“Payam Younesipour”

“Payam Younesipour,” a member of the editorial team of IranWire, in this news interview—whose full version is broadcast on the IranWire TV—has examined Iran’s seven periods of participation in the FIFA World Cup and the transfers of Iranian players and their contracts with clubs around the world that were concluded after playing in the World Cup; transfers which, since 2018 onward, have increasingly declined—not with major European clubs, but with Iran’s neighboring countries, and ultimately, in the 2026 World Cup, into a transfer to Qatar, which has good relations with the Islamic Republic.

Interestingly, this generation of Iranian football players—the group of Iranian footballers closest to Iran’s security and military power institutions—calls itself the “golden generation” of Iranian football.