Iran's football team granted visas to enter US for World Cup, officials say

LOS ANGELES, When Iran’s men’s soccer team takes the field at SoFi Stadium on June 15 for its first FIFA World Cup match, many Iranian Americans won’t be rooting for the team.

The reason has been stitched onto every player’s jersey: the flag of the Islamic Republic.

“I cannot stand the Islamic Republic flag at all, more than 20 of my friends and family got killed by this regime,” said Los Angeles restaurateur Roozbeh Farahanipour, a community leader who was a political activist in Iran before fleeing the country a quarter-century ago. “I’ve fought my entire life against this regime. To me, this is not the Iranian team; this is the Islamic Republic’s team.”

The unease captures one of the most fraught flashpoints of a World Cup already burdened by high ticket prices, transportation woes and other political tensions at home and abroad. Those challenges, and others, have dampened enthusiasm for the tournament, which begins next week and will be played across 11 U.S. cities, as well as in Canada and Mexico.

In Los Angeles, home to the largest population center for people of Iranian descent outside Iran, the tournament is forcing Iranian Americans to choose between celebrating their heritage and rejecting the government that claims to represent it. And many are settling on the latter, repulsed by a regime they say has turned the country’s national team into an instrument of propaganda.

Soccer, said exiled opposition leader Reza Pahlavi, “has become a weapon of the Regime in its war against the Iranian people.”

Iran’s pre-Islamic Revolution flag featuring a golden lion has become a common sight at protests in Los Angeles, especially since the U.S. began Operation Epic Fury against the revolutionary regime in February. But the flag, a potent symbol of dissent against the country’s religious theocracy, is banned by World Cup organizers FIFA as part of its restrictions on political expression by fans.

“Our people love the game,” said Pahlavi, the crown prince who many monarchists hope will play a leading role in Iran should the Islamic Republic fall, in a lengthy written statement. But, he added, “they cannot separate this team from an occupying regime that slaughtered” thousands of people this year in a brutal crackdown on protests.

Pahlavi noted that several Iranian athletes who have stood against the Islamic Republic “have faced intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and even execution.” And Pahlavi, whose late father Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Iran’s last shah, pointed out that star soccer player Sardar Azmoun was left off the World Cup roster this week after one of his social media posts was viewed as disloyal by the government.

“For decades, the Islamic Republic has used international sporting events to project legitimacy abroad while repressing athletes at home who dared to stand with the Iranian people,” said Pahlavi, calling on fans who attend the World Cup to “use this opportunity to stand in solidarity with the Iranian people.”

Iran’s first two matches, against New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, will be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, near Los Angeles. Its third group stage game will be played in Seattle against Egypt. That June 26 match also is the subject of a separate controversy: it will take place amid the city’s annual month-long LGBTQ+ Pride celebration, drawing formal complaints from both Middle Eastern countries.

In Los Angeles, state Sen. Ben Allen, whose district includes Westwood, an epicenter of the local Iranian community sometimes called “Tehrangeles”, said in a statement that the “gravity of the conflict” in Iran makes it difficult to treat the World Cup as the sort of “fun escape” it might typically be. “I hope the raw emotion this beautiful game evokes will give us the opportunity to humanize each other more than we usually do, and help us to remember that we have more in common than we sometimes believe,” he said.

There are ways Team Melli, the nickname for Iran’s national squad, might curry favor with Iranian Americans who oppose the Islamic Republic.

Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, the first Iranian American elected to the legislature in Florida, said that she expected “members of the diaspora to attend these games, but to carry with them some act of protest.” Eskamani, whose state is holding seven World Cup matches in Miami, said that if the team takes a stand, as members of the country’s women’s team recently did during a tournament in Australia, when some refused to sing the national anthem, it could give Iranian Americans a reason to offer support.

“I don’t see large-scale efforts … to platform individual players, unless they are standing up for the values that members of the diaspora care about,” she said.

But the team will have limited visibility in the United States both ahead of and during the World Cup. Iran is scheduled to play a closed-door warm-up match against Mali in Turkey before traveling to Tijuana, Mexico, where its base camp will be situated, moved from Arizona in a decision announced last month. The team will fly in and out of the U.S. for its matches, in part because the American government has said it did not want it staying in the country.

FIFA said in a statement that it has worked with multiple levels of government and other stakeholders across the three host countries to “deliver comprehensive security measures for the tournament,” and expressed confidence it would provide “a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved.”

The U.S. and Iran could end up facing off in a July 3 elimination game in Dallas that would be freighted with political meaning and likely to bring significant security concerns. For it to happen, each team would have to finish second in its group. They met at the 1998 and 2022 tournaments, with mixed results. On both occasions, though, the two countries weren’t at war.

Now, such a meeting would likely be riven with dread. “It’s hard to get rah-rah excited … when we see this pressing existential need to liberate the Iranian people,” said Alex Mohajer, vice president of the Iranian American Democrats of California. “If the U.S. wins, what does it really represent, other than the team winning? And if Iran wins, what does it represent, but a win for the regime?”

“It feels,” he said, “like a no-win situation.”