The Trouble With FIFA

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.

For four decades, Iranian women have been blocked by the government, security forces, the judiciary, the Shia clergy and extremists from the innocuous activity of watching football games in person. FIFA has a duty to intervene, but has yet to do so in anything other than unremarkable terms, despite being fully aware of the situation.

FIFA’s charter explicitly and strictly prohibits “discrimination of any kind” on the part of competing parties, against other countries, private individuals or groups of people, on a welter of grounds, including gender. It states that such discrimination is “punishable by suspension or expulsion”.

Despite this, scores of documented instances of gender discrimination on the part of the Iranian regime toward female football fans have gone unpunished. In August 2019, for instance, four women nicknamed the “Azadi Girls” in Persian-language media – the photojournalist Forough Alaei, Zahra Khoshnavaz, Lili Maleki and Hadieh Marvasti – were arrested by the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization, and held in prison for a month, for trying to sneak into the stadium disguised as men. Eight other women, all of whom had bought tickets, had been detained for the same in 2017.

On September 9, 2019, a young fan of Esteghlal FC named Sahar Khodayari died of third-degree burns in a Tehran hospital. Nicknamed the Blue Girl, Khodayari had been arrested that March on trying to enter Azadi Stadium to watch her favourite team play. Facing a six-month prison sentence, she set herself on fire in protest outside the Revolutionary Court of Tehran, and later died from her injuries.

The tragedy sent shockwaves through the international community. FIFA issued a statement in the aftermath in which president Gianni Infantino said he was “hopeful” that Iranian sports bosses would now be “receptive to our repeated calls to address this unacceptable situation".

For its part, the Iranian government allowed women to watch one match that October between Iran and Cambodia.Then business as usual returned, and the same lamentable state of affairs persists today, in large part because FIFA has never taken decisive action.

In January this year, in a moment that was seen by many as representative, minutes after Iran officially qualified for the 2022 World Cup, FIFA posted a congratulatory cartoon on its official Twitter and Instagram pages. It featured ex-Iranian football players rejoicing with a collection of fans, all dressed differently and visibly of different ethnic backgrounds. But not one woman was depicted among them.

As recently as March this year, Iranian women and girls, many of them ticket-holders were pepper-sprayed by security forces on trying to enter a football stadium in Mashhad. They were published in media outlets spanning the globe. FIFA did not condemn or act on the incident, but merely wrote to the Iranian Football Federation asking for “an explanation”.

In August, Iran's current Minister of Sports and Youth, Hamid Sajjadi, reported that FIFA had sent the Federation yet another letter about the issue. So extreme has the culture of impunity become, however, that he claimed FIFA had “never” pressured Iran to let women into stadiums, and that Tehran understood doing so was “not a requirement”.