{"id":55147,"date":"2026-07-21T19:10:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T02:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=55147"},"modified":"2026-07-21T19:10:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T02:10:47","slug":"world-cup-2026-team-grades-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2026\/07\/21\/world-cup-2026-team-grades-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026 Team Grades: Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ESPN &#8211; NEW YORK, <strong>With the end of the tournament, we grade all the eliminated teams &#8212; based on a combination of pretournament expectations, in-tournament performance and whatever else is worth considering.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The grades will be on a traditional A-to-F scale. Yes, you can get an A for failing or an F for failing. I can&#8217;t think of a sentence that better sums up the World Cup than that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Iran<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>How they got eliminated:<\/strong> Finished third in Group G<br \/>\n<strong>Final grade:<\/strong> A<\/p>\n<p>Well, their inability to shift into a more possession-based approach once they went a man up against Belgium speaks to an inherent weakness. But who cares?<\/p>\n<p>This team had everything else go against them, in ways they mostly couldn&#8217;t control: an ongoing war with one of the co-host nations, their domestic league being suspended because of the war, organizers forcing them to put their home base in a different country from where all their games were, organizers forcing them to fly back to Mexico immediately after each of their matches. Not to mention multiple interventions of marginal offside technology that gives the illusion of precision and seems increasingly removed from the spirit of the actual rules, and a 95th-minute goal in a match they weren&#8217;t playing in that eliminated them from the competition with what was basically the final kick of the group stage.<\/p>\n<p>Despite all of that, Iran didn&#8217;t lose a game at the 2026 World Cup. What might&#8217;ve happened if they were just allowed to play soccer like everyone else?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESPN &#8211; NEW YORK, With the end of the tournament, we grade all the eliminated&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":55148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,92,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c21-international-football-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":92,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55147","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\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55149,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55147\/revisions\/55149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}