An ideological tug-of-war: the pressures facing Iran’s World Cup squad in US

Flag bans, travel headaches and a religious regime video among bumps in road, as team prepares to be first to play in country with which it is at war

I ran will present a major challenge to Fifa’s “football unites the world” slogan on Monday by becoming the first country in World Cup history to compete on the soil of a host nation with which it is at war .

The national team’s opening match against New Zealand in Los Angeles will kick off amid continuing hostilities between Iran and the US that have intensified in recent days, as a fragile ceasefire has failed to hold and attempts at reaching a negotiated settlement have sputtered .

The belligerent backdrop makes a mockery of the message of unity being peddled by Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, analysts say.

“Despite Fifa’s fever dreams that this could be an apolitical World Cup , it is the most politically combustible World Cup ever, and the Iran-United States-Israel war sits right at the centre of it,” said Jules Boykoff, a politics professor at Pacific University in Oregon and a former professional footballer.

“There’s never been a World Cup where one of the hosts is openly threatening war crimes against one of the participating nations, and that participating nation, in turn, is bombing other participating nations. The levels of newness is off the charts.”

Iran’s players will take the field at So-Fi stadium following months of speculation over whether they would be allowed to participate at all, after Donald Trump suggested it would be safer for them to stay away.

Doubts about their involvement were dispelled only this week after squad members were granted US visas, although several officials have been denied entry , including the president of Iran’s football governing body, Mehdi Taj, because he once belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.