Iranian Co-Ed Soccer Ends With Suspensions
By: Daryl | January 26th, 2009
If you’ve seen the movie Offside, then you’ll know that the Iranian government’s attitude to women and soccer isn’t exactly liberal.
And that goes double for co-ed games, as the law bans any physical contact between unrelated/unmarried men and women.
So – for bravery alone – maximum respect to the men and women of Esteghlal football club, who defied the law by playing a game between their men’s youth team and women’s first team in South Tehran last week.
The game ended 7-0 to the youth team, but I’m guessing the result wasn’t all that important.
Those involved in the game are now in a bit of trouble. Apparently video taken on cell phones was used as evidence and punishments have been handed out:
According to the Esteghlal soccer club, Mohammad Khorramgah, the club’s technical manager, was suspended for a year and fined 50 million rials ($5,000) for the Jan. 20 game.
The only woman among the suspended — Saeedeh Pournader, head coach of the female team — also got a year’s suspension. Mostafa Ardestani, head coach of the youth team, got a six-month suspension and a 20 million rial ($2,000) fine.
A prominent Iranian soccer player and manager of the club’s soccer academy, Ali Reza Mansourian, got a written rebuke and a fine of 50 million rials, the club said.
The lesson here isn’t just “if you’re going to have an illegal co-ed soccer game in Iran, it’s probably best to ban all cell phones” (although clearly that is one of the lessons here). It’s that despite all the pointless fluff surrounding football (£100m transfer rumours, tell-all sex books, Champions league Wack-a-Mole) the beautiful game is still important enough to be a platform for protest and – maybe, in the long run – an agent of social change.
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Comments
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Still trying to understand why they played the game in the first place. For fun? Or as a political statement? In the latter case banning cell phones/video evidence kinda would have deletery…
Then again according to the Google article, the head coaches first denied the game took place, so politics/defiance doesn’t seem to be the reason.
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