The Iranian delegation to the World Cup has called for FIFA to eject the US team from the World Cup tournament in Qatar after the US Soccer Federation removed the Iranian national symbol from the country’s flag on the US team’s website to show support for protesters in Iran, CNN reports.
“By posting a distorted image of the flag of the Islamic Republic of #Iran on its official account, the #US football team breached the @FIFAcom charter, for which a 10-game suspension is the appropriate penalty,” Iran state-aligned Tasnim news agency wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “Team #USA should be kicked out of the #WorldCup2022.”
The Iranian national symbol, a stylized representation of the word “Allah” in Arabic, sits in the center white stripe of the Iranian flag, with a red stripe below it and a green stripe on top. The representation on the US soccer site showed the flag without the Arabic text, which was added in 1980 after the Muslim fundamentalist revolution. The US Soccer Federation said the protest was planned and that the emblem would be repositioned in the flag after an unspecified set period of time; the website showed the correct Iranian flag as off 6 p.m. ET Sunday.