This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. Farhad Pouladi contributed from the State Department.
The United States says Iran’s decision to let thousands of women attend a men’s football match in Tehran this week, relaxing a decades-old ban, shows external pressure on the Islamic republic works.
About 4,000 elated Iranian female fans watched the men’s national team thrash Cambodia, 14-0, in a 2022 World Cup qualifier in the capital’s Azadi Stadium Thursday. Iran had agreed to allocate several thousand tickets for female fans after facing increasing pressure from FIFA, football’s world governing body, to end the nation’s ban on selling tickets to women for men’s matches.
“This is another example where pressure works … with this regime,” U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said in response to a VOA Persian question at a State Department briefing Friday.
Open stadium to women
FIFA had demanded that Iranian women be allowed to buy tickets for Thursday’s match in response to last month’s death of a female Iranian fan who self-immolated after learning that she faced months in prison for being caught disguising herself as a man to enter Azadi Stadium for a men’s club match in March. The death of Sahar Khodayari, 29, shocked many Iranians and boosted calls inside and outside the country for the lifting of the stadium ban in memory of Khodayari, whom sympathizers nicknamed “Blue Girl” for her passion for wearing the color of her Tehran team, Esteghlal.
“FIFA stood up for her and put pressure on the regime,” Hook said, referring to Khodayari. “FIFA drove up the cost of them continuing to (ban) women from attending soccer (football) games.”
Iran’s ruling Islamist clerics had imposed the ban in the early 1980s to shield women from what they viewed as the unsavory sight of raucous and semi-clad male fans at stadiums hosting men’s football.
International rights activists have been campaigning for years for Iran to fully remove the ban by allowing female football fans to buy as many tickets as they want for domestic and international matches and letting them sit together with male fans inside stadiums.
Hook noted that some women who had come to Azadi Stadium to try to watch the Iran-Cambodia match were stuck outside after authorities refused to make more tickets available.
“The women who couldn’t get tickets were outside the stadium, and they were harassed and beaten by the Iranian regime,” he said.
Hook also criticized Iranian authorities for putting the 4,000 women who bought the limited tickets available to female fans in a “caged off” upper corner of the stadium, separate from the male fans.
“The infrastructure of Azadi Stadium is ready for the presence of women,” Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei said in remarks reported by state news agency IRNA on Thursday.
“But the cultural and mental infrastructure must be ready,” he added, suggesting that Iran may not be ready to make all future men’s international and domestic football matches accessible to female fans.
Ideology and pragmatism
“The Iranian regime is very ideological, but they also have a pragmatic side, which they will occasionally put on display when they think they are at risk,” Hook said. “We saw that with FIFA, and we believe that our approach is also going to help us accomplish our objectives.”
The Trump administration has been pursuing what it calls a campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran to end its nuclear and other perceived malign behaviors.
