddling in Iran’s affairs. That silence drew a double-edged reception: reprimand from state officials eager to show unity amid geopolitical tensions, and support from those who saw the international stage as a chance to be more vocal about Iran’s domestic politics.
This is why the international arena is so combustible for Iranians. Beneath a global camera, the smallest gesture becomes legible and instrumental to audiences eager to make use of it.
Caught up in conflict
Fifa and the International Olympic Committee present their tournaments as a neutral global commons - yet their governance, sponsorship economies, visa regimes and media framing are weighted heavily towards the West. The spectacle of an apolitical festival rings hollow when it accommodates US racist policies, barring supporters, players and referees from entry, or subjecting them to control and intrusion on account of their identity alone.
For the nations of the Global South, and for those that refuse alignment with Washington, this arena has never been the level playing field its charter proclaims.
The 1998 US-Iran World Cup match in France, played between governments without diplomatic relations, turned the Iranian players’ gift of white roses to their opponents into a parable of detente - foreign policy by other means, like the ping-pong diplomacy between Washington and Beijing in the Nixon era.
In the current World Cup, Iran’s first two matches will take place in Los Angeles, and the third in Seattle. Los Angeles may be a site of loud contention: the city holds the largest Iranian diaspora, dominated by the restorationist royalists supporting the Pahlavi crown.
What was once a nostalgic royalism has, over the past decade, acquired the aesthetic of the global right: a cult of the redeemer-leader, a mythologised past to be recovered by force, a “true Iran” defined against its internal enemies, a Make Iran Great Again motto.
Its alignment with the Maga movement is not incidental. That significant parts of this current have welcomed the sanctioning, and even the bombing, of Iran has left a mark difficult to erase in the eyes of many people inside Iran.
The athletes are thus caught between a domestic environment that, amid an existential war, demands national unity against a conflict propped up by Israeli interests, and American diasporic pressure to stand against the Islamic Republic and its repression of dissent.
So what should we expect of the team, shuttling between a base in Mexico and pitches in the US - watched from across Iran as emblems of the nation in enemy territory, and by Washington and its allies as tools for further delegitimisation?
For now, the team has arrived in Mexico wearing a pin on their suits displaying the number 168, referencing the children killed in the US bombing of a Minab girls’ school in February. As the war and its objectives expanded to the destruction of Iran’s industrial and scientific infrastructure, and the denial of its right to independent development, it would be surprising to find the Iranian team playing into the hands of their American host - which has passed up even the sporting gesture of letting players stay on US soil.
Instead, supporters from the Global South, starting with their Mexican hosts, may well turn out in vocal support of Iran’s team, out of disgust at Washington’s hubris, and in solidarity with a country which had been fighting an unequal battle for itself and much of the world against blatant US imperial politics.
In war as in football, Iran may need to endure until victory comes.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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