This archive report was first published on 10 October 2019.
Iranian women have been fighting for the right to attend soccer matches in their country for years. In 2018, FIFA's president, Gianni Infantino, attended a match in Iran's Azadi stadium while 35 women were being arrested for daring to attend. This was despite Infantino's promise in September to allow Iranian women to attend a FIFA World Cup qualifier match between Iran and Cambodia on October 10 and all future matches.
Infantino's promise was made at an awards event, but it was not enough to prompt immediate action from FIFA. In fact, it was not until November 2018, after Maryam Shojaei, an Iranian activist, met with a FIFA leader, Fatma Samoura, in Zurich to deliver 200,000 signatures of a petition against the ban, that FIFA began to take steps to address the issue.
However, even now, FIFA has agreed to a low quota of tickets for women - reportedly only 3,500 in a stadium that holds some 100,000. Women will be sent to different gates and to segregated sections. There are still no restrooms for women in other major stadiums, with the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran claiming that providing the infrastructure to accommodate women would create a
