From US to Iran: a big leap of faith

James Montague

• Last Updated: August 07. 2009 8:43PM UAE / August 7. 2009 4:43PM GMT

Afshin Ghotbi, the coach of Iran, has his sights on qualifying for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Lee Jin-man / AP Photo

Afshin Ghotbi chooses his words carefully. Sometimes he exhales loudly before answering, as if every question is a landmine lying in wait.

At others he begins with an explanatory caveat in his sparsely American drawl, an accent which still betrays its Persian roots even though he spent the best part of three decades estranged from his ancestral home.

The 45-year-old coach of the Iranian national football team has good grounds to be careful.

To start with he has one of the toughest jobs, not just in football, but in Iran.

In a nation famously passionate about its football, it is joked that Team Meli has an avid following of 70 million.

In other words, the country’s total population, man, woman and child.

The passion is such that derbies like that between Esteghlal and Persepolis, not to mention international games, can fill one of the biggest grounds in the world, Tehran’s Azadi stadium even when held at 5pm on a Wednesday.

It is no surprise then that a loose word in the media, no matter where in the world, is headline news for Iran’s zealous sports press.

Secondly, when he was hired after the disastrous tenure of the Iranian legend Ali Daei, who had brought them to the brink, but not quite, of elimination from World Cup 2010 qualification, he became the first American citizen to get the job.

It was a bold move in a country known to have a rocky relationship with the so called “Great Satan”.

But still, Americans aren’t usually welcomed with open arms in many positions in Iranian public life.

Finally, if that wasn’t already a tough set of circumstances to operate in, his players then made headlines around the world for allegedly making a political gesture during a World Cup match in support of Iran’s reform movement just as violent unrest was fermenting back home.

The move incensed the authorities so much that a pro-government newspaper reported that the guilty players would be banned from football for life and their passports seized. The story was in every paper from The New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald.

“I’m a football man and I try to make it all about the game,” Ghotbi begins magnanimously. “Politics in football has become the norm all around the world. There is even politics in the youth game in the local park.”

This, of course, is quite true. But when it comes to politics and football, Iran has some form. This isn’t the first political controversy to blight Iranian football. The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrapped himself in the team’s colours before the 2006 World Cup, using football to unite the country in the face of worsening relations with the West and outright hostility from the then-US President, George W Bush.

Protests from Jewish groups unhappy with Ahmadinejad’s alleged anti-Semitism followed in every German city that Iran played in, whilst lawmakers threatened to have the Iranian leader arrested if he turned up to watch a game in Germany because his remarks contravened the country’s strict Holocaust denial laws.

Then, after the World Cup, Fifa were forced to suspend the Iranian Football Federation (IFF) for political interference after the IFF’s head was sacked, allegedly with government approval, as punishment for a poor showing at the tournament.

And yet for all the controversy, Ghotbi got the nod. How he went from coaching US college football to leading the nation of his birth, however, is a remarkable story.

He arrived in the United States at the age of 13, shortly before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, a development that separated him from his mother until he returned home for the first time nearly 30 years later.

After earning his coaching stripes in college football, he travelled to the World Cup in France with Team USA. This time he was on the other side of the fence, scouting for the Americans, who had a tricky group match against Iran to worry about.

Iran famously won that game 2-1, prompting a million people to take to the streets of Tehran to celebrate.

At the next World Cup he worked under Guus Hiddink with a South Korea team that stormed to the semi-finals.

But it wasn’t until 2007 that an opportunity presented itself to return to Iran as coach of Persepolis.

By now Ghotbi had acquired something of a reputation in his homeland.

Here was an Iranian coach, by blood, who had top foreign experience. Some called for his appointment as national coach immediately.

Thousands thronged the airport when he left his Dubai base and arrived back in the country of his birth for the first time in three decades, showering him with flowers.

And yet, for all the public outpourings of love, Ghotbi was eyed with suspicion, especially by those within the footballing elite. Even some coaches and players within his own team were critical in public.

“I have been fortunate to have captured the hearts of Iranian fans,” he said cautiously. “But some coaches in Iran tried to use my citizenship against me. Being an outsider combined with my immediate success in Iranian football created a lot of resentment in the coaching community. Hiddink suffered from the same resentment in Korea with Korean coaches. I love Iran and the people of Iran. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to serve and make a difference in the future of Iranian football.”

The job that Ghotbi was handed, though, was almost impossible. When Ali Daei was chosen as national coach last year, Ghotbi had originally been passed over for the job. Daei’s sacking reopened the door for him and proved a popular choice with the public. One popular radio talk show ran a poll that 90 per cent of Iranians wanted Ghotbi as manager all along. But when he finally did get his chance he had just three games to salvage Iran’s slim World Cup hopes.

“The appointment was more an issue of being the right man for the difficult task,” he said. “Three crucial games to qualify and they thought I’d be the right person for the team, who has the right experience and who, of course, has the knowledge of Korean football. At the end, I think it was a footballing decision.” The Koreans, both North and South, had been strong through qualifying and had helped bring Iran to the brink of elimination. Following a narrow victory against the group’s whipping boys, the UAE, it all could be saved during the last group game against South Korea, away from home.

But just as the game approached, riots broke out in Tehran over the disputed presidential election results. The team, far away from home, watched the news anxiously. Did the images affect the team’s preparations? “Definitely,” said Ghotbi. “It’s obvious when you’re playing football in a different country and you see images of what’s going on in the streets and you cannot contact your family back home to find out what’s going on. Plus your whole career depends on the South Korea game. The pressure had an enormous impact on us and they handled it beautifully for 81 minutes.”

That was when Ji-Sung Park scored the equaliser that knocked Iran out. Ghotbi, though, had nothing but praise for his players. “Given the circumstances and the tensions they did phenomenally well. We were nine minutes away from the World Cup. But we played three games in 11 days, flying a total of 40 hours, 30 hours of it economy class. It would have been a difficult challenge for any team, going from Tehran to China to North Korea to Tehran to South Korea. Every team was waiting for us.”

However, the story of Iran’s failure to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa was overshadowed when the players started making headlines for reasons other than football. Several, including the mercurial Ali Karimi, wore green bands allegedly in support of Iran’s reform movement. It didn’t go unnoticed. The story of Team Meli’s defiance, and the players’ supposed ban that followed, went global. The problem, according to Ghotbi, was that none of it was true.

“None of these players have been banned,” he said, sounding incredulous. “My personal view is that the national team belongs to all of the people. To use the national team to make any political statement, I’m against it. But I didn’t know anything about it. When we were about to leave the dressing room a few minutes before the game, that’s when I saw one of the green bands on a few players. I didn’t know what they represented. When I asked Karimi about it later, he said it was a religious thing. I heard after they had political ramifications. ”

Ghotbi had been told by the players that the green bands were in honour of a revered Shia cleric. He revealed that the players still maintain that story and that no ban has been imposed on them, a contention backed by several German clubs who a number of the Iranian team play for. A spokesperson for the Bundesliga club VFL Bochum, where the striker Vahid Hashemian plays, said he was returning to training in Germany and that the story about passport seizures and bans had been fabricated.

There may, of course, be a more prosaic explanation. The players singled out, and especially Karimi and the team captain, Mehdi Mahdavikia, have long histories of injuries, are in their 30s and had talked about retirement after this World Cup campaign.

Fifa have asked for clarification about whether these retirements would forced, but the affair seems less an example of football Stalinism than the hubris of a small pro-government newspaper trying to engineer pro-government propaganda, and the affair being blown out of proportion by the world’s media for good measure.

The real proof, of course, comes with the next big squad selection: November’s Asian Cup qualifiers against Jordan. “I will speak to them both [Karimi and Mahdavikia] on a one to one basis,” Ghotbi said, dismissing claims he has been ordered not to pick dissenting players. “Karimi, if he retired, it would be premature as he still has a lot of football to offer the national team. But that’s a decision for him. Mahdavikia may be a different place in his international career. The national team door is always, always, open to them. If they both retire that is a personal decision and I will speak to them to see if they have the desire to carry on. Part of my job is to build for the next World Cup. My feeling is that is time to introduce some young players into the team.”

Question marks will remain until then. But at least it will be Ghotbi picking the squad. It was announced last month that he’d be taking charge of the team for the big Asian Cup push and towards qualification for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. And he has a huge practical problem on his hands: how does he replace his ageing stars?

“When you see the size of Iran and the passion they have for football, there will always be talented players for the national team,” he said.

“Unfortunately, expectations are massive making it difficult to give young players international experience. I think [the 2014 World Cup in Brazil], that’s the objective. Five years is not a lot of time to prepare for the next campaign. Take France in 1994. They failed to qualify for the World Cup, had to look at themselves in the mirror and make drastic changes. By ’98 they had created a world champion and a generation of players they were proud of.”

sports@thenational.ae