Iran out of the Cup but still very much in

“This is the World Cup, this is the big stage,” said Sohrab, an Iranian expat living in Norway. “The world is fearing us, now we shall show that we can be on good behaviour.”

Like Sohrab, most of the 5,000-odd Iran fans here today live in Europe; those in Iran had a much tougher time getting visas.

“More than 1,000 people had tickets but no visas”, said Mehdi, a Tehran resident who got lucky. “The politicians are scared to give us visas.” The fear factor is real.

Iran is the international pariah for its nuclear ambitions but in Germany, there is the added factor of President Ahmedinejad’s emphatic anti-Jewish remarks. He famously said the Holocaust was a “myth”, a stand that gave Iran’s first match in Nuremberg—a city rich in Nazi symbolism—an ironic twist. The symbolism doesn’t end there.

The Iran team met their president before leaving for Germany and gave him a team jersey. In return, the President had this to say: “You could be the great surprise of this World Cup and bring our country back to its glory as did our young scientists who with their efforts and knowledge have reached top levels in nuclear technology and opened the doors of the atomic club to the Islamic Republic.”

Gone is the fear that Ahmedinejad will deliver on his promise to attend a match should Iran reach the next round. Should that have happened, German officials would have been in a bind: Holocaust denial is a crime in this country.

As it is, his deputy, Mohammad Aliabadi, attended the tournament’s opening ceremony, the first match and Iran’s game in Nuremberg—a fact the Jewish lobby has come out strongly against.

Yet, the threat of violence was small, if only because the far-right in Germany, which would normally lead the way, allied itself with Iran’s president. There were no visible protests, as expected, either in the city centre or outside the stadium, just the sounds and sights of fans and flags.

At the stadium, security measures were increased three-fold for journalists (the huge interest in this match means there are more journalists than it would normally have drawn): three metal-detector checks instead of one.

Point out to one of the giant policemen on duty the sight of fans partying outside and he shrugged, said with a smile, “FIFA orders.”

Truth is, football means a lot to Iran’s youth, a relationship that has grown since the country—then ruled by the Shah, also a football fan—qualified for its first World Cup in 1978.

Since then, and in light of events that followed, football has given the youth an avenue to express themselves. In a nation where large gatherings inevitably signified some form of protest, authorities took time to figure out the supporters’ intentions.

Once they did, and realized any kind of nationalism was good, they followed the Shah’s footsteps and rode the wave. The crest of that wave so far has been the national team’s 2-1 win over the US—the “Great Satan”—at Lyon in the 1998 World Cup.

Ahmedinejad is himself a football fan and has shrewdly used football for his cause. Women had long been barred from attending football matches—they would do so in men’s clothes—till the President changed the rule earlier this year. That was subsequently vetoed by Ayatollah Khamenei but Ahmedinejad’s point was made. In the stands today, the chador wasn’t the defining image.

All this politics could have affected the players but team coach Branko Ivankovic, a Croatian, said they were okay. “They are young people, they don’t think about politics.”

A similar view, perhaps, in Portugal, where they looked on today’s match as just another football game, Iran another team Portugal must beat to realise its own ambitions.

“People know what Ahmedinejad has said, they read what Iran may be doing in nuclear science, but it doesn’t enter their football’’, says Hugo Vasconcelas, a reporter here with Portuguese sports daily A Bola. “Today they want Portugal to beat Iran but only because of football.”

Which is what Portugal did. Now, if only President Ahmedinejad will play ball.