Iranian women attend FIFA football game for 1st time
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — They had to sit well apart from the men, and the stadium was practically empty, but thousands of Iranian women in merry jester hats and face paint blew horns and cheered Thursday at the first FIFA football match they were allowed to freely attend in decades.
In what many considered a victory in a decades-long fight by women in Iran to attend sporting events, they wrapped themselves in the country’s vibrant red, green and white colors and watched with excitement as Iran thrashed Cambodia 14-0 in a 2022 World Cup qualifier at Tehran’s Azadi, or Freedom, Stadium.
“We are so happy that finally we got the chance to go to the stadium. It’s an extraordinary feeling,” said Zahra Pashaei, a 29-year-old nurse who has only known football games from television. “At least for me, 22 or 23 years of longing and regret lies behind this.”
As one woman shouted from a passing minibus before the match: “We are here finally!”
So far, Iran’s hard-line Islamic theocracy is not willing to go as far some women would like. Authorities announced they will allow women to attend only international football matches.
Women have been banned from many sporting events in Iran since 1981, during the early years of the country’s Islamic Revolution. Iran is the world’s last nation to bar women from football matches. Saudi Arabia recently began letting women see games.
Under pressure from FIFA, Iran let a carefully controlled number of women into the stadium, allocating them 4,000 tickets in a venue that seats about 80,000 people, and arranged for 150 female security personnel in black chadors to watch them. They sat at least 200 meters (yards) from the few thousand men at the match.
Iranian state television, which long has been controlled by hard-liners, aired footage of women cheering, and commentators even acknowledged their presence.
“There can be no stopping or turning back now,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement. “History teaches us that progress comes in stages, and this is just the beginning of a journey.”
Iran faced a potential ban from FIFA international matches if it didn’t allow women into the game. The pressure from FIFA and Iran’s football-loving public has grown since September, when an Iranian woman detained for dressing as a man to sneak into a match set herself on fire and died upon learning she could get six months in prison.
The self-immolation of 29-yearold Sahar Khodayari, who became known as the “Blue Girl” for her love of the Iranian team Esteghlal, whose uniforms are blue, shocked Iranian officials and the public.
At the match Thursday, a reporter with Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency posted a video online of chador-wearing officers trying to grab a woman she said had a sign in Khodayari’s honor. The crowd could be heard chanting, “Let her go!” The reporter wrote on Twitter that the woman slipped away from officers and ran off.