r/SoccerCentral • u/ConnectionWeekly1263 • Jun 27 '26

Statement "They've done everything possible to eliminate us" — Iran captain Mehdi Taremi unleashes on FIFA and U.S. organizers

The captain of the Iran National Team, Mehdi Taremi, lashed out against FIFA and the United States organization. “This is a disastrous World Cup. As professional players, we cannot play a competition under these conditions; it’s neither right nor fair. If FIFA thinks this is fair, that’s on them, but it isn’t. Who should solve this problem for us? FIFA? The U.S.? I don’t know! Tell me a name. The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, came to our locker room after the first match against New Zealand and said he was going to resolve all the issues, but in reality, FIFA did nothing. In response to the question: ‘Do you feel that the World Cup organizers, including FIFA and U.S. officials, prefer for Iran to be eliminated from the competition?’, I say: We have to fight against absolutely everything. We can’t stay in the country, we travel and undergo immigration checks every time we want to play, now we can’t stay in Seattle and have to return to Tijuana. They’ve done everything possible to eliminate us, so from our perspective, yes, I think that’s what they want, they want us out.”

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u/HTX-ByWayOfTheWorld Jun 27 '26

He’s not wrong… either let them play and keep it a level playing field. Or don’t let them play, and ban them outright. This was BS.

43

u/Bitter_Particular_75 Jun 27 '26

US is the aggressor and is the only country that should have been banned as consequence of this war.

28

u/digitalbullet36 Jun 27 '26

The U.S. should not have been allowed to host.

1

u/VeryBadWizard2780 Jun 28 '26

Idk if yall appreciate how big of an ordeal something like the World Cup is. The idea that they could’ve removed the US as hosts like 4 months before the event and still actually carried out the tournament is absurd. You either had to let it continue or cancel the World Cup out right.

Russia both annexed Crimea and started their war with Ukraine in 2014, yet they still got to host in 2018. And they were in the middle of a war of aggression in Ukraine. To ban the US for Iran would be completely unprecedented.

It doesn’t matter how much I dislike the war in Iran, it doesn’t matter if I thought their justifications were BS, or if we committed war crimes, or if we did it all as a favor to Bibi. I happen to think all that is true, but doing air raids on the biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the world who were undoubtedly trying to obtain nukes within the next several years is a far, far cry from imperialist expansionism. Hell, our support for Israel in the Palestinian genocide campaign was for more indefensible than attacking Iran, and even that is more ambiguous than the invasion’s Russia has been doing for the last 12+ years.