Football must use any leverage it has to protect Iran’s female protesters

Somewhere in Iran there are women footballers facing punishment and perhaps even death for not singing the national anthem. At a safe house in Australia are team-mates who escaped that threat but unwillingly exposed their families to it.

The tragedy of Iran’s women displaying bravery that may rebound on them all is impossible for football and sport to file away as mere collateral damage from the Middle East war. Football and sport can take a stand on it, if they have anything like the guts the Iranian women demonstrated.

No sooner had Donald Trump said Iran men’s team would be “welcome” at this summer’s World Cup than the Iranians pulled out.

“Considering that this corrupt regime [the US] has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup,” said the country’s sports minister Ahmad Donyamali on Wednesday.

Some analysts think Iran’s position may change. For now though their withdrawal removes the leverage Fifa might have used to protect the protesters and their families. Assuming Fifa had the urge – a big assumption.

But that shouldn’t stop international sport telling Iran they can have no place on any field of play unless the safety of their female players and their loved ones is guaranteed – with verifiable proof. This isn’t western meddling in a foreign state’s internal affairs. It’s a restatement of rights that sport is always pledging to uphold.

Six of the Iranians who remained silent in their country’s opening Asian Cup match refused to return to Tehran and were granted visas to stay by Australia. A seventh – either a player or member of the support staff – planned to remain as well but changed her mind after speaking to team-mates who were heading back.

Refusing to sing one’s national anthem is a modest freedom, exercised around the world. With Britain’s Epstein-adjacent royal scandal many here will feel disinclined to stand for God Save the King. For Iran’s female players, exercising that simple right just once could have disastrous consequences.

According to Raha Pourbakhsh, an Iranian sports journalist based in London, the players who took sanctuary “are all extremely anxious, worried, and very exhausted. Their biggest concern right now is their families in Iran,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

She says the intimidation began before the Asian Cup kicked off. “There were heavy financial bonds, threats against their families, threats against the players themselves, and warnings that family members could effectively be taken hostage.” Football is meant to have rules against state interference in national teams.

Damned if they stayed, damned if they went home, Iran’s women evoke the Black Power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics; or Colin Kaepernick popularising taking the knee in protest at American police brutality.

Saluting the anthem in their second Asian Cup fixture, against Australia, couldn’t protect them from the ramifications of staying silent three days earlier against South Korea. By then Iranian state TV had called them “traitors of wartime” who should be dealt with “severely”. Reports suggest they were warned by state officials masquerading as football support staff not to repeat the silent protest.

Yet, from that lose-lose scenario, five players – captain Zahra Ghanbari, Fatemeh Pasandideh, Zahra Sarbali, Atefeh Ramazanzadeh, and Mona Hamoudi – escaped the state’s grasp. Then a sixth, Mohaddeseh Zolfi, claimed asylum on Tuesday. So did Zahra Soltan Meshkeh Kar from the support staff, before the seven became six.

As the global news train hurtles on to other injustices, football owes it to them to act on the SOS hand gestures made by Iran’s women to their fans, the anti-regime protesters who laid in front of the bus taking them to the airport, and the recriminations from a regime more desperate than ever to enforce obedience.

With that government calling the defection an “enemy conspiracy,” according to the news site Iran International – and accusing Australia of “taking them hostage” – some started a new life clouded by fear about their families. Most were forced back to a war zone and a reckoning. If sport can’t support them, it can’t support anything.

Photography by Modh Rasfan/ Getty