Los Angeles, on a Thursday morning in mid-March, sits under the kind of perpetual sunshine that the city’s boosters have, for a century, sold as a substitute for everything else. The San Gabriel Mountains were hazy, barely visible from the downtown freeways, the kind of day when the air itself feels like it needs clearing. Six thousand miles east, in Tehran, the air was clearing too, though the nature of the obstruction was different. The Iranian Football Federation had, that morning, delivered to FIFA a document containing ten conditions for its participation at the 2026 World Cup, a tournament hosted in the country Iran’s government has, since 1979, regarded with a suspicion that football alone cannot resolve.
The conditions, as reported by the BBC, centre on guarantees: guarantees of visa issuance for players, staff, and fans; guarantees against what Tehran describes as potential political harassment on American soil; guarantees that the team’s security will be assured by FIFA rather than by the host nation’s agencies. The FFIRI has framed the document as a procedural safeguard. The geopolitical context, of course, makes it something else entirely. Iran and the United States have not maintained formal diplomatic relations for forty-six years. The 2026 World Cup is the first edition of the men’s tournament to be hosted, in part, by a country with which one of its qualified participants is in a state of open diplomatic freeze.
For England, drawn in the same group as Iran, this is not a footnote. It is a logistical variable with a clock on it. The Lionesses’ draw places Iran as a group-stage opponent, and while the women’s tournament remains, as of this writing, scheduled for a separate window and host configuration, the broader question of whether FIFA can deliver a World Cup that includes all qualified nations without the host government imperilling the participation of one of them is a question that touches every team in every group. If Iran’s conditions are not met, and if Tehran follows through on a withdrawal or a FIFA-imposed suspension, the group-stage composition changes. England’s preparation, which will have been built around scouting reports, tactical plans, and travel itineraries calibrated to specific opponents, would need to accommodate a replacement team, potentially at short notice, potentially from a different confederation with a different football grammar entirely.
The women’s game has its own version of this fragility. The Lionesses’ World Cup campaign in 2023, in Australia and New Zealand, was shaped by the professionalisation that had, since the 2022 Euros at Wembley, transformed the squad from a team that surprised a country into a team that a country now expects to perform. That transformation was built on certainty: certainty of broadcast revenue, certainty of opposition scouting, certainty of the infrastructure around a tournament. Geopolitical disruption erodes that certainty in ways that are difficult to plan for and impossible to ignore.
FIFA, for its part, has said little publicly. The organisation’s standard posture, in moments where politics and football occupy the same room, is to insist that football and politics occupy different rooms. This has never been true, and in the case of Iran, it is less true than usual. The FFIRI’s ten conditions are not the demands of a football federation worried about pitch quality or hotel star ratings. They are the demands of a state using its football team as a diplomatic instrument, and the precedent this sets, for this tournament and for the tournaments that follow, is one that every participating nation’s football association is now quietly studying.
London, where the Football Association will be preparing its own contingency documents, is seven time zones from Los Angeles and four from Tehran. The FA’s planning for a World Cup in North America was always going to be a planning of distances, of altitude adjustments in Mexico, of heat management in Texas, of the particular exhaustion of a month-long tournament played across three countries and four time zones. What it was not expected to be, at least not in the public-facing documents, was a planning for the possibility that one of the teams in the draw might not arrive.
The BBC’s reporting on the FFIRI conditions did not name the specific Iranian officials who authorised the document, and FIFA’s response, as of Thursday evening, consisted of a statement noting that it was “in dialogue with all participating associations.” This is the language FIFA uses when it does not want to say what it is actually doing. The dialogue, in this case, involves the governments of three host nations, the government of a fourth nation that has spent nearly half a century defining itself partly in opposition to the first, and a global football governing body whose institutional memory includes the 1980 Olympic boycott, the 1994 exclusion of Yugoslavia, and the 2022 ban of Russia. FIFA knows what happens when politics and football stop being separable. It knows, too, that the consequences always fall on the players.
The Lionesses, if the women’s draw holds and Iran is indeed a group-stage opponent, will face a team whose presence at the tournament is contingent on a diplomatic negotiation that has nothing to do with football and everything to do with the world football insists it can hold at arm’s length. That this negotiation is happening in the open, in the months before a ball is kicked, is itself a fact about the 2026 World Cup that no amount of sunshine over Los Angeles can obscure. The tournament, when it begins, will be a football event. Before it begins, it is something more complicated, and the complication is not going away.
