We Don’t Even Have Football Anymore

During Iran’s first match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup against New Zealand, I discovered that I had become a divided man in the most ordinary and ridiculous of circumstances. Early in the game, New Zealand scored, and I was happy. The ball entered the net, and something in me leapt up as though a blow had landed against the oppressive regime in Iran. It felt, absurdly and instantly, like justice. It felt as though some small embassy of the regime had been struck in public. I do not present this as wisdom. I present it as evidence.

Then Iran scored.

My conscience, which had only moments earlier dressed itself in the robes of political clarity, had not even had time to sit down before my heart betrayed it. Iran scored, and I felt joy. The old joy. The now forbidden joy. One cannot stop the heart and cross-examine it.

If this is hypocrisy, it is at least a very Iranian kind: full of grief, argument, and memory. But I hesitate to call it hypocrisy too quickly. The word is sharp, and sometimes we use sharp words when a duller, heavier one would be more accurate. It was not simply hypocrisy. It was double-heartedness. It was what happens when a dictatorship enters the places where childhood lives.

For Team Melli is not merely a football team. I envy those who can speak of it so plainly. There are people who can say “Iran played New Zealand” as though they are reporting weather. I cannot. Team Melli is among the few sports teams I have ever truly cared about.

I remember when Iran defeated Australia many years ago. I was in Tehran. The city did not merely celebrate; it exploded into happiness. People were dancing in the streets. Strangers belonged to one another for a few hours. The normal Iranian suspicion of public joy, imposed from above and inherited from too much disappointment, dissolved. It is one of the best memories of my life. I do not wish to improve that memory by making it philosophical. Let it remain what it was: pure joy. A city of people for once allowed to be happy together.

This is why cheering against Team Melli is not a small thing. It is not like changing preference between two clubs because one has hired an unpleasant manager. For me, to cheer against Team Melli is to cheer against a piece of my own childhood.

Yet what choice has been left to us? This is the part that disturbs me, and I must investigate my disturbance even as I write from it. The Islamic Republic has not merely governed badly, as all governments sometimes do. It has suffocated ordinary life. It has turned women’s hair, singers’ voices, dancers’ feet, students’ sentences, prayers, and private thoughts into matters of state. It has made basic human pursuits appear like contraband.

And now even football has been dragged into the same room. One may say, “It is only a game.” This is true, and like many true things, it is insufficient. Football does not matter much compared to prison, execution, poverty, and the humiliation of a whole people. But the fact that even football cannot remain football matters greatly. A tyranny is not satisfied with obedience in the ministries and courts. It wants the anthem. It wants the national shirt. It wants the smile. It wants the goal celebration. It wants to convert innocent joy into evidence of national consent.

This is why the anthem before the match matters. Before the ball had even moved, the game had already become political. To sing, not to sing, to stand in silence, to boo, to look down, to mouth the words softly, to refuse the camera! All of it has meaning now. I wish it did not. I wish I could say that a song before a match is only ceremony. But under a dictatorship, ceremony is not only ceremony. It is a census of obedience.

Most of the players sang. I will not pretend that this did not hurt.

But neither will I pretend to know the exact size of another man’s fear. Would I have refused? Would I have stood silent with millions of eyes watching, knowing that this made the gesture more visible, more dangerous, and more intolerable to the regime? Knowing who might call afterward, whose passport might suddenly become invalid, whose family might be visited, whose career might be quietly strangled? I do not know. It is easy, from safety, to become brave on behalf of others. I have done it often enough to recognize the costume.

So I am conflicted. The players are sons of the same Iran. They are men under pressure. They may love Iran no less than I do. And yet they have become, willingly or unwillingly, instruments of a dictatorship. This is the misery of captured things: one must pity the captive and still name the captivity.

Team Melli has been taken hostage. I do not mean that every player’s soul has been captured, or that each man on the pitch is corrupt. That would be too easy, and ease is usually a sign that one has stopped thinking. Perhaps in a free Iran many of the same players would wear the Team Melli shirt. But they would wear it differently. They would be received differently. They would not be asked to launder the image of an oppressive regime. They would not have to choose between ambition and conscience in the same theatrical way. They would stand for the people, not for those who have made a habit of oppressing them.

Perhaps it is unfair to hold every athlete to the high standard of the Pahlevaan. Yet that ancient ideal remains, haunting every Iranian athlete whether they ask for it or not. Pahlevaans are not merely strong and famous. Brutes may be strong. Tyrants may be strong. Embezzlers may be rich, and fools may be famous. But true Pahlevaans are strong and humble; powerful and protective; celebrated and mindful of the less fortunate. They are not simply the best at their craft. They are enlarged by responsibility. Their strength is not complete until it bends toward those with less of it.

This is why someone like Ali Daei matters. Daei is not merely a legendary football name, though he is certainly that. He is a living rebuke to the idea that a footballer’s duty ends at the pitch. He has paid a price for refusing to bend as demanded. Daei stood with people when standing with people was costly, and therefore he became inconvenient to those who prefer their heroes obedient. He did not cease to be valuable to Iranian football; he ceased to be useful to those who wished football to kneel. So he was ousted and abandoned.

And then there is Takhti, perhaps the ultimate Pahlevaan. He too belongs to that sacred Iranian category where athletic greatness and moral integrity become inseparable. He too stood with the people. He too became difficult for power. And this happened under the Shah, not under the Islamic Republic. That fact is like a stone in the shoe, especially for those who imagine that our problem began entirely in 1979.

Takhti was pushed away from the very world that gave his life shape. Wrestling was not a hobby to him. It was his way of life, his language, almost a form of prayer. Without it, he could not exist in quite the same way. Whether his death was suicide or murder is not the central matter here. The tragedy remains either way. A national hero ended broken and abandoned by a system that could not tolerate independent moral authority.

If a country produces a Takhti and then leaves him to such an end, the country must interrogate more than the final hour. It must interrogate the whole arrangement of power and obedience that made such an end possible.

This is why I cannot take seriously any political solution that merely changes the portrait on the wall and calls the matter solved. The Islamic Republic is the present enemy. I have no desire to blur that. Even an honest and pious Shiite, searching his conscience without fear, can see the fraud at the heart of this regime. A government that frightens its people, embezzles their wealth, glorifies violence and death, humiliates its women, and demands obedience as proof of virtue has not defended faith. It has borrowed the language of faith to escape its judgment. It has imprisoned, impoverished, silenced, and killed Iranians. It has made the country smaller while speaking in the language of greatness. It has dragged Iran toward ruin and then demanded applause for survival. But dictatorship itself is older than this regime, and the temptation toward it is not confined to beards, turbans, religious slogans, or one faction’s flag.

Among opponents of the Islamic Republic, there are many sincere patriots who want a different Iran. Some look backward for rescue; they look toward old names, old symbols, old flags, or old houses and imagine that history, properly rearranged, would lead to prosperity. Many of these people are decent. Many have suffered. All truly love their motherland. But love of Iran, by itself, is not a political philosophy. Suffering does not automatically teach liberty. Opposition to tyranny does not automatically produce freedom. The same Iran that gave us the Islamic Republic also gave us the conditions before it. The same national habit that can excuse one form of domination may, with new colours and better music, excuse another. We are experts at detecting tyranny in our enemies and amateurs at detecting it in our preferred remedies.

If Takhti teaches anything, it is that critical thinking is always dangerous to authoritarian power, whether it comes from a famous athlete or an ordinary citizen. The dictator does not hate the athlete. He hates the athlete who thinks independently and refuses to go along, someone who belongs more to the people than to the palace. He hates the woman whose hair becomes an argument, the rapper whose words cannot be purchased, the student who asks uncomfortable questions, the footballer who refuses to sing songs of oppression, the wrestler who does not bow deeply enough. Power can tolerate talent. It cannot tolerate independent moral authority.

So where does this leave the ordinary Iranian watching a match? I do not know, and I distrust anyone who knows too quickly.

There are Iranians who cannot cheer for Team Melli now. I understand them. They see the anthem, the federation, the officials, the propaganda, the celebrations, the captured institution, and they cannot separate the shirt from the state. They see a goal and imagine how it will be used by men who do not deserve the credit (and yes, it is almost always men).

There are also Iranians who still cheer, not because they love the regime, but because they cannot surrender Team Melli to it. They cheer because the team belonged to them first, because their mothers and fathers cheered before them, because they danced in the streets of Iran after a victory, because Team Melli is not the property of those who have taken it hostage.

Both are understandable. Both may be honest. But honesty is not enough if it hardens into contempt.

If I cheer against the team, I must not call every person who cheers for it a traitor. If I cheer for the team, I must not accuse every wounded abstainer of lacking love for Iran. Love has more than one wound, and each wound has its own language.

This, perhaps, is where football has led me against my will: to the harder matter of freedom itself. We do not yet know how to defend the rights of people whose conclusions disturb us. We speak of freedom often, but too frequently we mean the freedom of our own camp to prevail. We want speech for the words we approve, justice for our friends, punishment for our enemies, dignity for those whose dignity flatters our worldview. But a free country cannot be built from selective freedoms. A real political maturity begins when I defend the safety, speech, and basic dignity of a person whose opinion irritates me, frightens me, or insults my memories.

The Islamic Republic is the only real enemy in the present struggle, but we cannot place the entire burden of explanation outside ourselves. The Islamic Republic did not descend from Mars. It rose from us. Not from all of us equally, not from the best of us, not even from a large part of us, but from some portion of our culture, our silences, our fears, our resentments, our appetite for certainty, our willingness to let power become sacred when it speaks in a language we temporarily admire. To say this is not to reduce the regime’s guilt. It is to increase our collective responsibility.

We created this problem, in the broad tragic sense in which nations create their own disasters over time, and we must fix it. We must fix it because people are suffering. Not symbolically suffering, not poetically suffering, but actually suffering: prisoners awaiting cruelty, young people robbed of a future, artists punished for refusing to bend the knee, citizens who cannot speak, travel, worship, dress, sing, dance, or live without negotiating with humiliation.

And yet even in overpowering such an enemy, we must be careful not to become its reflection. It must be overpowered, not exterminated. Its ideology must be defeated; its machinery dismantled; its violence stopped; its victims defended; its lies exposed. But if our dream is merely to replace their certainty with our certainty, their prison with our prison, their sacred slogans with our sacred slogans, then we have not escaped the disease. We have only changed its name.

Why can’t Iran be like so many other countries where life, though imperfect, has at least been allowed to become ordinary? I do not mean paradise. I mean a school that is only a school, not a place where fanaticism waits for children. I mean a country where there are jobs that pay enough to preserve dignity, where a passport does not humiliate its holder, and where a vote is not theatre. What do other peoples possess that we do not? Nothing, I think, except habits we have not yet sufficiently demanded from ourselves and our institutions. The dictator outside us can only be defeated permanently if the smaller dictator within us is tamed.

This match has already ended. The World Cup will eventually end as well. The score will become trivia. Children will remember some goals and forget others. Commentators will move on. There will be new scandals, new heroes, new disappointments, new tournaments, new arguments over tactics and substitutions. Football, being mercifully foolish, will continue to behave as though it matters. But our people’s suffering will not end with the final whistle.

That is the truth that sits behind the whole spectacle. Football may not matter, and yet the theft of football matters. It matters that a people cannot even cheer without explanation. It matters that joy has to pass through a political checkpoint. It matters that a goal can make one Iranian weep, another rage, another celebrate, and another feel all three in the space of a minute.

I do not know whether I will cheer at the next match. Or rather, I know that I may cheer before I decide. The heart is a poor constitutionalist. It remembers Tehran. It remembers dancing. It remembers Iran. Then the mind arrives, late but severe, carrying prisons, murdered youth, frightened singers, brave women, captured institutions, and all the reasons joy must now be interrogated.

Perhaps that is why I write: not to solve the contradiction, but to refuse to let it become numb. I cheered against my own heart, and then my heart cheered back. Somewhere between those two cheers lies the condition of many Iranians: loving what has been captured, loathing those who captured it, doubting one another, accusing our friends, and still wanting, stubbornly, a country in which a child may watch Team Melli score and feel only joy.