September 23, 2022
With only 70 days remaining before Iran’s first game in the World Cup finals, the Iranian Football Federation fired coach Dragan Skocic and re-hired former coach Carlos Queiroz to helm the team.
Queiroz wrote in Instagram September 13, “When the family call you home, all you do is simply just show up.”
The Iranian Football Federation said Queiroz would be paid 50,000 euros ($50,000) a month for four months.
Skocic qualified Iran’s Team Melli for the World Cup finals by winning 15 of his 18 games, making him the winningest full-time coach in the history of the national team.
Queiroz, 69, previously led Iran from 2011 to 2019 and at the World Cup finals in both Brazil in 2014 and Russia four years later. His record in the 100 games he coached for Iran was 60 wins, 27 draws and 13 losses. Since then, he has coached the national teams of Columbia and Egypt, but been fired from both jobs.
Bringing back Queiroz was the personal goal of Mehdi Taj, who won election to a four-year term as head of the Iran Football Federation August 30 after publicly pledging to rehire Queiroz, which he did in just days.
Iranians were divided into three camps. One thought firing Skocic with only weeks to go before the first World Cup match was insane and would condemn Iran to failure. Others saw Queiroz as a world class coach and argued he had the proven skills to win one on the world stage. A third group did not want any foreign coach, but demanded an Iranian coach since Iran had drawn the United States and Britain as opponents—that group sees the World Cup as a political field in which Iran must beat its enemies as part of an all-Iran effort.
Iran will begin its World Cup campaign against England on November 21 before facing Wales four days later and the United States November 29—an all-English-speaking lineup.
Iran’s national team has appeared in five World Cups before this year. Its record is two wins (against USA and Morocco), one draw and 12 losses. It has never advanced beyond the first three games of what is dubbed the group stage—and advancing is the goal for Iran this year. The top two teams in each four-team group will advance.
Under Queiroz Iran secured its best World Cup performance in 2018, defeating Morocco and drawing with Portugal to claim four points and narrowly miss out on advancing.
Queiroz takes over an Iranian national team that has had horrendous difficulty signing up foreign teams with which to have friendly matches to get prepared for the World Cup. Since qualifying for the finals in March, the national team has played only a solitary friendly, losing 1-2 to Algeria under Skocic on June 12.
Queiroz came in with two friendlies scheduled: against Uruguay September 23 and against Senegal four days later—both in Austria where Iran’s national team held its first training camp. It is trying to set up a match with Russia for November.
Iran defeated Uruguay 1-0, getting the second Queiroz era off to a good start. But Iran did not have an easy day. Its sole goal came only in the 79th minute, off the foot of Mehdi Taremi, who had been brought in minutes before to try to revive Iran’s play. Reuters said that, apart from that goal, Uruguay had been “dominant” in the match.
The Iranian government insisted that the friendly against Uruguay be played in an empty stadium to block any chances of anti-regime protests. Despite that, two men managed to get in with a sign saying Mahsa Amini was “murdered by the police of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Police asked them to hand over the sign. When they refused, the Austrian police escorted them out of the stadium.
