Iran: Iran’s female football supporters have made history in Tehran – for the first time in 37 years they were able to attend a sporting event in the city’s Azadi stadium.
The usually strict ban on women attending sports stadiums was relaxed for a screening of Iran’s World Cup match against Spain, which was taking place in Kazan in Russia.
It had been hoped the ban would be lifted for Iran’s opening match of the tournament, but it was only for the team’s second game, which they lost 1-0, that women were able to access the ground.
OpenStadiums, a group campaigning for more access to sporting events for women in Iran, reported on the day of the match: “Last night after some confirmations, fans could buy tickets to watch on the screen in the Azadi stadium. Female fans are pretty excited to pass the Azadi’s gates for first time – but some are saying we can’t believe it until we enter in stadium.”
The event did not run completely smoothly – initially police were reluctant to let it go ahead and people were turned away, but the BBC Persian reporter Hadi Nili said an intervention by the interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, confirmed it could go ahead, leading to joyous scenes of celebration within the ground.
After the match the Spanish captain, Real Madrid’s Sergio Ramos, tweeted a link to a report about the women watching the match, commenting: “They are the ones who won tonight. Hopefully the first of many.” He was less charitable about the Iranian team themselves, describing the way they played as “not football”. Ramos, a Unicef ambassador, also dedicated Spain’s victory to World Refugee Day on social media.
Fans at Iran’s opening World Cup match in St Petersburg against Morocco last week also unfurled a banner that read “Let Iranian women enter their stadiums”. Regulations forbid political displays within stadiums during the World Cup, but a spokesperson for the organisers said: “The banners are considered by Fifa to express a social appeal, as opposed to a political slogan, and were therefore not prohibited.”
However, that appeared to hold true only for Iran’s first match. An Iranian women’s activist, Maryam Qashqaei Shojaei, said she was held for two hours by security officials at the Kazan stadium before Iran’s match with Spain, having planned to display the banner again.
“When I was trying to get in with my banner security told me I can’t take it in,” she told a Thomson Reuters Foundation reporter by phone from Kazan. “I showed them my approval. They searched me and held me two hours, and took the banner.”
A spokesman for Russia’s World Cup local organising committee said it was aware of an incident involving Shojaei, but had no further details.