On the evening of 25 March last year, at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, Iran drew 2-2 with Uzbekistan and qualified for the World Cup. Mehdi Taremi scored twice. They were the third country in the world to book a place at the 2026 tournament, after Japan and New Zealand, and they did it with two matches still to play.
On 11 March this year Iran’s sports minister said the country would not be going, citing security.
The tournament is being staged in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and Iran is at war with one of them. That sentence contains the whole of the reasoning and there is no obvious counter to it.
What is worth examining is the shape of the absence rather than the cause of it, because there are two ways a country ends up missing a World Cup it qualified for, and the last time it happened the mechanism was the opposite of this one.
The last time: Russia, 2022
In February 2022, days after the invasion of Ukraine, FIFA and UEFA suspended Russia from all competitions. The national team was in a qualifying playoff at the time. It did not play. Its opponent advanced without kicking a ball.
Notice what that was, institutionally. A governing body made a decision about a member association, under its own rules, and the member had recourse: Russia appealed, the appeal failed, and the suspension held. There was a process, an adjudicator, and a reviewable outcome.
Notice also what it cost the institution. Once a governing body expels one member for the conduct of its state, it has accepted a standard, and it will be asked about that standard every time another member’s state does something. Every subsequent case is measured against the precedent, and the body either applies it consistently or explains why not. That is an expensive thing to own, and it is the reason sporting federations resist doing it for as long as they possibly can.
This time: the opposite direction
Iran has not been expelled. Nobody has been asked to judge anything. A government has concluded that sending a squad and its staff into a tournament hosted by a country it is currently fighting is not a thing it is prepared to do, and has said so.
There is no appeal, because there is no decision to appeal against. There is no adjudicator, because nothing is in dispute. And crucially there is no precedent, because a withdrawal establishes nothing about anybody else. FIFA is not required to have a view. It has not been asked for one.
That is the difference the comparison teaches, and it is not a small one. Expulsion puts the sport’s institutions in the position of making political judgments and living with them afterwards. Withdrawal removes the institutions from the question entirely. The same outcome on the pitch, and a completely different bill for the people running the competition.
The older precedent
There is one earlier case and it is the closer fit, though almost nobody reaches for it.
Austria qualified for the 1938 World Cup in France. Before the tournament began, Austria was annexed and ceased to exist as a state, and the team that had qualified had no country to represent. It did not travel. The tournament went ahead with fifteen teams rather than sixteen, and Sweden, which had been drawn against Austria, advanced without playing.
The parallel is not the politics, which are not comparable and should not be made so. It is the administrative fact: a place at a World Cup is awarded to a football association, and a football association exists inside a state, and when the state’s circumstances change the place can simply evaporate. The competition absorbs it and continues. It has done this before.
What it leaves behind
A practical problem and a less tractable one.
The practical problem is a hole in a group. Asia had eight direct places at this tournament and one of the eight has gone. Whether the place is filled, and by whom, is a question for FIFA’s regulations on a qualified team withdrawing, and the answer is not obvious: the competition schedule is fixed, the draw has been made, and a late replacement is a logistical undertaking rather than a form to be signed. There is a live argument coming about whether the next best qualifier has a claim, and it will be conducted quietly.
The harder problem is what happens to the players.
Several of the squad play their club football in Europe, and the national team is not their employer. A footballer who has spent four years qualifying for a tournament is being told he is not going, by a ministry, for reasons that have nothing to do with him and that he is not in a position to argue with publicly. Some of them are at the age where this was the one.
Nobody is going to write much about that, because the geopolitics is louder and because a footballer’s disappointment is a small thing next to the month Iran has had. It is still the part of this that is actually about sport.
The absence itself
Here is what it will look like when the tournament starts in June.
There will not be a moment of acknowledgment. No empty chair at the draw, no minute of anything, no gap in the schedule that a viewer would notice. A group will have the number of teams a group has. The fixtures will be the fixtures. Broadcasters will not mention it after the first week.
The only place it will be visible is the squad itself, dispersed. Several of these players are contracted in Europe, and a European season does not stop for a tournament their country is not at. They will spend the weeks of the World Cup at their clubs, in pre-season, on a training ground somewhere, running the drills that are run in June.
There will be a television on in the canteen.
