Open-top trucks patrolled the surrounding roads outside the Estadio Caliente today, mounted by men in helmets and masks and wielding machine guns. They pass by the main entrance every few hours, guarding the massive city block, otherwise chocked with cars and smog, that the Iran national team has made its temporary, and largely improvised, home for this World Cup.
This has become business as usual here in northwest Mexico, at an arena that most teams in the domestic league hate to visit thanks to its distance from the country’s other footballing hubs and its brutal artificial turf playing surface.
The team was originally due to stay about 400 miles and one international border away, in Tucson, Arizona, at the sprawling Kino Sports Complex; a pro-level facility with numerous fields. Those plans were scrapped in a rush in the weeks after the US and Israel opened their attacks on Iran itself, killing the country’s head of state and several top leaders. The setting now, in the middle of bustling Tijuana, is downstream of that and countless other aggressions, threats and volleys of policy.
Staff working for Club Tijuana were only informed about the team’s move two weeks ago in a call with Fifa. Since then, they have been working 18-hour days to get the training field ready for one of Asia’s best teams – the complex only has one pitch with natural grass. That’s on top of the logistical concerns. Admission to the facility is strictly controlled. Credentials are checked, double-checked, then checked again. Though the team is staying at a hotel nearby, the political situation has demanded the utmost security. Hence the machine guns, the tight security, the lack of information about training times, filming locations, and who, if anyone, will speak about the latest extraordinary situation the team finds itself in.
Just about the only population who have welcomed the Iranians with open arms are Mexicans. Club Tijuana staffers, while clearly stressed at the sudden change of plans, have pulled out as many stops as they can to make the players feel at home – a large banner surrounding the field reads “Iranian cheetahs, welcome to Tijuana” in Farsi. Mexican fans have taken to gathering outside the team’s hotel, sending them off for the short journey to training sessions with cheers and requests for autographs.
“I’m ashamed of what the United States is doing,” one fan told Agence France-Presse.
“It’s wrong… [the United States] treat everyone like terrorists,” said another.
When they move to Los Angeles for the Fifa-mandated press conference on Sunday, they will do so with 15 members of the support staff, a federation official confirmed, including their entire media operations department. When asked who will run the press conference and manage any potential access to players in the aftermath of their World Cup opener against New Zealand, the official speculated that it might have to be the kit man.
Today, the federation is allowing only a brief glimpse of the team in the spotlight, moreso now than at any previous time they have gone to the World Cup under political pressure. No players will speak, because there is little in it for them if they do. At home, the regime itself and its supporters will pounce on any perceived slight in a moment where the nation is seeking unity. Among the diaspora, opponents of the regime will criticize the team for representing the oppression they have escaped. Somewhere in the middle, there are Iranian people who simply want to see the team do well, because they are football players playing in a football tournament, and football brings joy to a nation that is absolutely mad about the sport. The players are in a no-win situation; political and cultural quicksand where the only way to survive is to not move at all.
Yet the Iranian players are moving. Today is a light regeneration session, with the team recovering from yesterday’s 3-0 win over the Under-21 team of Club Tijuana, their hosts. It’s about as good a competition as the team can muster at this point, with their country a pariah on the international stage and thus seemingly radioactive for teams looking for a stern test against an experienced team that has qualified for its fourth straight World Cup. A planned friendly against Caribbean country Grenada was abruptly canceled, hence the need to play that U-21 team.
In 2022, Iran played in Qatar amid ongoing protests within the country over the death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian women arrested for improper hijab and who later died in custody. At the first of those three games in the middle east, Iranian fans used the occasion to shout the time’s rallying cry: Woman, Life Freedom. Over the course of the next two, the tenor of the crowd changed, reportedly policed from within by hundreds of IRGC operatives sent from across the water.
The denial of visas to many Iranian officials makes a similar scene unlikely this time around. Yet this is a team that does not have the support of all Iranian people, and especially not the diaspora that in the US has its center in the Los Angeles area, where the team will play two of their three group games. There are divisions within divisions that are almost inherent to this fandom, though Fifa will pretend there are none, and that this team’s appearance in the world’s showpiece event is purely about the football.
Good luck.
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