CNN
—
“I remember it prefer it was yesterday,” says Steve Sampson, his face breaking right into a smile before spending his Friday morning reminiscing about what has steadily been described as essentially the most politically charged match in World Cup history.
Sampson has just retired because the coach of California Polytechnic State University’s men’s soccer team, but 24 years ago the American was on the helm for the US men’s national soccer team (USMNT) during a never to be forgotten period in soccer history.
The US had qualified for the 1998 World Cup in France with ease. Nevertheless, in December 1997 in Marseille, six months before the beginning of the tournament, soccer took a backseat when the US was drawn in the identical group as Germany, Yugoslavia and, most importantly, a geopolitical rival, Iran.
It was the primary time that Iran and the US, sometimes described officially in Iran because the ‘Great Devil,’ were to satisfy on the soccer pitch and the most important sporting occasion between the countries because the 1979 revolution.
“Immediately, it was less about Germany, less about Yugoslavia, more about Iran,” Sampson told CNN Sport. “That was a little bit of a distraction.”
Over 20 years later, the USMNT again faces Iran within the group stages of a World Cup. Identical to in 1998, it’s a must-win match for the US whether it is to progress to the knockout stages and, similar to in 1998, the geopolitical situation between the 2 countries stays strained, because it has been for over 40 years.
It’s a protracted and sophisticated history, but political tensions between Iran and the US have been simmering for years.
For a long time, Iran had been backed by Western power and money until the 1979 revolution, when the US-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was forced to flee the country as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the leader of the brand new republic.
In November that 12 months, dozens of Americans were taken hostage for 444 days after Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the Shah – admitted into the US for cancer treatment – be extradited.
It was during this crisis that the US cut all diplomatic ties with Iran, and formal diplomatic relations have never been restored.
The bad blood between the 2 countries was made worse after Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, starting an eight-year regional war, with Iran accusing the US of backing Iraq by selling its arms to them.
When Sampson’s team arrived in France, there was some speak about on-the-pitch matters – the tactics, the team selections – yet the Iran match overshadowed the whole lot, he said.
The USMNT needed to face Germany, then the reigning European champion in its opening match, yet the Iran match, the second group game, was everyone else’s focus. “It almost took away from the Germany match,” he said.
Sampson’s men lost to Germany 2-0, putting added significance on the subsequent game if the team was to have any hope of qualifying for the knockout stages. Yet, there was greater than points and qualification on the road.
“There was an incredible amount of security, even for our families, plenty of plainclothes policemen, plainclothes security,” Sampson, who retired as Cal Poly’s head coach last month, recalled.
The team, Sampson says, was “very much aware” of the safety operation around them and “appreciated it.” It wasn’t unusual to get police escorts to and from stadiums as heightened security is, after all, part and parcel of any major tournament. Nevertheless, this was different and neither FIFA nor World Cup security, Sampson said, informed the squad of “the extent our members of the family were being watched.”
Talking to FIFATV four years ago, Mehrdad Masoudi, FIFA’s media officer at France 1998, said: “There have been plenty of rumors, the US team was thought to have been the goal of certain radical groups. There was plenty of security across the US national team training camp in France. There was also some rumors of [an] anti-Iranian government group who desired to reap the benefits of the occasion. FIFA took all measures required to ensure that that game to occur.”
Sampson said FIFA wanted the build-up to solely be in regards to the match and, as a comparatively young 41-year-old coach, he ensured his team talks were about “football and nothing else.”
With hindsight, Sampson said he regrets that approach. He could have motivated his side by talking in regards to the political history between the 2 countries, he said, but selected to not. “I really imagine the Iranians made it completely about politics,” said Sampson.
“The national team’s job is to make use of any, and all, opportunities available to him to motivate his team and I feel I’d do it in another way if I were to do it again. My team talk leading up in the times before, in training, would have been more motivational from a political standpoint.”
No matter what FIFA wanted, politics and soccer were intertwined for this head-to-head.
On the eve of the match, the Iranian team had received orders from its government to not shake hands, which was FIFA protocol, with the Americans.
“We got here to the conclusion that as a substitute of who walks towards who, we could have a joint team photo taken,” Masoudi told FIFATV in 2018.
So on the evening of June 21, at Lyon’s Stade de Gerland, the players took to the pitch and in a choreographed pregame ceremony, Iranian players presented their opponents with white roses as an emblem of peace and the teams posed for a photograph together.
“I’ll keep in mind that photo for the remaining of my life,” Jalal Talebi, Iran’s then-coach who resided within the US on the time, once said in an interview with the Guardian. But Sampson said the pre-match ceremony “barely took away from our focus in the sport.”
Artemis Moshtaghian, a CNN journalist who wasn’t working for the network when she attended the match as an Iran supporter, described the atmosphere as “festive, electric and yet underlined with a way of tension.”
“There was plenty of drinking and chanting,” she recalled. “Iran fans were singing and chanting together with, or against, US fans but in a friendly manner. Everyone was excited to be there, to be witness to 2 political foes fighting for bragging rights on the pitch.”
But shortly after kickoff, there was a reminder, if it were needed, that this was greater than a soccer match, as political banners were unfurled by Iranian expatriates.
“We had 150 armed police, which was unprecedented for a World Cup match. I said we want to bring these 150 and surround this group of fans with a view to stop them from invading the pitch,” Masoudi told FIFATV within the 2018 interview.
Moshtaghian said the atmosphere modified once Iranian fans realized there have been people supporting Mujahideen-e-Khalq, higher often called MeK, a dissident group that on the time was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups, within the stadium.
The group, faraway from the US terror list in 2012, had been placed on the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 1997 due to the killing of six Americans in Iran within the Seventies and an attempted attack against the Iranian mission to the United Nations in 1992.
“The MeK has a giant presence in France and, as such, large groups of supporters attended the Iran vs. US match armed with T-shirts printed with their leader Maryam Rajavi’s face plastered on them and waved around Iran’s pre-revolutionary sun and lion flag,” Moshtaghian explained.
“These MeK supporters were sprinkled throughout the stadium and had bought seats in several different sections of the stadium and unfurled Maryam Rajavi banners throughout the game.”
For Sampson, his half-time talk was “all about tactics.”
Remembering the match intimately, Sampson talked about how his team dominated, hit the crossbar and the post “4 or five times,” conceded twice to 2 counter-attacks, with Hamid Estili and Mehdi Mahdavikia scoring for Iran, before Brian McBride halved the deficit within the 87th minute to establish a tense finale. His team was, he says, too anxious to get three points. “We possessed plenty of the ball, but Iran managed the sport very well in those moments,” said Sampson.
Iran’s 2-1 victory was its first at a World Cup and one which ensured the US would progress no further within the competition. In Tehran there have been wild celebrations. The Latest York Times reported on the time that “1000’s of celebrating fans took to the streets, some women without their scarves.”
Moshtaghian said the match left an “indelible mark,” on her. “It was my first time attending a World Cup match and being a component of the complexity of emotion that surrounded the match is something that I carry with me to this present day once I watch Iran play,” she said.
The match remained on the forefront of Sampson’s mind for years. “It was devastating, heart-breaking to lose to Iran,” he said. “We were upset more in order that we didn’t advance within the World Cup.”
On the time, US defender Jeff Agoos said that the players “did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years.” Sampson described his former player’s remark as “very astute.”
“What happened on that pitch during those two hours was a lesson to the entire world at large that despite our differences, despite the incontrovertible fact that we may come from different backgrounds, we are able to live peacefully together,” Masoudi told FIFATV in 2018.
Omid Namazi, Iranian national team’s assistant coach from 2011 to 2014, described the win over the US as a “huge moment.”
“Obviously with relations between Iran and the US and the politically charged game that happened, beating the US was a form of a revenge for the people,” he told CNN Sport. “They feel they’ve been oppressed by and sanctioned by the US for a very long time, and it’s really affected people’s lives and the economy within the country. So, they were relieved. They felt good about that.”
When the 2 countries meet in Qatar on Tuesday, they will likely be doing so with the protests and violence which have convulsed Iran – threatening the very nature of the regime that has been in power for greater than 40 years – as its backdrop.
The protests, referred to by experts as essentially the most significant because the establishment of clerical rule following the 1979 revolution, were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died after being detained by Iran’s morality police allegedly for not abiding by the country’s conservative dress code.
Namazi said: “This time around, it’s different. I’ve heard people even say that, , ‘I’m rooting for the US.’ But again, I can’t say that for nearly all of people because they still have their very own feelings towards the US.”
Through the playing of the national anthems before Iran’s opening match against England last Monday, the Iranian players stood silent in what was widely interpreted as a show of solidarity with those protesting back home.
Ahead of the second match against Wales, which Iran won 2-0 to take care of its hopes of qualification, the players quietly joined within the singing of the anthem.
On Monday it was reported that the families of Iran’s team have been threatened with imprisonment and torture if the players fail to “behave” ahead of the match against the US on Tuesday, a source involved in the safety of the games said.
It stays to be seen what’s going to occur before kickoff on Tuesday, though relations were already strained after US Soccer showed support for the protesters in Iran by changing Iran’s flag to remove the symbol of the Islamic Republic on its social media accounts for twenty-four hours.
US Soccer told CNN on Sunday that it wanted to point out “support for the ladies in Iran fighting for basic human rights.” It had all the time planned to return to the unique flag, US Soccer said.
But Iran state-aligned media Tasnim said Sunday that america must be kicked out of the World Cup and suspended for 10 games for a “distorted image” of the country’s flag.
A long time have passed by, players have modified, leaders have modified, but tensions remain as high as ever.