After Iran drew 2-2 with New Zealand at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the delegation did not check into their hotel. They went to the airport. The match had ended at approximately 8pm Pacific time. Within hours, the players were on a charter flight back to Tijuana, Mexico — no recovery night, no decompression, no time for the physical demands of a World Cup match to be absorbed in any normal way. Their next match was six days away. The journey home was 127 miles. It took five hours.
Coach Amir Ghalenoei did not begin his post-match press conference by discussing football. He began it with the travel arrangements. He had one phrase for all of it, offered before a single question was asked about tactics or goals or the result: “The most oppressed team in the whole World Cup.”
Then he talked about football.
A Team That Commutes to Its Own Tournament
The logistics of Iran’s participation at this World Cup are not incidental. They are the story. The squad is based in Tijuana because thirteen members of the Iranian delegation — including the president of the Football Federation, Mehdi Taj — were denied US visas ahead of the tournament. The training camp was moved from its original base in Tucson, Arizona, across the Mexican border, where Taj and the other excluded officials watch from a distance as Iran compete in matches they cannot attend.
The US government’s position rests on the IRGC designation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration would not allow Iran to embed individuals with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps within its delegation. Taj previously held a senior intelligence position within the IRGC, and the State Department has consistently declined to discuss individual visa decisions. It is worth saying plainly: these are not invented restrictions. The IRGC designation is longstanding, the security rationale is coherent, and the US government is within its legal rights to apply it.
What the logic produces in practice is a different matter. The president of Iran’s football federation cannot enter the country where Iran’s football team is playing. The squad commutes across an international border for each match. A 127-mile flight — a journey that in the ordinary way takes 35 minutes in the air — consumed five hours of the players’ time the day before an opening World Cup match, absorbed into security checks and immigration processing.
By the time winger Mehdi Torabi played against New Zealand as an unused substitute and flew back to Tijuana with the squad, his visa had expired. He had been issued a single-entry authorisation while all his teammates received multiple-entry visas. He had to visit the US consulate in Tijuana to obtain a new one before the Belgium fixture. Mehdi Taremi, Iran’s captain, encountered separate difficulties during the squad’s departure from Los Angeles. The nature of those difficulties was not disclosed.
All of this is before a ball has been mentioned in the context of fair competition.
What FIFA’s Neutrality Covers
Iran’s Football Federation has filed a formal complaint with FIFA, arguing that the restrictions are inconsistent with the principles of equal conditions for participating teams. FIFA’s response — that it is not involved in host country immigration processes — is technically accurate and substantively evasive. It is the same formulation deployed when a Somali referee was turned away at Miami Airport, when an Iraqi photographer was deported from Chicago after ten hours of interrogation, when Senegalese players were searched on a runway in San Antonio with their shoes off. FIFA’s neutrality, in practice, functions as a guarantee not of equal treatment but of institutional non-interference when powerful host country prerogatives are exercised against weaker parties.
Gianni Infantino visited the Iran locker room after the New Zealand match. Captain Taremi’s response to the gesture was neither grateful nor hostile — it was precise: “For sure, he wants to try to help us, but it’s about other things, too. Everyone knows it. I don’t need to mention that because you know where we are. I think FIFA has to help us more than this.”
Andrew Giuliani, the White House World Cup task force director, offered a counter-reading. “I think the United States has been more than fair,” he told ABC News. “We’ve gotten visas for all 31 players, gotten visas for every coach, so that way there can be competitive balance. I would respond by saying that they’re welcome for our hospitality.” Competitive balance, in this formulation, means that all players can play. It does not mean that all teams can prepare equally, recover equally, or travel without crossing an international border before each fixture. The definition is accurate as far as it goes, which is not far enough.
The Stadium and Its Contradictions
On the morning of the New Zealand match, a Los Angeles court held an emergency hearing to decide whether FIFA’s ban on the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag — the lion-and-sun emblem that predates the 1979 Islamic Revolution — should be overturned. The judge upheld the ban. Hours later, the flags were visible throughout SoFi Stadium, brought in despite the ruling, worn on shirts that security had asked some fans to turn inside out at the entrance.
Los Angeles holds an estimated 600,000 Persian Americans, the largest Iranian diaspora community outside Iran itself, in the neighbourhood long known as Tehrangeles. They came to the stadium carrying flags from two different periods of their country’s history and a relationship to the team on the pitch that could not be reduced to either support or opposition. When the national anthem played, sections of the crowd booed. Outside, protesters described Iran’s players as representatives of a government, not a people. Inside, the same crowd cheered Ramin Rezaeian’s equaliser and Mohammad Mohebbi’s header with the uncomplicated joy of people watching one of their own score a goal at a World Cup.
Mohebbi said afterwards: “I wanted to say thank you to the Iranians who live in Los Angeles. They make a great atmosphere in the game.” A footballer’s gratitude, crossing decades of diaspora and political complexity, arriving at something simple and true.
Iran are the first team in World Cup history to compete in a tournament hosted by a country with which they were at war. Their players chose to come anyway — for the people at home, they said, who were living with the consequences. What those people are watching is a team that flies in the day before each match, plays, and flies out the same evening. A team whose federation president watches from a hotel room across a border. A team whose captain needed five hours to travel 127 miles, and whose unused substitute needed a consular appointment to stay in the tournament.
Ghalenoei reached for one word before his press conference turned to football.
It was not hyperbole. It was a description.
Read more – Football’s Selective Conscience: A World Cup Indictment
Also see – FIFA Revokes Iran Fans’ World Cup Tickets, Says Federation
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