e-Edition
Get the latest news delivered daily!
Get the latest news delivered daily!
e-Edition
Trending:
INGLEWOOD — They lined up in the aisle separating sections 120 and 121 above the north end of SoFi Stadium an hour before Iran and New Zealand’s World Cup match Monday evening, eagerly waiting their turn for a selfie with Iran’s pre-Islamic revolution flag as if it were one of the celebrities featured on the stadium’s video screen three days earlier.
Only hours earlier, in an emergency hearing, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge upheld FIFA’s ban on the flag at the World Cup stadium. In banning the flag, FIFA cited its regulations that prohibit “banners, flags, fliers, apparel and other paraphernalia, that are of a political, offensive and/or discriminatory nature, containing wording, symbols or any other attributes aimed at discrimination of any kind against a country. …” Iran Football Federation officials threatened to pull its team off the pitch if the flag, which features a lion against a background of the sun on a field of white between a green and red horizontal stripes.
The ban, the court ruling, the threat, none of it mattered to the dozen people lining up to pose with the flag.
On the other end the stadium Iranian fans draped five, six, seven flags, the current official Iranian national flag, a red emblem meaning Allah between the green and red stripes, over the first row behind the other goal.
“Words matter,” Anthony Bourdain wrote after visiting the country in 2014. “Especially in Iran where what is permissible — to say, to do, to be seen to say or do — is an ever-changing thing.”
So it would be understandable if similar thoughts – or concerns – raced through Iran defender Ramin Rezaeian’s head as he pulled his jersey up over his head after he scored Iran’s first goal Monday.
Rezaeian was the best player in the best match of this World Cup so far, twice bringing Iran back from behind in a thrilling end-to-end cliffhanger that was in doubt to the final whistle on a 2-2 draw played against the backdrop of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, months of political acrimony and uncertainty, and only hours earlier the promise of peace.
More than 300,000 people of Iranian descent live in the Greater Los Angeles area, according to the Pew Research Center, the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran. So Iran was essentially playing a home match. The question was how would the predominantly Iranian crowd of 70,108 react? As with most things with Iran, it was a complicated question, one a number of fans struggled to answer even as they entered the stadium.
“My friend, we are here for the football. We are always united with our people,” Iran forward Mehdi Taremi said after the match. “Because of football, we want our people united, which is in Iran and outside Iran. Those are political things. We just play for the whole of Iranian people. We want to make all our people united.
Repeatedly Rezaeian did just that.
New Zealand, however, struck first. After surviving a series of Iranian threats in the opening minutes, Chris Wood, the throwback Kiwi and Nottingham Forest target man-style center forward, brought down a ball and laid it off into the path of a rushing Elijah Just, who blasted a shot through the arms of goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand.
New Zealand, ranked 85th in the latest FIFA World rankings, the lowest ranked team in the tournament, was up 1-0 after just seven minutes.
Twenty-six minutes later, Rezaeian stabbed a loose ball with the outside of his right foot past New Zealand goalkeeper Max Crocombe to tie the match 1-1.
Four years earlier, Rezaeian scored in second-half stoppage time in a 2-0 victory against Wales in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. But he refused to celebrate, an act of protest in response to the death of Masha Amini, who died in police custody only weeks earlier. Amini, a 22-year-old woman of Kurdish-Iranian descent, while visiting her brother in Tehran, was arrested on September 13, 2022, by the Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police for the Iranian government, for allegedly not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards.
Medical scans later leaked to media outlets suggest that Amini suffered a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke due to head injuries received while in police custody.
This past January, Rezaeian was summoned to the Iran Football Federation headquarters after he wore black wristbands in a match for his club team Foolad in memory of protesters killed by government forces in a crackdown on nationwide protests that began on December 28 and soon spread to more than 200 cities, growing into Iran’s largest uprising since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered police and security forces to kill protesters. As many as 12,000, possibly 20,000 protesters were killed in the largest massacre in Iranian history, according to reports by U.S. and British media outlets and human rights groups.
Wood and Just combined again to put New Zealand back up 2-1 in the 55th minute, the 34-year-old veteran, the last survivor of the Kiwis’ last World Cup appearance in 2010, setting up another Just goal.
And again Rezaeian brought Iran back, delivering a perfect cross from the right wing into the box that Mohammad Mohebbi headed inside the far post.
After the match, he turned his attention to FIFA, calling on the governing body to do more to support his team. Rezaeian said the team had originally been told they could return to their training base in Tijuana Tuesday morning. Instead, players said, they were informed Iran shortly before the match that they would have to fly back to Mexico Monday night shortly after the match.
“I think we must come here two days before the game,” he said. “Yesterday we started the trip in the morning and arrive in the afternoon and go to the training. We get tired, you know? These kinds of things, I think, is not fair. We need to be competitive.”
Said Taremi, “We still have some problems. We were supposed to have recovery tomorrow morning and then we leave for Tijuana, but we have to leave Los Angeles right now, and it’s not good for us. It’s not good for the football. In the World Cup, you need good preparation for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and staff and everyone. We don’t have that support. I think FIFA has to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.
“Everything is a disaster, actually, for us.”
A half hour earlier, Rezaeian embraced Just near midfield, then placed his hand on the Kiwi’s heart and then over his own. Then Rezaeian walked away seemingly aimlessly, turning 360 degrees, scanning the stadium, the Iranian flags on both ends waving.
Copyright 2026 Orange County Register. All rights reserved. The use of any content on this website for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, algorithms, machine learning models, text and data mining, or similar use is strictly prohibited without explicit written consent.
Leave a Reply