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With 100 days to go until World Cup kickoff, it’s still unclear if Iran will play in the tournament.
Following the joint attacks by the U.S. and Israel on Saturday, the president of Iran’s soccer federation, Mehdi Taj, told the Iranian sports platform Varzesh3: “What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope.”
FIFA is hosting national federations for tournament preparation workshops in Atlanta this week. A source familiar with the meetings tells Front Office Sports that Iran did not send staff. FIFA did not immediately respond when asked to confirm.
But Iran has not pulled out, nor have FIFA or the U.S. officially banned it from participating. Iran is scheduled to play three matches in Los Angeles and Seattle, with a potential to face the U.S. in the Round of 32.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “I really don’t care” if Iran plays or not. “I think Iran is a very badly defeated country,” he told Politico. “They’re running on fumes.”
To this point, FIFA has reiterated its goal to have all teams involved. FIFA secretary general Mattias Grafstrom said in a press conference on Saturday that FIFA’s “focus is to have a safe World Cup with everybody participating.”
FIFA president Gianni Infantino told Sky News in an article published Tuesday: “I hope so much it will be a moment of peace, I hope we can contribute to unite a little bit the world. I think the world really, really, needs it.”
In the same article, U.S. Soccer CEO JT Batson said, “FIFA president Gianni Infantino shared over the weekend the intention of a safe and secure World Cup where all teams are participating. And we’re certainly very supportive of that.”
Given the conflict, political experts tell FOS they don’t think it would be feasible for Iran to participate in the World Cup. The U.S. is one of three hosts in the tournament, and Iran could hypothetically request that its games be moved to Canada or Mexico. But on top of that workaround already being logically challenging for the group stage, such a plan would get tricky if Iran advanced to the knockout rounds.
“I would say it’s highly unlikely Iran will be there, it’s the mechanism by which they will not show up which I think is the big unknown,” Tim Elcombe, a sports politics researcher and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario who writes and teaches on sports history, tells FOS.
If Iran withdraws, its soccer federation would forfeit millions of dollars and jeopardize its spot in the 2030 tournament, according to the AP. All teams are guaranteed at least $10.5 million from FIFA for participating: $1.5 million for “preparation costs,” and $9 million for any team who doesn’t get past the group stage. (Teams make more money for advancing.) Then there’s fines from FIFA for withdrawing from the World Cup, which would be about $320,000 now, and about $640,000 within the last month before the tournament.
If FIFA wanted to ban Iran from the tournament, it could point to the country’s counterattacks that have struck 2026 World Cup participants Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
However, FIFA has historically preferred to stay out of politics, a tradition that Infantino has tested with his bear hug of the Trump administration. The global governing body was notably hesitant to ban Russia after its attack on Ukraine in 2022.
“FIFA will be desperate to not have to make a decision,” Elcombe says. “I would suspect FIFA will take all its cues from the U.S. administration, and I suspect the U.S. administration probably won’t hesitate to be willing to make that decision on their behalf.”
Trump’s stated indifference is the administration’s first clear position on Iran and the World Cup. The head of the White House World Cup task force, Andrew Giuliani, celebrated the attacks on social media on Saturday. “We’ll deal with soccer games tomorrow—tonight, we celebrate [Iranians’] opportunity for freedom,” he wrote. Giuliani told Politico on Tuesday that Trump’s attacks on Iran would make the World Cup safer.
The Trump administration already has a ban against travelers from Iran, with exceptions for World Cup players, staff, and families. The administration could block Iran from the tournament by extending that ban to all Iranian nationals.
Regardless of whether Iran ends up playing, the government will likely heighten security because of the war, experts say.
“Physical security for the World Cup was already going to be really high,” Jason Blazakis, professor and executive director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College, tells FOS. “This puts it at another level.”
Blazakis, who has also worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, says fans shouldn’t be deterred from attending the games, but thinks the Department of Homeland Security should shift resources to focus on World Cup security.
“So that means we might have less depth, for instance, on covering Africa-based threats, but it makes a lot of sense right now to think about Iranian-based threats and triaging there,” Blazakis says.
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