The World Cup, that quadrennial festival of football and faux fraternity, has provided us with yet another tableau of political theatre. This time, the stage is Doha, and the players are not the athletes on the pitch but the Iranian-American protesters raising their voices against the Islamic Republic’s football team. The chants of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ echo not only in the streets of Tehran but now in the Qatari heat, a reminder that the regime’s human rights abuses cannot be outrun, not even for 90 minutes of sport.
Let us not mince words. The Iranian regime is a grotesque relic of 1979, a theocratic mullahcracy that has draped its brutality in the cloak of piety. It jails journalists, hangs homosexuals, and treats women as chattel. The recent protests, ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, have rocked the country, but the regime clings to power with the fists of the Revolutionary Guard. And now, it seeks to use the World Cup as a PR exercise, a chance to show a friendly face to the world. But the Iranian diaspora is having none of it.
These protesters understand something that the bien-pensant liberals of the West too often forget: that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity. To cheer for the Iranian team as if they were mere sportsmen, divorced from the political context, is to ignore the bloodstained hands that send them onto the field. The team itself is a tool of the state, its players often pressured to toe the regime’s line. Recall the controversy over the national anthem: some players refusing to sing, others forced to conform. This is not a team; it is a propaganda arm.
Critics will say that politics has no place in sport. But this is a naive, even dangerous, fiction. Sport has always been political, from Jesse Owens in Berlin to the Black Power salute in Mexico City. The World Cup is a platform, and to refuse to use it for moral purposes is to cede it to the oppressors. The Iranian-Americans know this. They have traded the comfort of their new homes for the sting of activism, because they remember what the regime has taken from them: freedom, dignity, lives.
One might draw a parallel to the dilemma faced by the West in the 1930s, when the world chose to participate in the Berlin Olympics despite Nazi Germany’s racism. That decision was a moral failure, one that emboldened Hitler. Today, we risk a similar failure. By treating the Iranian team as normal athletes, we grant legitimacy to a regime that deserves none. The protests are a corrective, a sharp reminder that the game is not just a game.
But here is the rub: the very act of protesting, of channelling anger into a public spectacle, also risks a slide into the sort of theatrical politics that defines our decadent age. We have become a society of gestures, of tweets and banners, rather than of substance. What do these protests achieve beyond a fleeting moment of catharsis? The regime does not care about a chant in Doha. It cares about oil revenues, about nuclear deals, about survival. The real protest must be economic, diplomatic, sustained. The Iranian diaspora must push their governments to impose real costs, not just hurl insults from the stands.
Yet, we must not be too cynical. The sight of Iranian-Americans waving the pre-revolutionary flag, the lion and sun, is a poignant symbol of a lost dream. It reminds us that Iran was once a modernising nation, a friend to the West. That dream was stolen by zealots. And so every chant, every banner, is a small act of resistance, a refusal to forget. It may not topple the regime, but it keeps the flame of hope alive. In an age of intellectual decadence, where we wallow in our own comfort and forget the suffering of others, that is no small thing.
The World Cup will end. The players will go home. But the struggle for Iran’s soul continues. And as we watch the matches, let us remember that there is a moral dimension to every game. The Iranian-Americans have shown us that. The question is: will we listen?
