Getting to Know the Iranian National Team: Mehdi Taremi

This article is part of a 22-part miniseries on the history and stars of Iranian football released ahead of Iran's participation in Group B of the 2022 Qatar World Cup in November. You can explore the rest of the series here.

Mehdi Taremi may be the first striker to hit the pitch for Iran in the 2022 Qatar World Cup. Recently he was the most vocal opponent of the team’s former coach, Dragan Skočić, who was suddenly ditched by the Football Federation last week in favor of Carlos Queiroz. 

Taremi was born on July 18, 1992 in a fishing zone of Bushehr province. His father, Alishah Taremi, played as a defender in the local team but never reached the professional leagues.

Throughout his childhood, Taremi has said, he used to go to sea in a barge with his father and the men of the family to fish with a barge and practice football in the hot southern Iran afternoons.

Taremi started playing football professionally with Bushehr’s Bargh FC in 2002. Four years later, he joined Iran-Javan Bushehr. Iran-Javan is known as one of the most successful football teams in Iran.

Then in 2014, he was invited to join Persepolis. At the time the request from one of Iran’s two biggest clubs seemed strange; Taremi was a relative unknown with no experience of top-level football. But he had been spotted by Ali Daei, one of the club’s living legends and the head coach at the time.

Taremi duly played for Persepolis from 2014 to 2018 and managed to score 45 goals in 87 games, making him the club’s top scorer in the last two decades. His first ever appearance with the club was in the 2014 Tehran Derby, facing down the opposition in front of 100,000 spectators and initiating the team’s first goal. Persepolis eventually won the match 2-1.

In April 2015, Taremi showed a different side of himself at a game against Nasr Arabia. After scoring on a penalty shot, he drew his index finger across his throat: the universal sign for throat-cutting. After what should have been a joyful moment in sport, he told reporters he had wanted to “take revenge” on the Saudis because of the “disrespect” they had shown to Iranian football in recent years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, today Taremi is known as a staunch supporter of the Islamic Republic. He has echoed many of its ideological talking points and publicly thrown his weight behind the late IRGC Quds Force commander, Ghasem Soleimani, on Twitter and Instagram. He has a close relationship relationship with Ebrahim Raisi, the current president of Iran, and met with him in summer 2022 to discuss the future of Team Melli’s head coach.

Taremi first played for the national team in May 2015 after then-manager Carlos Queiroz invited him to join a friendly match against Uzbekistan. Since then he has played for Iran 58 times, scoring 27 goals.

He was, however, also a key factor in Iran's failure to advance beyond the group stage of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. In the match against Spain, he missed an unguarded goal, then punted the ball into the air in the last few second of the game in what should have been a one-on-one play between him and the Portuguese goalkeeper.

That said Taremi's performance in the past 12 months went a long way toward securing Iran’s place in Qatar. He is also one of the most successful Iranian football players in Europe; in 2019, he joined the Portuguese Rio Ave team and managed to score 18 times in 30 games.

His extraordinary performance drew the attention of the Porto club, for whom he has played 71 times, scoring 44 goals, since 2020. In late 2021 UEFA chose a remarkable scissor-kick performed by Taremi against Chelsea as “goal of the season”. He is also known for expertly breaking the offside traps of rival defenders.