By Toby TAIWO
Despite months of war and uncertainty, Iran is still scheduled to play three World Cup matches here in the U.S.
Two of those games will be right here in Los Angeles, which is home to a huge number of Iranian immigrants.
Many of them have complicated feelings about the coming tournament. Libby Rainey of LAist News reports.
RAINEY: This group of mainly Iranians has been in a league together for years, and now they’re wrestling with complicated feelings about the Iranian team playing in their city. Nader Adeli follows soccer in his home country of Iran and is excited to root for those players on the world stage. He hopes politics will be left out of it. He thinks a lot of his teammates feel the same way.
NADER ADELI: They want the team to be here, lots of us. We registered to win a ticket for this tournament.
RAINEY: Bobby Riahi, another player, expressed more mixed feelings about cheering for the Iranian team.
BOBBY RIAHI: People are oppressed in Iran, right? Given the condition, given the war and everything, cheering for a team that, you know, not everybody’s heart is in it, it’s hard.
MEHRAN JANANI: Some folks are excited. There are some folks who are not happy for the presence of the Iranian team. And that all comes down to politics, unfortunately.
RAINEY: The dynamics on this soccer field mirror a larger narrative tension in the diaspora, according to Niki Akhavan. She’s Iranian American and a professor at The Catholic University of America in D.C., where she studies Iranian culture and media. She’s also a soccer fan and has been following conversations around the coming World Cup. She says that during the last World Cup, there was a push from some Iranians around the world to boycott the team after a crackdown on protests about women’s rights and other issues in Iran. Now she thinks the war has resurfaced those conversations as some oppose the war, and others are frustrated that it hasn’t led to regime change. Some, she says, associate the team with the government.
AKHAVAN: My argument is, you can’t concede to the state and say, OK, well, you know, it’s your team. No, it’s a national team, and so you want to support that team.
SHAHEEN FERDOWSI: Not only am I excited that the Iranian national team is coming to play here because they’re going to have so much fan support, but I’m also excited to have all of the Iranians from the rest of North America and probably Europe, right?
SHEILA ROSSI: It’s still very, like, tenuous right now. We’re not sure what’s going to happen.
