I love football. I’m a Manchester United season ticket holder who has watched Iran and England at three World Cups: Germany 2006, Brazil 2014 and Qatar 2022. This summer I am going on a family holiday to California to visit relatives. Coincidentally, following the group draw in December, two of Iran’s games at this year’s World Cup are played in LA, just an hour north of where most of my US relatives live. Los Angeles and Southern California is home to almost a million people of Iranian descent, the largest population of Iranians outside Iran. The Iranian national football team would in theory be playing against New Zealand and Belgium with a fervent home support. Many Iranians will be there to cheer on their country. But I won’t be joining them. As much as it pains me to say so, I’d be relieved should the national team of the Iranian regime be absent from this year’s World Cup.

It would be an abomination to allow the Iranian regime’s team to compete at the World Cup

In an effort to repair US ties with Giorgia Meloni, after the two fell out over the Pope’s comment on the Iran war, a top envoy to President Donald Trump has asked FIFA to replace Iran with Italy in the upcoming World Cup, setting up high-stakes US sports diplomacy involving a spurned ally and a sworn enemy. Yet another example of sport not being mixed with politics. Or does that only apply to some countries?

But for Iranians, this is not about politics. This is about human rights and justice. This is about not giving a stage to the team I have cheered on my entire life, which now only represents an illegitimate terrorist state.

Iran has two star players. Both strikers. Sardar Azmoun, formerly of Bayer Leverkusen and Roma, and Mehdi Taremi, who won the Portuguese league and golden boot in the same season with Porto, and played in last year’s Champions League final with Inter.

Between them they have scored 116 goals in 194 caps for Iran and have formed a formidable, at times telepathic, two-striker partnership for Iran over the past decade. They are both more or less my age and I have followed their careers with keen interest since my early 20s.

Azmoun, a cool, nonchalant and likeable Iranian Turkmen has in recent times spoken out against the regime. Conversely, the softly spoken Taremi was a supporter of the regime and its ideology, even if there are signs that his stance has changed. In June 2017, after Hassan Rouhani congratulated the national team for qualifying for the 2018 World Cup, Taremi donated his shirt to Rouhani. Guess which one was recently left out of the national team, after 12 years of service, 91 caps and 57 goals.

The reality is that football is about the fans. That’s what every player says. It’s what every pundit says. Club owners and politicians, whether it be politicians like Donald Trump or FIFA president Gianni Infantino, should be reminded of that. That football is very much about the fans.

And if you ask Iranian football fans, of which I am almost as passionate and dedicated as they come (having literally shed, blood, sweat and tears for the team; the former following some minor injuries sustained in the immediate bedlam in the stands that followed an injury time winner against Wales at the last World Cup), they will likely tell you that they are just not in the mood to watch the Iranian national football team or be involved in the festivities of football that is a World Cup. I certainly am not, which I realise as I write this is a rather painful admission.

In a year where the Iranian regime has particularly targeted, arrested, sentenced to death and executed Iranian athletes, amongst the many other tens of thousands of innocent women, children and men, they have murdered, it would be an abomination to allow the regime’s team to compete at the World Cup, where the anthem of a terrorist state would be played as the flag of a terrorist mafia is spread out across the pitch at LA’s spectacular SoFi stadium.

Should the Iranian national team be replaced, it would be a victory for the families of the victims of the murderous Iranian regime and for those of us who have dedicated a large portion of our lives to creating awareness of the crimes against humanity of the Iranian regime.

And as a kid who grew up with the Italy team of the early and mid noughties (who would make a straight guy like me even swoon) it would be a victory for football to have the Azzurri at the World Cup. Even though it would not be entirely deserved – and I might regret this if they beat England in another final.