Usually when a team gets knocked out of an international tournament like the soccer World Cup, the nation is united in grief, pride in their performance or a mixture of both. After Iran's loss to the United States on Tuesday, however, many Iranians cheered their players' failure, saying they represented the repressive theocratic regime rather than the people it violently oppresses.
On Tuesday, those criticizing the team made their voices heard: This was the Islamic Republic's loss, not Iran's. Horn-honking cars flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities, according to footage posted on social media.
In one of the videos, which was posted after the match, the man filming said those honking their horns on the capital’s Pirouzi Street were expressing "the joy of the people due to the loss."
Meanwhile, there were thousands of tweets in Persian, or in English from prominent Iranians, saying how happy they were their own team had fallen at the first hurdle of the competition.
"For 43 years the regime brainwashed Iranians to hate America," Masih Alinejad, a New York-based Iranian journalist and activist, tweeted . "But see how people across Iran are celebrating the victory of the U.S. soccer team against the Islamic Republic."
Dissident Iranian rapper Soroush Lashkari, better known by his stage name Hichkas (translation: nobody) wrote that “videos of Iranians celebrating the Islamic Republic team’s loss to the U.S. team are all over the internet.”
He said that real “Iranians don’t consider the terrorist regime” — meaning the country’s government — to be “Iranian.”
So Iran's short-lived stint at the World Cup was fraught with complex questions about loyalty and the national identity. Should the country’s 85 million people get behind a team bearing the name “Islamic Republic of Iran” — which is using brutal tactics to crush protests that have raged for more than two months?
The debate even played out inside Qatar's billion-dollar stadiums during Iran's three games, with fans backing the regime attempting to drown out supporters who criticized it.
Shortly after the U.S. match, scuffles erupted between Iranian protesters holding up portraits of outspoken former soccer player Ali Karimi, an icon of the protest movement, and a journalist from Iranian state-run media who was trying to film them, The Associated Press reported.