Iran’s national football team played its first match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup on June 15, facing New Zealand in a Group G contest at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Inside the stadium, fans cheered. Outside, and in pockets throughout the LA area, Iranian Americans made clear they weren’t there to celebrate.

Several hundred protesters gathered at both the stadium and the team’s hotel in Manhattan Beach, waving pre-revolutionary “Lion and Sun” flags and calling for Iran’s exclusion from the tournament entirely. Their message was blunt: Team Melli, as the national squad is known, represents what demonstrators labeled a “terrorist regime.”

A diaspora divided, a stadium conflicted

Los Angeles is home to one of the largest Iranian diaspora communities in the world. That makes it perhaps the most politically charged city FIFA could have chosen to host Iran’s opener.

Demonstrators at the Manhattan Beach hotel confronted the team’s presence directly, staging organized rallies before the squad even reached the pitch. At SoFi Stadium, the scene was more layered. Fans in Iran jerseys sat alongside or near people who had come specifically to protest, creating the kind of split-screen atmosphere that makes World Cup matches involving politically contentious nations so uniquely charged.

FIFA reportedly plans to ban the display of the “Lion and Sun” flag inside stadiums. That flag, which predates the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has become a symbol of opposition to the current Iranian government.

How Iran got to Los Angeles, literally

The team’s path to the pitch was unusual even by World Cup standards. Iran arrived in Los Angeles via Tijuana, Mexico, reportedly due to security concerns.

The security calculus was complicated further by the geopolitical backdrop. A recently announced US-Iran peace deal added another dimension to an already volatile atmosphere. For some protesters, the deal made the team’s presence feel like a normalization they weren’t ready to accept.

At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Iran’s players notably refused to sing the national anthem before their opening match against England, a gesture widely interpreted as solidarity with the Mahsa Amini protests sweeping Iran at the time. The difference in 2026 is geography. Qatar was far from the largest Iranian American population centers. Los Angeles is not.

What comes next for Team Melli

Iran’s next Group G match is scheduled for June 21 against Belgium.