At World Cup: Iran’s team or Islamic Rebublic’s team?

The flag of the pre-1979 Islamic revolution, featuring a lion and a sun, is banned from stadiums at the World Cup

“The Iranian team is not playing. The Islamic Republic’s team is.”

For Roozbeh Farahanipour, there is no separating football from politics.

Before Iran has kicked a ball in Los Angeles, the team’s presence at this World Cup - being hosted across North America - is already fraught.

Even the issue of flags displayed inside stadiums has become an issue of intense debate, after Fifa prohibited fans from flying a certain banner that it deems to be too political.

Farahanipour, an Iranian-American activist and chief executive of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, fled Iran in 2000 after years of political activism.

Since then, he has built a life in Los Angeles, home to one of the world’s largest Iranian communities outside Iran - and the city in which the first two of the team’s group-stage matches will take place.

The neighbourhood of Westwood, on Los Angeles’ west side, has long been known as “Tehrangeles”.

Farahanipour’s opposition to the government in Tehran is deeply personal.

“My mother was killed. My cousin and friends were killed,” he says. “There is no peace between me and this regime.”

Yet he rejects the idea that the answer lies in war - reflecting on the conflict that broke out on 28 February after the US and Israel attacked Iran.

“I hate this regime and I hate this war,” he says. “Nothing justifies killing innocent people.”

Those contradictions are becoming increasingly familiar for Iranian Americans as Iran prepare to play those two matches in LA, and a third in Seattle.

Outside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, where Iran will face New Zealand on 15 June, those tensions are on full display.

Opponents of the government in Tehran have gathered waving the Lion and Sun flag. It was Iran’s flag from before the 1979 Islamic revolution, and for many here, a symbol of resistance to the current regime.(BBC sport)