May 20, 2022
Many women in Iran and large groups of men as well are incensed that women who were sold tickets to the last World Cup Asian elimination match were blocked from attending the game and then some of them were pepper-sprayed by the police when they appeared at the stadium.
A movement has erupted overnight in Iran, urging FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, to boot the Iranian team out of the World Cup finals. Even some professional soccer players have joined in the call.
FIFA has insisted for years that Iran must admit women, not only to World Cup games but to the weekly Iranian league games as well. Iranians up to and including former President Hassan Rohani have said Iran would do so. But many powerful clerics and political hardliners remain strongly opposed to women in the stands and have prevailed to date.
The clerics have argued that it is unseemly for women to attend the games. The main argument is that the male fans at games are crude and shout obscenities that women should not be subjected to. The solution, women respond, is not to punish women fans for what the men do. Furthermore, on the rare occasions when women have been admitted, they have noted that the men are on good behavior and are not crude. They say the solution, therefore, may be to admit more women.
Many clerics also argue that it is inappropriate for women to be in a stadium where the players are in shorts because those uncovered legs are alluring to women. Of course, the women can watch games on television, where the very same legs are uncovered.
The game that sparked the latest uproar was played against Lebanon March 29 in Mashhad, a very conservative city where the clergy assembled around the Shrine of Imam Reza wield much authority.
A total of 12,500 tickets were put on sale, according to news reports, with 2,000 of those tickets reserved for women to be seated in a segregated section of the stadium. All the tickets were said to have been sold.
When women fans arrived at the entry reserved exclusively for women, the gates were locked and police blocked the way. Video posted on social media showed some scuffling and a handful of women collapsed on the ground crying and covering their eyes from pepper spray. They were isolated and limited in number, however; it did not appear that the police attacked the women masse, but rather singled out some women to be attacked.
The call for Iran to be barred from the finals emerged swiftly after that. However, state broadcasting reported that Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, met with Mirshad Majedi, acting president of the Iranian Football Federation, and assured him the Iranian national team would not be booted out of the finals.
Saifπ2π2ollah Faghanpour, head of the Iranian Football Federation’s legal department, said Iran had received a letter from FIFA after the Mashhad match but there was no deadline set for Iran to respond, and “It seems that nothing specific is going to happen at this juncture.”
The Iran Times has contacted FIFA three times to ask what it has said to Iran. FIFA has not acknowledged any of the emails.
Infantino has been very vocal about demanding that Iran admit female fans to all games. But he has accepted Iranian assurances that female fans would be admitted at some point in the future and has never imposed any disciplinary action. FIFA’s governing rules allow teams to be suspended from FIFA membership for taking discriminatory action based on race, nationality or gender.
“Women should be allowed to come to stadiums,” said national team goalkeeper Ali-Reza Beirandvand. “We are the only country, apart from Afghanistan, that doesn’t allow women to enter stadiums. Why is that so?”
Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn-based women’s rights campaigner, has spearheaded a campaign from abroad to bar Iran from participating in this year’s World Cup finals.
“I call on FIFA to ban the Islamic Republic because we, the women of Iran, are banned from entering stadiums for 42 years,” she told the Daily Mail of London. She argued that FIFA would have been stricter in enforcing its own regulations if Western countries had banned women from entering stadiums. “This is a total betrayal that FIFA do not take a strong action against a gender apartheid regime,” she said.
The United for Navid group of exiled Iranian athletes and activists, set up after the execution of wrester Navid Afkari in September 2020, said Iran should be suspended from international soccer until it changes its stance.
“We formally request that FIFA immediately suspend Iran and prohibit its participation in the World Cup 2022 as long as the Football Federation of Iran continues to violate the Olympic Charter and FIFA regulations,” it said in a letter to FIFA’s deputy secretary general, Mattias Grafstrom.
The Iranian federation’s official response has been to blame the last-minute nature of ticket sales and “fake tickets.” In a statement, the federation said that, until three days before the match, the game had been due to be played without spectators. When the last-minute change was made to admit fans, it was late to provide “favorable conditions” for women to enter. Accordingly, it said, officials had not “invited” women to buy tickets in the first place. It didn’t explain how its website provided for women to obtain tickets.
The federation further said that just nine women were bona fide ticket-holders and their payments would be refunded. It didn’t explain how any woman could be a bona fide ticket-holder if it didn’t sell any tickets marked for women.
The violence the rest had suffered, it said, was “the result of mischief and profiteering by people who endangered the order and security of the stadium by selling and printing fake tickets.”
Jafar Montazeri, the prosecutor general, however, blamed the federation for selling tickets. “If the conditions were not ready and it was not possible to let women into the stadium, the authorities would have had to use their intellect from the beginning and not sell tickets,” he said.
Taking a different tack, Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Javaheri, director general of the Khorasan Razavi Department of Sports and Youth, said the ban on women was about religious issues: “Given that Mashhad is the cultural base of the Islamic and Shiite worlds, some issues had to be anticipated.”
Hashemi-Javaheri added that the decision to ban women was made in Tehran: “We were the executors of the decisions that were taken in Tehran. We and the Provincial Security Council all listened to the order and carried out the orders that came from Tehran.”
According to article four of the FIFA rules, any discrimination against people because of gender is “strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.”
The dispute rose to such a level that President Raisi personally intervened, trying to calm the roiling waters by announcing he had directed the interior minister to conduct an investigation of three issues the ticket sales process; the rights of citizens who had bought tickets; and the compliance with coronavirus health protocols.
