In an unusual decision, Iranian officials on Thursday night let women to watch a soccer match at the Tehran Azadi stadium in the Iranian capital, according to local media.
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Iran reportedly allows women to attend soccer game in Tehran
Women are visible in stadium footage shared on social media as Mes-e Kerman and Esteghlal FC, Iran’s second-most popular team, begin play in a national league match.
In the video, women can be seen shouting and waving blue Esteghlal team flags in a section of the stadium with 100,000 seats specifically set aside for them.
500 tickets were set aside solely for women, according to the ostensibly official ISNA news agency, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many showed up.
Asriran, a news website, said that tickets for women sold for almost 70 US dollars on the black market four hours prior to the match, as opposed to their official price of under 2 US dollars.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it has generally been forbidden for women to attend men’s games and other sporting activities in Iran.
Iran has long been asked by FIFA to guarantee that women will be permitted to watch World Cup qualifiers in 2022.
For the first time in decades, hundreds of Iranian women were permitted to attend the Asian Champions League final in Tehran in 2019 to watch Persepolis play Kashima Antlers of Japan.
At the Azadi Stadium in January, more than 2,000 female fans witnessed Iran’s national football team defeat Iraq in Group A of Asian teams to secure Iran’s third consecutive World Cup qualification.
Iranian ladies watched a second significant soccer match at the stadium.
The final soccer match in Iran’s 2022 World Cup qualifying campaign, between Lebanon and Iran, was played in the holy city of Mashhad in March, but Iranian authorities forbade women from attending.
At the time, Iranian media said that 12,500 tickets had been purchased online, 2,000 of which had been set aside for women.
However, Ahmad Alamolhoda, a well-known Friday prayer leader in Mashhad who was chosen by the nation’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that he is opposed to ladies watching males play sports and called it “vulgarity.”
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