Canada’s feel-good story takes a sour turn
Politics outweigh tactical reasons behind Iran friendly
This is an incredible time for men’s soccer in Canada. The national team has qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1986, to great excitement. Canada may be waking up to a team with some hope. Canada’s first pre-World Cup tune-up will be in Vancouver June 5, and it’s part of this time of enormous opportunity.
And Canada Soccer chose Iran. That is a problem.
It was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard. Of those lost souls, 85 were Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and more than 100 had ties to Canada. Early this year an Ontario Superior Court awarded $107 million to families of six victims. The court found it was likely the missiles were fired intentionally. Murder.
So the match is, to coin a phrase, a political football. The association of families of 752 victims has called it an insult, and there is a possibility of a protest at the game. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he thought scheduling Iran wasn’t a good idea, and that Canada Soccer should explain its decision.
Would-be Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who knows from
questionable associations, said the federal government should cancel the visas.
Canada Soccer has largely responded by covering its head with its hands and singing that old song about the power of sport, and how it brings different people together. Which is both true in the broader sense, and also how you justify an Olympics in Russia or in Beijing, or a Saudi golf tour, or Formula One in Saudi Arabia. Bringing people together to make money is how the world goes round.
If the sport was just sport, then you could see the Canadian logic. To even have a chance at escaping its group at the World Cup, Canada needs to beat Morocco, which is a sort of mirror image. Their young Alphonso Davies-style big star is right back Achraf Hakimi, and, like Canada, the Moroccans have enough depth around him to qualify. Morocco is playing the U.S. in a friendly June 1, and the Americans are in a group with Iran. Canada head coach John Herdman is friendly enough with U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter, and an exchange of scouting reports may be possible.
Beyond that, after two lean pandemic years, Canada Soccer likely needed a big gate and so wound up in Vancouver, which likely limited the number of countries willing to fly that far for a single friendly. A bigger nation would probably command a bigger appearance fee, while Iran is not at the top of the list as a dance partner. And from a pure soccer standpoint, Iran is a team that has five recent World Cup appearances and plays a defensive style that resembles Morocco’s.
“I don’t think anyone thinks this looks great from a political perspective,” says broadcaster Gareth Wheeler, who has been the voice of Canada’s World Cup campaign for OneSoccer. “It doesn’t. From a practical and planning perspective it did tick some boxes, and people can rationalize their decision-making based on that.”
Wheeler points out that ideally Canada would play three highquality opponents, instead of having CONCACAF appointments with tiny Curacao in Vancouver and the recently-defeated Honduras in San Pedro Sula. So it goes.
But jamming Iran in there looks like a combination of money and either ruthlessness, carelessness or cluelessness, or a mix of all three. Iran cannot have been Canada Soccer’s first choice. There will surely be some Iranian Canadians who think the way a Russian journalist did during the Sochi Olympics: I don’t cheer for Russia, she said, I cheer for Russians. There are an estimated 300,000 Canadians of Iranian origin in Canada. Some will surely be thrilled to see their boys.
But some will see the emblem of those who murdered their loved ones, and that will hang in the air. It’s a fine thing to try to separate the individual from their government. But Russian athletes are now being suspended for supporting Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and disastrous war in Ukraine, and it’s more difficult than usual to separate the Iranian team from Iran’s ruling class. FIFA issued a warning to the Iranian soccer federation two years ago over its lack of independence from the government.
Canada’s immensely successful women’s team has never had this problem, since Iran’s women’s team only played its first significant international tournament in January of this year. Iran largely bans female fans from even watching the game.
So maybe you can sell yourself on the idea that international soccer is a ruthless place, that FIFA rivals the International Olympic Committee as a transnational corruption concern — with a World Cup jammed in a tiny oil-rich postage stamp for the fun of it — and that given the scale of a World Cup opportunity for Canada’s perpetually undersized men’s soccer program, dragging the spectre of Flight 752 into a friendly soccer match is a small price to pay for all the tactical benefits of a match against a team ranked 21st in the world.
But if the families of the victims protest in the stadium, then Canada Soccer will deserve that. The least they could do is hold a long, quiet moment of silence for the dead. Pay tribute. The federal government should watch the visas closely, and nobody associated with the Revolutionary Guard should come in. That’s probably not enough, but there’s no changing this now unless the Canadian government starts cancelling visas outright. That seems unlikely so let’s hope Canada Soccer recognizes that this isn’t just a soccer match, not purely, not on its own. Try, in whatever way you can, to do it right.