A small number of women watched an Iran friendly and a cup final but the head of the judiciary has said it is sinful for them to see ‘half-naked men’ play

Iran opens door to women at football but will anything really change?

Normal service has resumed at Iranian football grounds and that spells bad news for the country’s women.

Last Thursday a strictly men-only crowd convened at the 100,000-capacity Azadi Stadium in Tehran to watch Iran’s 1-0 friendly win over Trinidad. At the stroke of a government pen the mood of cautious optimism mounting among female supporters had been dashed.

In Farsi, Azadi means freedom or liberty but such concepts do not seem to apply to the half of the population excluded from attending games.

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This month around 500 women were permitted to join the 80,000 crowd attending the second leg of the Asia Champions League final in the capital between Persepolis and Japan’s Kashima Antlers.

Considering that Iranian women have not been allowed access to live football for most of the 39 years since the Islamic revolution it appeared a watershed.

“Women are champions of Azadi,” declared a headline in the reformist newspaper Etemad, while the similarly minded Sazandegi proclaimed: “Women’s victory in Asia final” and the Persepolis captain, Hossein Mahini, tweeted: “Hope one day half Azadi will be yours.” Meanwhile the watching Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, described it as a “historic day”.

This breakthrough came in the wake of an apparently pivotal moment in October when around 100 women were permitted to watch Iran’s friendly win against Bolivia.

Yet those who imagined that represented a historic turning point had perhaps underestimated the power of the country’s hardline clerics and their backers, the Revolutionary Guard.

There had been a sense that president Hassan Rouhani and his fellow “modernisers” were susceptible to pressure from Fifa on the issue but, in the wake of the Bolivia game, Iran’s chief prosecutor, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, issued a starkly contrasting message.

The head of the country’s judiciary said women should be banned from stadiums as it was “sinful” for them to watch “half-naked men play soccer”. It seemed the hardliners were reminding the reformers who was really in charge.

Tellingly a political commissar to the Revolutionary Guard, Abdullah Haji Sadeghi, also entered the fray. “Women’s presence in stadiums is dangerous,” he said. “We need to be wary of our social behaviour.”

Even before the Bolivia friendly Montazeri was perturbed by the significance of events in June when women entered the Azadi for only the third time in almost four decades to watch Carlos Queiroz’s Iran play Spain in the World Cup in Russia via a big screen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fans cheer during a screening of the World Cup group match between Iran and Spain in Tehran’s Azadi stadium in June. Photograph: STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

It was the moment Open Stadiums, a pressure group lobbying for the rights of Iranian women to watch football live, had long awaited. “It’s been our dream for decades,” said a spokeswoman for the campaign group. “We’re excluded from public happiness and excitement.”

In a week when Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, has been in Tehran appealing for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British woman detained in the notorious Evin prison since 2016, Open Stadiums’ complaints may appear comparatively trivial.

Yet the clamour for freedom to attend matches represents part of a much wider context embracing increasing appeals for “bodily autonomy” by Iranian women.

Many object to being forced to cover their heads and, almost every day, protesters remove their hijabs and, typically, twirl them defiantly on sticks.

Like the Open Stadiums supporters they have mothers, aunts and grandmothers who remember a very different life in Iran before 1979 and the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution.

Before the imposition of Khomeini’s ultra-strict interpretation of Islam, many women went bare-headed in public, often wearing the latest western fashions. Then female interest in football was relatively low but everything changed in 1998 when the achievement of Team Melli – Iran’s national team – in qualifying for the World Cup finals in France captured the entire country’s imagination.

Accordingly a few women were allowed into the Azadi to greet the returning national side in the late 1990s but, bar the occasional foreign female spectator, they would not be back until a game against Bahrain in 2005.

After security services had beaten several women attempting to enter the stadium, breaking the leg of one, they were finally persuaded to invite a handful through the turnstiles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Around 500 female fans were allowed to attend the Asian Champions League final between Persepolis and Kashima Antlers in Tehran this month. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

It was a gesture which would not be repeated until the recent Bolivia match. Significantly, though, the intervening years saw the birth of the “white scarves” movement – featuring women fans donning white scarves emblazoned with the message “half of Azadi [freedom] is my share.”

Moreover, by now the internet was their friend, offering activists a communications forum and, crucially, a means of lobbying Fifa. The movement was gaining inexorable momentum and, suddenly concerned, Iran’s power brokers were presumably nudged into recent concessions after contemplating the national side possibly being banned from future tournaments.

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Earlier this year Infantino seemed confident of change after discussions with President Rouhani in Tehran, while Fatma Samoura, Fifa’s first female secretary general, has met women from Open Stadiums and seems fully signed up to the cause. “This is something very high on Fifa’s human rights agenda,” she said. “The dialogue continues.”

Suitably encouraged, Open Stadiums has now handed Fifa a petition, endorsed by more than 200,000 signatures, appealing for further assistance.

By the time the 2022 World Cup kicks off in Qatar we should know whether this cry for help succeeded. Or if the events of 2018 were merely a case of one step forward, two steps back.