{"id":42837,"date":"2021-07-03T08:52:25","date_gmt":"2021-07-03T15:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=42837"},"modified":"2021-07-03T08:52:25","modified_gmt":"2021-07-03T15:52:25","slug":"shahrzad-mozafar-irans-female-futsal-trailblazer-who-defied-the-odds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2021\/07\/03\/shahrzad-mozafar-irans-female-futsal-trailblazer-who-defied-the-odds\/","title":{"rendered":"Shahrzad Mozafar: Iran\u2019s female futsal trailblazer who defied the odds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Guardian – LONDON, Story of how a sport-crazy girl led her country to futsal glory and became a role model is told in this extract from a new book.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To her parents, it was no great surprise. When Shahrzad Mozafar was not kicking a ball with her sisters in their sun-baked family garden nestled in a parched neighbourhood in Khuzestan province,\u00a0Iran, she was usually inside, dreaming about the love of her life. Football. An avid viewer of games on television \u2013 \u201cI loved to be a coach since I was a kid\u201d \u2013 on one occasion she indulged her fantasies by commentating on an imaginary match, capturing every word of a dramatic monologue on a cassette tape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an outlet for a sport-crazy girl who turned eight at the height of the 1978\u201379 revolution, where newly introduced modesty laws made public sporting activity increasingly difficult for millions of women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen my father listened, he loved it,\u201d says Mozafar, nearly four decades on. Her parents kept the tape for years, eagerly playing it for visitors. Their support fanned the flames of her clandestine love affair with football \u2013 one that led to a transformative career in futsal that elevates Mozafar as a 21st-century role model for women in the Islamic world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After blazing a trail coaching the first Iran women\u2019s football team \u2013 \u201cbeing pioneer of anything that didn\u2019t exist before is not easy\u201d \u2013 she led the nation\u2019s futsal team to a second Asian Football Confederation (AFC) women\u2019s title in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The controversy accompanying the first title three years earlier, with her predecessor, Forouzan Soleimani, at the helm, exposed the distance still to travel on the road to equality for women in Iran. The inspirational captain \u2013\u00a0Niloufar Ardalan, AKA \u201cLady Goal\u201d\u00a0\u2013 missed the tournament after her husband\u00a0refused to allow her to travel, insisting she stayed at home to accompany their seven-year-old son on his first day at school. Ardalan\u2019s teammates rallied in her honour, triumphing in adversity as the outstanding Fereshteh Karimi shone in Ardalan\u2019s No 7 shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after Mozafar\u2019s team\u00a0retained the title, punitive economic sanctions imposed by the new US president Donald Trump hit Iranian sport hard, triggering an exodus that included Mozafar moving to Kuwait as the women\u2019s national futsal team head coach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, she sat proudly as the only female coaching instructor in Fifa and the AFC, championing the cause of the women\u2019s game from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her life charts the course of sporting history in a country synonymous with clashes between faith and culture. And her journey also highlights the specific role of futsal \u2013 the Fifa-sanctioned five-a-side indoor game \u2013 in the stubborn\u00a0rise of women\u2019s sport in the wider Muslim world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Mozafar, the resistance she symbolises started early. \u201cThe passion was born with me,\u201d she says. \u201cI have been looking for a ball my whole life. I can remember watching the World Cup in 1982 in Spain. I cried all night when Brazil lost against Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was not alone. A more collective form of defiance dismantled a huge barrier to women in 1993, a little over a decade after the political earthquake had deposed the Shah. The gamechangers were the sport-mad students at Alzahra University in Tehran, the only all-female university in the country. With a soaring number of women becoming educated in the Islamic republic, the students compelled the university\u2019s administrators to allow a groundbreaking unofficial futsal tournament that attracted nine other college teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was nothing short of a cultural revolution. Just like Mozafar, many of the women had the game snatched from them as children after the early 1970s had brought girls on to the streets playing alongside boys. The Alzahra students decided enough was enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1997, the powerful Physical Education Organisation had formed a futsal committee that eventually sanctioned an official women\u2019s universities futsal competition involving more than 100 students in 12 teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor authorities, futsal was a palatable solution for women,\u201d writes Timothy F Grainey in his book Beyond Bend it Like Beckham: The Global Phenomenon of Women\u2019s Soccer. \u201cThey could play in an indoor facility where men could easily be locked out. In this way university officials and players were not contravening sharia law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Mozafar, it\u2019s been a lifetime of overcoming obstacles in a nation where football and futsal were forbidden to her from the age of eight to 28.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her experience of Iran\u2019s national pastime of street football, gol koochik, which means small goal in Persian, brought despair and hope in equal measure. The revolution stopped her playing, but it did not halt gol koochik. \u201cMany boys were playing,\u201d she says. \u201cIn that time the big cities in Iran were not too crowded. They made a goal with bricks or stones and sometimes used parked cars as a goal. If the ball went under the car, it was goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe plastic ball they used to play was made for children \u2026 it was a toy, actually. So because it was very light, they cut it with a knife to make a slot then they put another one inside to make it heavy and call it two-layers ball. They would play two-v-two, three-v-three, four-v-four, etc. They had lots of spectators, including me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watching wasn\u2019t enough though. She craved playing. And once her family relocated to Tehran for safety at the height of the war, she found an outlet \u2013 and another haven \u2013 in volleyball. After representing the national team for a decade from age 18, she quit volleyball once futsal had taken off in earnest \u2013 while fully aware that, at 29, she was too old to start a new life as a player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coaching beckoned. In the early 2000s \u2013 \u201cwe had no football yet, just futsal\u201d \u2013 she immersed herself in tactics as head coach with various clubs while assisting the coach for the new national women\u2019s futsal team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this time, the Iran men\u2019s team were busy earning the \u201ckings of Asian futsal\u201d tag by securing victory in the inaugural AFC tournament in 1999 \u2013 the first of seven consecutive titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2005, Mozafar was approaching her own crossroads. Khadejeh Sepanji, head of women\u2019s football in the Iran Football Federation, invited her to lead the new national football team at the West Asian Football Games. \u201cI was 35, with no football coaching background and there was no football league,\u201d says Mozafar. \u201cIn other words, we didn\u2019t have any football players.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With just weeks to put together a squad, she followed her instincts and recruited futsal players. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t even make long and high passes because they had never played on grass before,\u201d she says. But they made it to the Games, finishing runners-up behind the hosts, Jordan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis was the beginning of the road of football in my country,\u201d she says. During the next five years, she combined club futsal with national football duties before being ordered to choose between the two sports by the federation. It was not a difficult decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIran was a pioneer in futsal in Asia,\u201d she says, whereas in football it was lagging behind its Asian rivals. \u201cSo I decided to focus on futsal and let my dreams come true through it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guardian – LONDON, Story of how a sport-crazy girl led her country to futsal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":42838,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,88,92,142,91,86,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c15-futsal","category-c21-international-football-news","category-memory-lane","category-c20-other-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-womens"],"views":1008,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42839,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42837\/revisions\/42839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}