DOHA, Qatar — When Iran first qualified for the World Cup almost half a century ago, Team Melli was led by a dogged defender from Tehran.
Consider Andranik Eskandarian the original Tenacious D. Through speed, work and sheer will, Eskandarian shadowed the best attacking stars of his era, shutting down everyone from Diego Maradona to Pelé to George Best. Eskandarian still recalls one game against Johan Cruyff, who ran to his coach at halftime and screamed, “Why did you send this animal after me?”
“All those big names, they hate my guts. Maradona couldn’t handle me,” Eskandarian recalls with a sly smile Monday afternoon, inside a coffee shop in the hotel where the U.S. national team is staying. He’s fresh off an overseas flight, having arrived just in time to watch the Americans play Wales in 10 hours. He’s thinking back 48 years, to the one time he played in Qatar, a country that has transformed over the past decade. For that game, Eskandarian cannot recall a single building higher than two stories, nor remember a street made from asphalt.
The Iran he knew back then, in 1978, at the time of the first World Cup appearance, had just begun to change. The Islamic Revolution started that January, six months before the soccer tournament, and its leaders pursued freedom and democracy. The national team, through which the vast majority of its citizens identified, was young but talented and deep. And fans starved for soccer success saw themselves in the soul of Eskandarian, who wasn’t fighting in the revolution but shared a spirit of resolve with those who were.
Team Melli made the tournament, which consisted of only 16 teams at that point, losing to the Netherlands and Peru, but fighting to a draw with Scotland in the match in between to secure the country’s first World Cup point. Eskandarian can still remember returning home to a joyous airport stuffed with supporters, where the players were carried like kings from the airplane to their bus.
The Revolution, which wasn’t the same as soccer, of course, overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty in February of the next year. Eskandarian left for a professional soccer career in the United States, starred for the New York Cosmos, built a family, retired and opened Birkenmeier Sports Shop in Hackensack, N.J. He sold soccer gear and apparel to fans from all over the world, including a young Gregg Berhalter, now the U.S. national team coach. Eskandarian’s son, Alecko, would follow his father into professional football, as a player and a coach and now a development executive with Major League Soccer. But not before Berhalter and his older brother, Jay, babysat the son of Iranian soccer royalty.
Alecko’s father wasn’t simply a star. He was an Iranian star with Armenian blood, a Christian who reached beloved status in a predominantly Muslim country. Locals still send Alecko thousands of messages over Instagram every year on his father’s birthday.
All of which helps make sense of what the elder Eskandarian says about the current revolution in Iran, with all its murder, imprisonment and bloodshed. “I cannot comment,” he says. But he does feel for Iranians, for his friends and for his country and for the players who took to the field here against England on Monday afternoon. They are like him in 1978—and they’re not like him at all.
Eskandarian remembers a game he played in Paris, in 1977, after officials painted over graffiti that local protesters had sprayed onto the field, the words directed at the Pahlavi regime. The crowd spit on the Iranians as they jogged onto the pitch, and while the fluid hit him, the hatred, he says, did not. His dream was to play in the World Cup, and that game marked another step in the right direction.
He knows that now is different, not like then, much worse. On the flight over, he discussed the circumstances with his son. “We don’t know what they’re going through,” he says.
The implication is left hanging.
It’s impossible to even begin to imagine. Dream or not, how could anyone play soccer while their country remains locked in the throes of human atrocities and political unrest?
