With their stoic silence in Doha, the 11 Iranian footballers telegraphed to the Ayatollahs of puritanism in Tehran that oppression will be met with resistance in many forms. Their refusal to sing the country's national anthem prior to their World Cup opener against England at the Khalifa International Stadium was a simple, but heroic, act of defiance that carried powerful symbolism. And symbolism matters when people rise up against the tyranny of majoritarianism or social injustice.
The Iranian football team couldn't have chosen a bigger stage or occasion to express its solidarity with the protesters back home, who have been railing against the rule of the Mullahs since the custodial death of 22-year-old Masha Amini at the hands of the moral police in September. According to latest reports, 326 people, including 43 children and 25 women, have been killed in crackdowns against the protesters.
In his pre-match presser on Sunday, Iranian captain, Ehsan Hajsafi, made it clear where the team stands on the issue.
"We have to accept the conditions in our country are not right and our people are not happy," he said. "We are here but it does not mean we should not be their voice, or we must not respect them." He also said the goals his team scores in Qatar would be dedicated to the "brave people of Iran."
It's difficult to predict what fate awaits the Iranian footballers when they return home. Their actions, and the words of Hajsafi, however, carry a far bigger and a wider message that demolishes the carefully crafted homilies that sports should be apolitical. They are lies. Modern sports history offers enough evidence of sportspersons taking a moral stand, at times at great costs, against social injustices and tyranny.
The picture of Tommy Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists with medals around their necks on the winners' podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics is frozen in time as one of the most powerful iconographies of political defiance in the sports arena. They chose to execute the Black Power salute in their greatest moment of triumph to turn the global spotlight on the Civil Rights movement in the US that was at its peak at that time.
Their expression of solidarity with the men and women of the movement extracted a heavy price as they were banished from the US athletics team for the rest of their lives, despite Smith setting a world record in the 200-metre race in Mexico. They were vilified and humiliated when they returned home.
In 2007, Smith wrote in his autobiography, Silent Gesture, that it was a "human rights salute" and "not just Black Power salute". In 2019, after more than 50 years, the US Olympics Committee acknowledged the wrongful vilification of Smith and Carlos and inducted them into the US Olympic and Paralympics Hall of Fame.
In the sporting arena, there has never been a more vociferous and eloquent campaigner against social and political injustice than Mohammad Ali.
Having refused to be drafted in the US Army to fight in Vietnam, Ali was stripped of his boxing licence and world heavyweight title and was charged with draft evasion that carried a five-year jail sentence. Though he used his newly adopted religion of Islam to refuse the draft, he believed expecting black people, who faced violent racial discrimination and had enjoyed little rights at that time, to fight in what he considered as an "unjust war" was hypocrisy.
Speaking to David Frost in an interview a year later, Ali said, "I fight in the ring, but unwilling to go abroad to fight. Boxing and war cannot be considered nowhere like…We fought for the United States in Germany, we fought in Japan, and now in Vietnam, but we are still not free."
Ali's contention against the Vietnam war was a protest against political injustice. His defiant symbolism inspired thousands of African-Americans to convert to Islam to refuse draft.
The audacious experiment of Democracia Corinthiana remains a shining exemplar of merging football with political activism. Established by the iconic Brazilian footballer, Sócrates Vieira de Oliveira-- doctor of sports medicine and philosophy -- at the legendary Corinthians football club, it turned out to be one of the most significant movements for the restoration of democracy in Brazil in the 1980s. Democracia Corinthiana inspired its fans to carry massive banners into the stadiums that read, "Win or lose, but always with democracy."
Sócrates understood the power of football in Brazil and his near-mythical status among his vast fan following to campaign against the military dictatorship -- known for kidnappings and killing political activists -- for restoring direct presidential elections. The two-time captain of the Selecao turned team meetings at the club into political meetings that often stretched late into the night.
In 1982, after leading the club to victory in a regional championship against the mighty Sao Paulo, The Doctor underlined his moral compulsion to be the voice of the pro-democracy movement in Brazil: "That was the greatest team I ever played in because it was more than sport. My political victories are more important than my victories as a professional player. A match finishes in 90 minutes, but life goes on."
In more recent memory, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick sparked a worldwide phenomenon of taking a knee as a political gesture of protest against social injustice. Kaepernick went down on one knee in an NFL match while the American national anthem was played to protest the killing of one Alton Sterling by two white police officers. Despite facing a severe backlash for his actions, Kaepernick refused to back down, stating that "to me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to the other way."
On the other side, authoritarian regimes, dictators, and fascists too have exploited sports as a political tool to burnish their image in front of global audiences.
In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini was no more a football lover than the average Italian fan. But he clearly understood that masses of people who watched football in the stadiums provided a captive audience for propagating the ideology of the National Fascist Party. The Italian dictator went about methodically establishing total control over Italian clubs to turn their youth wings into a catchment pool for harvesting party cadre. British historian Simon Miller provides deep insight into Mussolini's machinations for controlling Italian football in his book, Football and Fascism, as an extension of total political control.
In neighbouring Germany, Adolf Hitler wasn't any lover of sports. Yet, his obsession to host the 1936 Berlin Olympics stemmed from his urge to project Germany as peace-loving nation even as its war machine blitzed across Europe.
"International animosity toward National Socialist Germany was plainly a thing of the past, he [Hitler] thought. He gave orders thateverything should be done to convey the impression of a peace-minded Germany to the many prominent foreign guests," wrote Nazi industry minister, Albert Spear, in his autobiography, Inside The Third Reich, about the Berlin Games.
Leaders of authoritarian regimes such as the erstwhile Soviet Union, present-day Russia, and China, to name a few, have made sports as part of their state policies to project power and political ideologies and enhance their personality of the cult.
Closer home, many of India's sports icons have willingly submitted themselves to become vital cogs in the ruling party's vast massaging apparatus. So much so that they have behaved as an extension of a coordinated messaging system by propagating identical homilies to their large social media followings.
It's time to give the idea that sports and politics should not be spoken in the same breath a decent burial and move on. Sports with its mass following is like a canvas that can be painted in any political hue -- good or bad depends on the end goal. The Iranians proved that once again.
Vivek Mukherji is an independent journalist and Content Consultant