{"id":54216,"date":"2025-12-04T20:15:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T04:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=54216"},"modified":"2025-12-04T20:15:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T04:15:01","slug":"iran-coach-to-attend-fifa-world-cup-draw-despite-boycott-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2025\/12\/04\/iran-coach-to-attend-fifa-world-cup-draw-despite-boycott-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran coach to attend FIFA World Cup draw despite boycott [Report]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>ESPN &#8211; TEHRAN, <strong>Iran&#8217;s national team coach will attend the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington, D.C., despite an earlier announcement by the country&#8217;s football federation that it would boycott the event, Iranian media reported Thursday.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Iranian federation said last week that the U.S. denied visas to members of its delegation and that it would skip Friday&#8217;s draw as a result.<\/p>\n<p>But federation spokesman Amir-Mahdi Alavi told YJC.ir, a news agency affiliated with Iran&#8217;s state TV, that Iran coach Amir Ghalenoei would attend the event together with one or two staff members to ensure Iran&#8217;s seat is not left vacant.<\/p>\n<p>Alavi said that Ghalenoei&#8217;s attendance was purely technical and did not amount to walking back the federation&#8217;s protest.<\/p>\n<p>U.S. President Donald Trump&#8217;s administration announced in June a travel ban on citizens from 12 countries including Iran. The list also included Haiti, which has qualified for the World Cup.<\/p>\n<p>Exemptions, however, were promised for &#8220;any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, traveling for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the secretary of state.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESPN &#8211; TEHRAN, Iran&#8217;s national team coach will attend the 2026 World Cup draw in&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":54217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c47-featured-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1063,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54216","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=54216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54218,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54216\/revisions\/54218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}