The Beautiful Game, The Big Game, and Everything Between

The players walked onto the grass carrying bouquets of white roses. Twenty-eight years later, they arrived carrying something heavier. Not flowers. History. War. Betrayal and loyalty, sometimes existing inside the same person. Fear. Pride. Grief. Hope. And who knows what else lay beneath the silence that often speaks louder than the rhetoric surrounding it.

Imagine, for a moment, being asked to choose between one impossible choice and another. That is what these players have likely faced, carrying not only the expectations of a football-mad nation in conflict, but the weight of being interpreted, judged and claimed by competing narratives and interests far larger than themselves.

The image of the interspersed USMNT and Iranian players from Lyon in 1998 has survived because it captured something football rarely manages to preserve for very long. For a brief moment, politics appeared to loosen its grip. Two nations that had spent decades speaking to one another through sanctions, speeches and suspicion met instead through a gesture so simple it felt almost radical. White roses. Handshakes. A shared photograph.

Football has spent decades trying to convince itself that moments like that are proof of its power. Perhaps they are.

But they may also reveal how desperately humanity wants them to be true.

Because the years that followed did not bring harmony between Iran and the United States. The world did not suddenly become more peaceful because football briefly offered a shared language. Governments changed. Administrations changed. Alliances shifted. Wars began. Others ended. New grievances over human rights emerged while old ones remained unresolved. 

The world’s beautiful game continued anyway. It always does.

That persistence is not accidental. When I first began researching this story in March, UCLA law professor Steven Bank pointed me toward one of the oldest ideals in organized sport: the Olympic Truce. According to tradition, warring Greek city-states suspended hostilities long enough to allow athletes safe passage to competition. The modern Olympic movement and FIFA have inherited versions of that philosophy through their commitments to political neutrality, however imperfectly or inconsistently those principles are applied. The underlying idea remains remarkably simple. Competition is permitted. Participation is encouraged. Rivalry is inevitable. But the game itself is meant to create a space where conflict does not prevent people from sharing the same field.

Whether humanity consistently lives up to that aspiration is another matter entirely.

Iran’s qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup suddenly became entangled with a question larger than football itself. Not whether Team Melli deserved to be there. They had earned that right on the field, becoming the first nation from Asia to qualify for the tournament. Not whether politics would enter the conversation. History had already answered that question.

The real question was simpler – Could the game that belongs to the world still matter once politics threatened to hijack it? Or had the world finally become too loud?

By the time Iran took the field against New Zealand in Los Angeles for their 2026 World Cup debut, the answer seemed obvious. The rest of the world, their opinions, their shared history and their relentless clashes had arrived long before kickoff.

It stood outside SoFi Stadium carrying signs and megaphones. It traveled on buses alongside protesters and supporters. It appeared in the flags FIFA attempted to ban in an almost pointless exercise in symbolism on the morning of the match, only for many of those same flags to find their way into the stadium anyway. Separation of the beautiful game from the game of life is impossible as they interweave their stories across time.

This episode felt strangely emblematic of the entire occasion. FIFA, as it so often does, appeared to be navigating an impossible middle ground, trying simultaneously to acknowledge political sensitivities while preserving the illusion that politics had nothing to do with the event at all. The result was neither a complete ban nor a complete endorsement, but something murkier and more familiar: a compromise that allowed everyone to claim a small victory while changing very little.

Perhaps that was the point. Or perhaps it simply reflected the reality facing everyone involved. The protesters were not going away. The supporters were not going away. The history was not going away. The game would have to make room for all of them.

It followed the team from Turkey to Tijuana and from Tijuana to Los Angeles. It sat inside press conferences. It even followed them afterwards in their locker room and back to Mexico the same night. It lingered in every question players did not want to answer and in every reply that was tinged with a touch of melancholy.

The world had followed the ball onto the pitch exactly as it always does. And yet something else happened too. The match kicked off. That sounds almost absurdly simple until you stop and consider everything that suggested it might not.

Iran arrived at this World Cup under circumstances no team in tournament history had experienced. According to reporting from Los Angeles and Tijuana, players navigated visa uncertainty, security concerns, travel restrictions and the reality of representing a nation that had recently been engaged in direct conflict with one of the tournament hosts. Some supporters came to cheer. Others came specifically to protest. And among members of the Iranian diaspora, support for the national team was neither automatic nor uncomplicated.

And yet when the players finally sat in front of reporters, something unexpected happened. They kept trying to talk about football.

Mohammad Mohebi spoke about travel schedules, recovery and preparation. Mehdi Taremi pointed to the challenges of training in Mexico before playing in Los Angeles. Ramin Rezaeian expressed frustration that the team had been required to travel immediately after the match rather than recover properly. Again and again, their answers returned to the same subjects: fatigue, fairness, preparation, performance.

The world wanted geopolitics. Whether by preference, necessity, caution or conviction, the players kept returning to football.

Even when questions drifted toward the anthem, the protests and the atmosphere surrounding the match, Rezaeian gently pushed back.

“We are here to answer football questions,” he said. There was something revealing in that unsurprising response.

Not that the players were uninterested in the larger realities surrounding them. If anything, they understood those realities better than anyone. For years they have existed at the intersection of competing expectations, asked by some to become political symbols and criticized by others regardless of what they choose to say.

As Arash Markazi wrote this week, perhaps nobody understands that conflict better than the players themselves, who have spent years navigating pressures they did not create while simply trying to represent their country on the biggest stage in sports.

Yet sitting in those press conferences, what emerged was not a group of political actors eager to make statements.

It was a group of footballers worried about recovery sessions, training schedules, tactical preparation and the next opponent.

That distinction feels important. Because perhaps the game is not some abstract ideal at all, nor a tool many call sportswashing. Perhaps it is this. A group of exhausted players arriving after a difficult journey and still choosing to focus on the match itself. A coach worrying about preparation. A striker thinking about his next chance. A defender thinking about recovery.

The world may insist on making them symbols. But first, they are footballers and for ninety minutes in Los Angeles, that identity survived everything else. Life, even during moments of enormous historical significance and emotional weight, remains stubbornly practical.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the idea of the little game and the big geopolitical game that so often threatens to swallow it.

George Orwell famously described serious international sport as “war minus the shooting,” and standing outside SoFi Stadium before kickoff, it was difficult not to understand what he meant. Flags became declarations. Chants became arguments. Historical grievances resurfaced. Entire communities projected their hopes, fears, frustrations and heartbreak onto ninety minutes of football. In moments like these, the game can feel less like an escape from the world than an extension of it.

And yet Orwell’s definition has never entirely satisfied me.

If football were simply another battlefield, the image from Lyon would not still resonate nearly three decades later. The white roses would have become another forgotten pre-match ceremony. Instead, people still remember them because they represented something that feels increasingly difficult to find. Not agreement. Not reconciliation. Not even understanding. Merely the willingness to occupy the same space for a moment without attempting to destroy one another.

That distinction matters.

Albert Camus, long before becoming a philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning writer, was a goalkeeper. Years later, reflecting on his life, he suggested that much of what he understood about morality came from football. It is an observation that sounds naïve until you spend enough time around the game to recognize what it actually asks of people. Not perfection. Not virtue. Merely participation within a shared set of boundaries. The match cannot exist unless both sides agree, however briefly, that certain rules matter.

The older I get, the more radical that idea feels. Because outside the lines, the world rarely operates that way. Governments change. Alliances shift. Revolutions begin. Wars end and new conflicts emerge in their place. Public opinion moves with astonishing speed. Heroes become villains. Villains become heroes. Narratives are rewritten so often that certainty itself begins to feel temporary.

Football changes too, of course, but not in quite the same way. The field remains. The ball remains. The need for an opponent remains. What struck me most in Los Angeles was not the protests outside the stadium, the flags, the security concerns or even the geopolitical backdrop surrounding the tournament. Those things were all real. They mattered. They shaped the experience for everyone involved.

What stayed with me instead was the remarkable normalcy of the players.

After everything that had happened, after all the questions surrounding visas, travel, training locations, political symbolism and international tension, they were still worried about recovery sessions. They were still discussing preparation. They were still frustrated by travel schedules. They were still thinking about the next match.

History may remember this World Cup for reasons that have little to do with football. Historians may debate the politics. Commentators will argue about symbolism. Entire books may eventually be written about the circumstances surrounding Iran’s participation. But inside the experience itself, there were still footballers trying to play football. Perhaps that is what I find comforting.

Not because the game solves anything. It does not. It cannot end wars, heal old wounds, reunite severed families, or erase history. Sports are not tools of justice. But it can create a temporary space where people who disagree about nearly everything still direct their attention toward the same thing. A pass. A save. A tackle. A goal. 

For ninety minutes, thousands of people carrying different histories, loyalties, grievances and dreams found themselves reacting to the same moments. Not because they suddenly agreed with one another. Not because politics disappeared. Not because history ceased to matter. Simply because the game had begun.

While researching this piece, Los Angeles Times reporter Kevin Baxter reminded me of another moment that never took place at a World Cup at all. In 2016, only days after Donald Trump’s first election victory, the United States hosted Mexico in a World Cup qualifier in Columbus. Matches between the two nations are rarely short on tension, yet Baxter recalled organized American supporter groups encouraging fans to welcome Mexican supporters rather than antagonize them, recognizing that political rhetoric surrounding immigration had already inflamed emotions. It did not change the politics of the moment. It did not resolve larger disagreements between countries or communities. But it represented a conscious choice to resist escalation.

Perhaps football’s greatest contribution has never been peace. Peace is too ambitious a burden to place upon a game. Perhaps its contribution is smaller and therefore more attainable. A shared ritual. A temporary ceasefire. A reminder that the person standing across from you is still a human being before they become a symbol.

And when I think back to Lyon in 1998 and Los Angeles in 2026, that may be the thread connecting them. Not proof that football can change all the world’s ills, but proof that despite everything happening within it, people continue showing up anyway, sometimes even displaying tremendous feats of the human experience.

The politicians. The protesters. The supporters. The journalists. The players.

The world’s beloved game survives all of them and often allows for what is the best within us to reveal itself. The worst in us after all, is revealed to us on a regular basis outside the stadiums. 

And perhaps that is why, despite all its imperfections and hypocrisies, this game remains worth protecting.