‘A disaster’: Iran at the World Cup — expelled, oppressed and still standing

Taremi called it simply a disaster. “For sure, he wants to try to help us, but it’s about other things, too, everyone knows it. I don’t need to mention that, because you know where we are … Everything is like a disaster actually for us. It’s not right, but we don’t follow the excuses. We are just looking forward to having hope for the next two games and bringing joy to our supporters.”

This was how Iran’s World Cup night in Los Angeles ended. Here is how it began.

Hours before kickoff, the United States and Iran signed a peace treaty. Inside the ground, some Iranian fans waved the pre-revolutionary flag and booed their own national anthem. “This is not our team,” they shouted.

Los Angeles has the largest Iranian community outside Iran. They call the stretch of Westwood Boulevard where saffron ice cream parlours and Farsi bookstores and kabob shops cluster together “Tehrangeles.” On Monday, it emptied out early. Everyone was going to the same place.

Outside the stadium in Inglewood, hundreds of demonstrators had gathered by mid-morning. They wore red, white and green, waved Iranian flags and displayed photos of athletes killed by the regime. Security gave nearly a dozen spectators the option of leaving their Lion and Sun flags outside or having them seized. FIFA had banned the pre-revolutionary emblem, considering it too political for a World Cup venue.

A woman asked her friends before getting in line, as reported by Yahoo Sports: “Should I tuck it under my shirt?” It ended up in the balled fist of a Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputy. When a man holding the Star-Spangled Banner was asked to unfurl it by security, he said in apparent disbelief: “It’s an American flag, man!” Mehdi Estiri, asked to cover his Lion and Sun T-shirt with a sweatshirt while his wife and son turned theirs inside-out, made it through eventually. “This is the true flag of my country,” he said. “For the last 47 years, they’ve taken my country hostage with a fake flag.”

This was the first World Cup match ever played by a country at war with the host nation. The team’s training base had been moved from Arizona to Tijuana. Eleven members of the delegation had been denied US visas. On Sunday, their bus took two hours to travel the fifteen minutes from the airport to their hotel. Several players had not kicked a ball competitively since February, after the domestic league was suspended amid US and Israeli air strikes.

When the teams finally walked out, the stadium was ready for all of it. Dozens of fans had managed to get their Lion and Sun flags through despite security’s best efforts. They waved them when the current Iranian flag was unfurled, when the anthem played, and when New Zealand scored. But most of the crowd of more than 70,000 chanted “Ir-ran! Ir-ran!” A smattering of boos rose when the anthem began. Others turned their backs. The stadium contained, in that moment, every version of what it means to be Iranian in 2026 — the grief, the pride, the rage, the love, the refusal to choose between them.

And then they played. A 2-2 draw against New Zealand, breathless and end-to-end, twice coming from behind. Elijah Just scored both New Zealand goals. Ramin Rezaeian, one of several Iran players who had not kicked a ball competitively since February, reacted quickest to a blocked shot to poke home the first equaliser. Mohammad Mohebi headed home the second. Both teams pushed for a late winner. Neither found one.

One Iranian American had told Al Jazeera before the match: “Where you feel helpless and you feel like you don’t have any power to make a difference where it really counts, you look for any other venues where you can insert yourself. And it just happens to be that the FIFA game is happening.”

It just happened to be. And yet nothing about Monday night in Inglewood felt accidental.