Iran Match Falls Through
Almost three months’ worth of work involving the governments and soccer federations of the United States and Iran went for naught Monday when the Galaxy was forced to cancel next week’s match against Iran’s national team at the Rose Bowl.
There is, however, a possibility that the game will be rescheduled for the summer or fall if various roadblocks can be cleared.
Those roadblocks include the difficulty of getting the Iranian players released from their club teams and, more important, obtaining travel visas for the athletes at a time when U.S. relations with many Middle Eastern countries are strained and U.S. security concerns are paramount. Then, too, there is the political problem Iran’s soccer federation faces on its own soil from those who would prefer not to see sporting contacts with Americans.
Logistics also entered the equation.
Because the U.S. does not have an embassy in Tehran, Iran’s soccer players, coaches and other members of its delegation would have had to travel to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in order to apply in person for travel visas.
According to Doug Hamilton, the Galaxy’s president and general manager, the club had been working for more than 2 1/2 months trying to stage the game.
An estimated 10,000 tickets had been sold for the April 28 match and a Rose Bowl crowd of between 20,000 and 35,000 was expected, most of the fans coming from Southern California’s large and soccer-passionate Iranian-American community.
“The April 28 date is dead,” Hamilton said Monday, but added, in reference to the Galaxy and Iran’s soccer federation, “I hope that the relationship and the potential of the game is not dead.”
On the U.S. side, the effort involved working with the U.S. Soccer federation, the State Department and Iran’s delegation to the United Nations. It was a time-consuming process, and in the end the Galaxy ran out of time.
“Reaching an agreement with the Iran national team actually was not difficult,” said Tom Payne, the Galaxy’s director of business development who had been in charge of the project. “They very, very much wanted to come over here as an integral part of getting ready for World Cup qualifying.
“They desperately wanted to come play the game against us and then go to Washington D.C. and play the game against Guatemala” at RFK Stadium.
The cancellation “is a hard hit for them,” Payne added. “I can’t even tell you how much they wanted to come. I spent many a long night on the phone with the top-ranking officials in the federation over there.”
Hamilton said that the U.S. and Iranian governments had supported the match.
“I don’t think there was a governmental issue on this one,” he said. “The U.S. has had Iranian athletes here before. The wrestling team is scheduled to come this summer.
“What our issue came down to was really just with the club commitments the players had and getting them to Dubai in order to go through the visa process.”
Payne said the latter eventually forced the cancellation.
“Their government took umbrage with that,” he said. “They wanted the team to be able to stop on the way to L.A., basically. In the past you were able to do that, but obviously post-Sept. 11 you’re not.
“Our State Department did a great job trying to put things together, trying to do things at the last minute, agreeing to try to do the visas on almost a seven-day turnaround. But at the end of the day the Iranian team still couldn’t make that commitment to be there” in Dubai by Sunday.
Iran’s national team last visited Southern California in January 2000, when it tied the U.S., 1-1, in front of 50,181 at the Rose Bowl. Since then, the Galaxy has tried to bring Iranian club teams here but has run into difficulties with the U.S. government over the fingerprinting of Iranian athletes, which Iran objected to, causing those games to be canceled. That was not the case this time.
“It had nothing to do with it at all,” Payne said. “Fingerprinting was an issue in the past because they were the only group that was being fingerprinted. They took it personally.
“Now there was no problem whatsoever. The State Department approved the trip. Their government approved the trip. It really came down to timing, and it really came down to running out of time.”
Hamilton said he hoped Iran would be able to return this year.
