{"id":14891,"date":"2013-06-01T10:47:03","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T17:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=14891"},"modified":"2013-06-02T00:53:24","modified_gmt":"2013-06-02T07:53:24","slug":"i-wanted-to-go-out-at-the-top-mahdavikia-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2013\/06\/01\/i-wanted-to-go-out-at-the-top-mahdavikia-says\/","title":{"rendered":"I wanted to go out at the top, Mahdavikia says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Iranian legendary winger Mehdi Mahdavikia said that he always wanted to quit football at the top.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The 36-year-old player bade farewell in early May after Persepolis lost to Sepahan in penalty shootout.<\/p>\n<p>Mahdavikia made 111 appearances for Iran football team and scored 13 goals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI am tempted to return but I think now is the right time to finish my football. I always wanted to quit my career at the top. Obviously it was a difficult decision,\u201d Mahdavikia said in an interview with BBC Persian.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was a fantasy to quit football in my boyhood club Persepolis. I wanted to lift the Hazfi Cup, but unfortunately we lost to Sepahan in penalty shootout,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Mahdavikia was appointed as the first Grassroots Ambassador in Asia by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in May.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want to make contributions to Asian football at the grassroots level. I started my career with Bank Melli football team and I want to start my mission in this club. In my opinion, you will never be successful if you don\u2019t take care about the grassroots level,\u201d former Iran midfielder said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; TEHRAN, Iranian legendary winger Mehdi Mahdavikia said that he always wanted to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25049,"featured_media":14903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c22-players-spotlight"],"views":3162,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25049"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}