ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A football match between Saudi Arabia’s al-Ittihad and Iran’s Sepahan was called off on Monday after the Saudi team refused to enter the pitch minutes before the game was set to start, with Iranian media claiming that the Saudis’ exit was due to the presence of a statute of slain Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in the stadium.
Ittihad players, who entered the Naghsh-e Jahan Stadium to warm-up nearly an hour before the match was supposed to begin, soon abandoned the pitch and requested the game to be delayed by 30 minutes due to an undisclosed reason. The Saudi team did not enter the pitch again, and the game was called off by the referee.
While the reason for the exit has yet to be specified by either side, Iranian media have speculated that the Saudi club abandoned the match due to the presence of a statue of Soleimani, the former head of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was killed in a US airstrike on January 3, 2020 in Baghdad.
Sepahan club CEO Mohammad Reza Saket said in a statement that the stadium has been inspected and approved by representatives of FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) for the past two and a half years, and that it has “hosted dozens of matches with the same shape, image and design that we saw today.”
Saket said that Ittihad players had practiced in the stadium the day before “under the same conditions and with the existing designs,” adding that the Saudi team’s demands were “outside of sports issues.”
The AFC said in a statement that the match had been canceled due to “unanticipated and unforeseen circumstances,” stressing the association’s commitment to “ensuring the safety and security of the players, match officials, spectators, and all stakeholders involved.”
Both Ittihad and the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF) commented on the incident without providing a concrete reasoning for the team’s exit. The SAFF lauded the AFC for ensuring “the match takes place under appropriate circumstances,” without further clarification.
“[The club] was informed by the AFC observer that the match would not take place at its scheduled timing and that the team could leave the stadium and therefore the club’s delegation left the stadium towards the airport,” read a statement from the Saudi team.
Sepahan is set to file a complaint to the AFC regarding the Saudi team’s behavior, according to the club’s CEO.
Saudi Arabia added Soleimani to its terror list in 2018. The commander was sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury back in 2011 for his alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate former Saudi Ambassador to the US Adel al-Jubeir.
The strike on Soleimani was ordered by former US President Donald Trump in response to the constant attacks by IRGC-allied groups on the US embassy in Baghdad and military bases housing coalition and US forces across the country.
Unnamed Saudi officials in 2020 told state media that Soleimani’s killing was “the result of escalating tensions and terror activities which Riyadh has previously condemned and warned of their repercussions.”
Iran and Saudi Arabia announced in February that they were restoring ties after decades of bitter relations that culminated in severing their respective diplomatic missions in 2016. The countries have had rocky relations since 1979, when Shiite revolutionaries came to power in Iran and pledged to export their revolution to the world, including to the Gulf countries.
Saudi Arabia’s al-Nassr’s visit to Iran to play against Persepolis on September 19 brought an end to an agreement between the football associations of both countries to hold matches in neutral stadiums due to the political tensions between Tehran and Riyadh.
