Iran’s expat community sees chance to confront regime — at World Cup

On a warm Sunday morning in Inglewood, more than 200 Iranian-Americans gathered outside SoFi Stadium with red, white and green flags draped around their shoulders — the lion and the sun in the center, the way it was before 1979.

They were not there to cheer. They were there, one week before kickoff, with the cameras already in front of the stadium, to show Americans who actually represents Iran.

And to many here, it isn’t the 11 players who will line up to represent the regime on June 15.

This is the fight Southern California’s Iranian diaspora has been waiting for. The World Cup has come to Los Angeles. That means the Islamic Republic has, as well.

For the Iranian diaspora in Southern California — the largest concentration of Iranians anywhere outside Iran — the 2026 World Cup is not a sporting event. It is an arena for geopolitics. And after 47 years of watching the Islamic Republic claim the name, the flag, the team and the global microphone that belongs to a 2,500-year-old civilization, the community has decided to use that arena.

The fight started in May when FIFA quietly moved to prohibit fans from displaying Iran’s pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flag in World Cup stadiums, renewing the controversy that shadowed the 2022 tournament in Qatar. The pretext is FIFA’s “no political symbols” rule.

The reality is that the Islamic Republic’s football federation pressured FIFA to ban the flag, knowing that it represents not only pre-1979 Iran before their reign, but is now synonymous with freedom and democracy, and the Iran of the future that Iranians have been fighting for.

For Iranians, the lion-and-sun is not a fringe banner. It is not, as FIFA’s lawyers would have it, a “political” object on par with a campaign slogan. It is one of the oldest national emblems in the world, predating Islam by centuries. It is the only flag a generation of Iranian children in Tehrangeles grew up seeing.

To rule it out of an American stadium while permitting the green-white-red banner of a regime that executes children, beats women in the street and fires drones at the United States is a slap in the face to all Americans.

That is why a coalition of Iranian-American legal and civil groups has gone to court to challenge the ban under the First Amendment, arguing that FIFA cannot import Tehran’s censorship into a country whose Constitution exists precisely to prevent that.

And it is why, when Iran’s team plays New Zealand at SoFi on June 15, then Belgium days later, Iranian-Americans from Encino to Irvine will be in the parking lots, on the sidewalks, and — flag ban or no flag ban — inside the stadium, wearing the lion and sun on T-shirts, scarves and the inside of their jackets.

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters

There is something fitting about this fight happening here. Southern California is where the regime’s exiles built a parallel Iran — the bookstores on Westwood Boulevard; the satellite channels in Woodland Hills; the restaurants on the Westside where the menus are still in Persian and the music on the speakers is still pre-revolutionary. For decades, that Iran was a memory for this community. The political headlines, the executions and the recent war, while on the minds and hearts of Iranian Americans, was still thousands of miles away.

The World Cup is bringing their fight here.

The regime understands the threat. That is why its football federation lobbied to keep the flag out of the stadiums. That is why its players have been told to fly in and out of the US on match day, a humiliation imposed by the State Department after this year’s conflict, which the regime is now using to claim victim status.

And that is why officials in Tehran have raged against the diaspora’s “infiltration” of the tournament, as if attending a soccer match in your own country were a covert operation.

It is not. It is citizenship — American citizenship — being used the way it was meant to be used.

Iranian-Americans in California fled a regime that criminalized their identity. They came to a country where waving a flag the Ayatollah hates is a constitutional right.

When the cameras pan the crowd at SoFi on June 15, the world will see the country Iranians actually want — secular, pluralist, ancient, free — and not the regime that has held it hostage for 47 years.

Football belongs to the fans. Iran belongs to the Iranians. And for one summer, in stadiums from Inglewood to Seattle, Southern California’s diaspora intends to remind FIFA, the mullahs and the rest of America that the regime is not Iran.

Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.