Group B: A Match Made in (Iranian) Broadcasting Hell

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 the World Cup in Qatar, the Iranian national team has been placed in Group B alongside England, Wales and the US.

Though many would hold that politics and sport shouldn’t mix in an ideal world, the reality is that in Iran, football has been intensely politicized for the past 40 years – and Tehran has had strained relations with both Britain and the US throughout that time. Like it or not, Group B’s are likely to be the most intensely politicized set of matches in the entire tournament, at least from Iranian commentators’ point of view.

Months after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, a group of students and fanatical supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and took some 56 of its diplomatic staff hostage for 444 days. The episode deepened tensions with the US – and economic sanctions on Iran – and pushed the normalization of relations off the table for decades to come.

Tussles between Tehran and Washington have been well-publicized down the years since then. Less well known is that on November 5 of that same year, a similar group of armed militants broke into the British embassy compound and escorted staff in the area and their families to the house of the chargé d'affaires. The group withdrew after about five hours, but the exchange alarmed UK officials and created a high degree of unease.

In both its foreign policy stances and its media and educational output, the Islamic Republic has cast the US as the “enemy” and the antithesis of its own principles, but also Britain as the conniving, untrustworthy “Old Fox”. Both, and other countries Tehran collectively casts as “the West”, are positioned as diametrically opposed and an active threat to Iran and its sovereignty.

Individual incidents have made relations with the UK all the harder since then. In 1989, for instance, an ageing Ruhollah Khomeini called on “all brave Muslims” to attempt to murder the British author Salman Rushdie over the content of his book The Satanic Verse. This led both countries to temporarily suspend diplomatic contact.

Then in 1994, the Islamic Republic formally recognized the Irish Republican Army. Tehran Municipality renamed Winston Churchill Street, next to the British Embassy, to Bobby Sands Street, after the convicted IRA member Bobby Sands. This, too, prompted London to recall some of its embassy employees.

In 2011, in the most explosive provocation yet, a group of members of the state-backed paramilitary Basij broke into the British Embassy, tearing down the Union Jack flag and seizing documents. At the same time, in an attack on the garden of the British Embassy in Tehran’s Gholhak district, six British diplomatic staff were taken hostage and released after a few hours after police intervention. Three British officers were injured in the fray.

For his part, in his address on the matter, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described the building as “that evil embassy”, only saying in mitigation: “The feelings of the youth were correct, but entering the embassy was not.” Then-speaker of parliament Ali Larijani said the attackers’ anger was “a symbol of public opinion in the country”.

After these incidents, the UK Foreign Office expelled all Iranian diplomatic staff from Britain and began withdrawing its own personnel from Iran. The following summer a temporary British Interests Section was opened at the Swedish Embassy instead. Normal relations did not resume until 2014.

A key figure who took part in the garden assault was a man named Ali Foroughi: a relative of Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the Supreme Leader’s son’s father-in-law, and currently the head of the IRIB’s TV3. This happens to be the channel that will be broadcasting World Cup matches in October.