The US and Iran (and beyond): when football becomes the crossroads between war and peace

The United States and Iran then faced each other at the World Cup in Qatar on 29 November 2022 at Al Thumama Stadium in Doha. On that occasion too, there was a tense atmosphere surrounding the match, characterised by political statements and social media attacks, although it was less intense than the previous encounter in ’98. In Doha, the Americans won the match.

However, the instances in which football has intersected with international crises – acting as a sounding board or, in some cases, an outlet – are not limited to the Washington–Tehran axis. A famous example is the so-called ‘football war’ between Honduras and El Salvador, which erupted around the time of the qualifying matches for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, and was masterfully recounted in a book of reportage by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, *The First Football War and Other Wars of the Poor*. The Central American conflict, which lasted just a few hours but claimed thousands of victims, stemmed from territorial and social disputes linked to migration between the two countries, but football served as its emotional trigger.

Over the last four years, however, the World Cup and the European Championships, as well as the Olympic Games, have not been affected by the Russia–Ukraine war, simply because, following the large-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2022, Russia was excluded from FIFA and UEFA competitions and from IOC events (although on this front, the suspension of Russia and Belarus could soon be lifted).

Football history also records other World Cups and European Championships played ‘in the shadow of war’. Two notable examples are the 1938 World Cup and the 1992 European Championship.

In an Old Continent on the brink of the Second World War, with the rise of Nazism, territorial claims and German expansionism, shortly before the World Cup scheduled to take place in France in 1938, we even witnessed the disappearance of a national team. In March 1938, in fact, after annexing Austria, Nazi Germany disbanded the Austrian national team, forcibly integrating its best players into its own squad. At the time, Austria was one of the strongest teams, the successor to the ‘Wunderteam’ of the 1930s. Alexander Sindelar, the symbol of that national team, refused to join the Nazi project and subsequently died in 1939 in circumstances that have never been fully clarified.

At the end of the Second World War, the World Cup – named for the first time after its creator, Jules Rimet, who had been FIFA president for 25 years – was relaunched in Brazil. West Germany and Japan, the two nations deemed most responsible for the conflict, were excluded from the outset, just as they had been from the 1948 London Olympic Games. Italy, despite having been part of the Tripartite Pact, was, on the contrary, invited by the organisers as the defending champions.

In 1992, the war in the former Yugoslavia, with the ethnic violence that had erupted across the Balkans, led to the dissolution of the Yugoslav national football team, which was due to play in the European Championship in Sweden. UEFA, partly as a result of international sanctions imposed by the UN, decided to exclude the team from the tournament and hastily call up Denmark as a replacement; Denmark went on to be crowned European champions, beating Germany in the final.

In the intertwining of football and geopolitics, however, the match and the goals par excellence remain those conjured up by Diego Armando Maradona against England, forty years ago, in the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Mexico. The background to this dates back four years earlier. Whilst a young Maradona’s Argentina, the defending champions, took to the pitch on 13 June 1982 at the World Cup in Spain and were defeated by Belgium, the military junta surrendered to Great Britain in the Falklands War, a conflict that lasted 74 days and cost the lives of 650 Argentine and 255 British servicemen.

At the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Argentina and England faced each other on 22 June at the Azteca Stadium. Maradona’s cunning handball (the ‘mano de Dios’) and his incredible dribble from midfield (the ‘goal of the century’), immortalised by Víctor Hugo’s commentary – ‘Cosmic kite, from which planet did you come?’ – were experienced by the Argentines, and others besides, as the sweetest of revenge against the British Empire.