The World Cup was supposed to be a respite from the grinding idiocies of geopolitics. A sporting tournament, for heaven's sake. But no. In Stuttgart, Iranian-Americans have taken it upon themselves to protest against the Iranian national team, waving banners and shouting slogans as if the 22 men on the pitch were personally responsible for the mullahs' theocratic mischief. This is what happens when you conflate football with morality: you get a spectacle of self-righteousness that would make a Victorian missionary blush.
Let us be clear. I am no defender of the Islamic Republic. The regime in Tehran is a grotesque amalgam of clerical obscurantism and revolutionary gangsterism. Its human rights record is an abomination. Its nuclear ambitions are a menace. Its treatment of women and minorities is medieval. But to hijack a football match, to turn a stadium into a theatre of protest, is to misunderstand the very nature of sport. Sport is not politics. It is a realm of play, of ritual, of release. To demand that a footballer, an athlete who has spent his life perfecting a meaningless skill, bear the weight of a nation's sins is the height of intellectual decadence.
The protesters, mostly Iranian-Americans, claim they are speaking for the Iranian people. They are not. They are speaking for a particular diaspora, one that has the luxury of safety and distance. The real Iranians, the ones trapped in the Islamic Republic, have far more pressing concerns than a World Cup match. They have executions, economic collapse, and the daily indignity of living under a regime that despises them. A protest in Stuttgart changes nothing. It merely allows the protesters to feel virtuous while the regime continues its reign of terror.
This is not to say that protest is always futile. The Fall of Rome, if I may drag history into it, was preceded by centuries of moral decay and political stupor. But the protests of the early Christians, or the barbarian invasions, had a material impact. A banner at a football match has the impact of a gnat on an elephant's hide. The Iranian regime is not moved by Western opinion. It is moved by power, by force, by the calculus of survival. If the Iranian-Americans truly wanted to change Iran, they would be lobbying for sanctions, supporting resistance organisations, or, God forbid, returning to fight. Instead, they wave flags and chant slogans. It is theatre, not politics.
And let us not ignore the irony. The Iranian team itself is a microcosm of the tensions at play. Many of its players are despised by the regime, forced to navigate a minefield of political pressures. Some have even made gestures of solidarity with the opposition. But here in Stuttgart, they are treated as villains. The protesters do not see nuance. They see representatives of a villainous state, and they act accordingly. This is the infantilisation of politics, where every interaction must be reduced to a morality play.
What is to be done? The answer, I suspect, is nothing. The protests will continue, the media will cover them, and the regime will ignore them. The World Cup will go on, and the Iranian team will play on, caught in a crossfire they did not ask for. It is a splendid little crisis in the grand tradition of modern spectacle. And we, the audience, will watch and feel superior. It is all we ever do anymore.
In the end, the Iranian-American protesters are not wrong to be angry. They are wrong to think that a football pitch is the place for it. History teaches us that moral outrage must be focused, strategic, and material. Otherwise, it is merely noise. And noise, as the Romans knew, is the sound of an empire in decline.
So let the World Cup be the World Cup. Let the protests be protests. And let us reserve our judgment for those who actually change the world, not those who merely wish to be seen changing it.
