What the U.S. and FIFA Did to Iran — and What It Says About Both of Them
The World Cup is supposed to be the tournament where the world shows up. That is the founding premise of the thing — a global competition held in a host nation that by accepting the tournament accepts the world, including the teams it finds inconvenient, uncomfortable, or actively hostile. This is not naive internationalism. It is the explicit contractual commitment that FIFA extracts from every host nation that wants the privilege and the revenue of staging the event.
The United States wanted the World Cup badly. It bid for it. It won it. It built the marketing around it. It collected the ticket revenue, the broadcast fees, the hotel bookings, the restaurant receipts from millions of visitors who came from around the world. And then it told one of those visiting teams — fine, you can play, but you have to sleep in Mexico.
Iran’s training base was relocated from Tucson, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico, ahead of the tournament, and the team has said it is unfairly being made to travel to matches the day before games and return immediately after. Three group stage games. All three in the United States. And after every single one of them, the Iranian national team was required to board a plane and fly back across the border to Mexico, because the United States government decided that a soccer team was a national security risk that could not be permitted to sleep in a hotel in Los Angeles. NPR
Iran coach Amir Ghalenoei called his team perhaps the “most oppressed team in the whole World Cup,” after he said Iran have been forced to leave Los Angeles and return to their base camp in Tijuana, Mexico, immediately following their opening match. Al Jazeera
He is not wrong. And the story of how this happened is an indictment of two institutions that should have done better.
What the U.S. Government Did
The facts are not in serious dispute. Iran’s players were granted visas to enter the U.S. on June 5, just 10 days before the national team began group play. Yet some coaches, support staff and officials had their applications rejected. Among those whose applications were not approved were Mehdi Taj, the head of Iran’s football federation.
The United States will not ease the travel restrictions on the Iranian team despite the team saying they would lodge a complaint with FIFA. Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House Task Force for the tournament, told Reuters: “The shift from Tucson to Tijuana, I think, was good for everybody involved. Certainly it reduces their travel time to Los Angeles too. Their flight is an hour shorter than it would be from Tucson. And we’re happy with the way that things went for match one.” The Washington Post
Andrew Giuliani — son of Rudy, handed a World Cup sinecure by the administration — said the arrangement was “good for everybody involved.” He said this about a team that was required to board a plane at 8 PM after a competitive international soccer match and fly to another country instead of sleeping in the city where they had just played.
Team captain Mehdi Taremi said the typically short trip from Tijuana to Los Angeles instead took five hours, including security and immigration checks. The team had to cut its training period short because the coach’s request to travel from Mexico was originally denied. The single-entry visa of winger Mahdi Torabi expired immediately after he left the United States for Tijuana, requiring him to visit the U.S. consulate in Tijuana to get a new visa.
The United States is at war with Iran. That is real. The geopolitical situation is real and complicated. But the Iranian national soccer team is not the IRGC. The men in those jerseys are athletes — some of them playing for club teams in Europe, many of them representing a country whose ordinary people have been brave enough to resist the very government the U.S. is fighting. Punishing them for their government’s actions while simultaneously collecting FIFA revenue and marketing the tournament as a celebration of global unity is a hypocrisy so brazen it takes your breath away.
What FIFA Did — Or Rather, Didn’t
FIFA is the other party that deserves to be named here.
Iran’s restrictions were not lifted despite an interim agreement to end the war with the U.S. and Israel. Iran filed an official complaint with FIFA. FIFA’s 2026 World Cup regulations state in Article 18.3 that each team shall travel from its base camp to the match venue one day before matchday and shall return to their base camp after the match. Iran was forced to comply with a stripped-down version of this rule — fly in the day before, fly out the same night — that no other team in the tournament faced. NPR
FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino visited the Iranian locker room after their opening match. Captain Mehdi Taremi said: “For sure, he wants to try to help us, but it’s about other things, too. Everyone knows it.” Al Jazeera
“Everyone knows it” is a precise summary of what FIFA is. Everyone knows that FIFA awarded this World Cup to the United States partly because of American money and American television markets and American political influence. Everyone knows that FIFA’s promises of neutral sporting governance melt the moment a host government asserts its political preferences. Everyone knows that Infantino’s locker room visit was a photo opportunity, not an intervention.
FIFA has suspended, sanctioned, and investigated member federations for the most trivial political infractions. It has barred teams from competition for government interference in football. It has issued lengthy proclamations about the sanctity of sport from political pressure. And then a host government tells one of its member federations’ national teams that they cannot sleep in the country where they are playing their games — and FIFA visits the locker room to express sympathy and does nothing enforceable.
The Iranian coach after his team’s final group game said the host country treated them “very unfairly” and that “the world should be aware of that.” “What these young people, these players have done, it should be written in history because the host country treated us very unfairly. Their behaviour towards us has been really terrible. Despite all of these problems, we’ve been able to perform well, and the world is proud of Iranians and our team. I think that’s our greatest achievement despite all the obstacles and the hurdles they put in our way.” Salon
The Fans Who Couldn’t Come
And the players were at least allowed in. Iran’s ticket allocation for the tournament was revoked just days before the start, leaving fans who had already finalized their travel arrangements unable to attend their team’s matches. The travel ban affecting Iranian citizens meant that ordinary fans — not officials, not coaches, not anyone with any connection to the Iranian government — could not come to the United States to watch their team play.
In Los Angeles, in the community its residents call Tehrangeles, there are more Iranian-Americans than anywhere outside Iran. Many of them have family back home. Many of them have been fighting for decades for a democratic Iran, opposing the very government the U.S. is at war with. They would have filled SoFi Stadium. Instead, their family members and countrymen watched from cinemas in Tehran, subject to “necessary approvals” from the state.
The Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles — the people who fled the Islamic Republic, who built businesses and raised families and became Americans — were the people most robbed by this policy. They could not buy tickets for their national team because those tickets were revoked. Their relatives could not get visas. The players flew in the day before and flew out the same night.
Sport Is Not Above Politics. But It Has Rules.
I want to be clear about something. The argument here is not that the United States had no legitimate national security concerns about Iranian government officials traveling freely through American cities while the two countries are at war. Some of those concerns are real. The decision not to grant visas to individuals with ties to the IRGC may be defensible.
But there is a difference between national security and petty harassment. There is a difference between scrutinizing officials and telling a soccer team it cannot sleep in Los Angeles after a night game. There is a difference between legitimate security measures and revoking a team’s entire ticket allocation two weeks before the tournament, stranding fans who had booked flights and hotels.
The United States wanted to host the World Cup. It wanted the prestige and the money and the moment. It got them. And then it treated one of the visiting national teams — a team of young men from a country currently at war with us, wearing their nation’s colors, trying to play soccer — like they were a security threat to be managed rather than athletes to be hosted.
The World Cup is not above politics. Nothing is above politics. But FIFA agreed to host a global tournament in a country that promptly demonstrated it would apply political criteria to the treatment of teams on the field, and FIFA smiled and collected its fees and visited the locker room and did nothing.
“We spent so much time in the air commuting, they didn’t even give us time to recover,” coach Ghalenoei said. “After the game today, they said to us, ‘You have to leave immediately.'” NPR
Leave immediately. In a country that told the world it was hosting the world.