The National Team

There’s a point in every conversation I’ve been part of over the last couple weeks, no matter where we are or what we’re talking about, when I can feel my brain start its grim and familiar drift towards what’s happening now in Iran. Last weekend, I visited the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh. I was there standing under the skeleton of a dinosaur, looking up at the hollow where its belly used to hang, thinking, “I really should check the news again.”

I started this blog around New Years with the purpose of brute forcing my way out of a years-long writers block by posting something every week. With January came the violent federal occupation of Minneapolis. It felt impossible to think about anything else, let alone write about it. At the same time, writing about it felt like I was robbing attention from those in Minneapolis whose voices are much more valuable right now. I’m feeling that same dilemma as we enter the third week of a war against Iran. Is the solution not to write at all, or is that just letting the bastards win? 

When I think of the war, or compulsively read about the war, I think of a soccer match in 2017. This needs some explaining. The background is that I was a terrible college student. At the time, I was enrolled in Penn State’s computer security program, which I believe was my fourth change in major. I had just switched again after a professor gently informed me that failing an introductory math course three times in a row was not a good omen for my budding career as an astrophysicist.

I had no practical skills in computer security. To this day, I have to enlist my friends’ help to solve basic computer problems. (Special thanks to Nick who recently extracted some shredded cheddar from my graphics card.) My interest was totally theoretical and mostly centered on my borderline paranoid concern about surveillance. These were the years following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US government’s data collection programs. We were also in the midst of what’s become known as the 2015 European migrant crisis, when about 1.3 million refugees requested asylum on the continent, mostly caused by war and political disasters in the Middle East. Conversations about technology and security in terms of borders, movement, terrorism, and speech were dominant in the program at that time.

I started writing about the relationship between refugees and computers, specifically about the ways that states were using technology to monitor and patrol their borders, and also the ways that individuals were using things like smartphones while moving. One of my English professors took an interest in what I was writing. She was an immigrant from Austria, where members of her family were involved in a program to help settle refugees arriving in that country. She had an idea for my research – why didn’t I go to Austria that summer to interview the refugees?

It was the first time I’d ever left the country. Also my first time traveling alone, leading to adventures like forgetting to pack a toothbrush and getting kicked out of a shop by its Turkish owner for trying to buy socks after they’d closed for the day. I could write a whole book about that trip, and maybe I will some day, but for our purposes I want to talk about the folks I interviewed.

We were in a small town in rural Austria called Feldbach, not far from the Hungarian and Slovenian border. My memory is that about 25 refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria were living there. This particular program was finding housing and education for men who usually arrived in the country alone. Most of them were around my age, in their early 20s or younger. We arranged for interviews at a school that was empty for the summer. I surprisingly still have the transcripts from those interviews. While writing this, I went back to read them for the first time in probably 8 years. If you couldn’t tell, I don’t think highly of myself during this period (a friend described me at the time as “generally disheveled”), but I’m pretty impressed with how I managed those interviews.

Apparently the folks I interviewed were impressed too. One day after we finished a session, some of them asked if I wanted to come visit where they lived. The place where most of them had been settled was an old restaurant in town. They were living in hastily-made dormitories on the second floor. I remember it being cramped and not well lit. They gathered up some chairs and 6 of us sat together inside one of the rooms. They brought me some tea and we passed around a tin of cookies. Three of them spoke Farsi as a first language, one spoke Dari, and one spoke Arabic. They were all learning German and I could speak some passable German at the time. A couple of them knew some broken English. And we just sat there, drinking tea, talking, translating for one another for hours. We talked about our homes and our families, how we all ended up here, we talked about friends and girlfriends, politics, the food in Austria, video games, school, and we talked about soccer.

Playing soccer is one of the ways these newly-arrived people created community with one another, despite their different backgrounds and experiences. I was reminded while reading the transcripts that one of the interviewees, while talking about all manner of terrible things he’d witnessed and been subjected to, also made space to talk about his joy in playing goalkeeper. He was using his phone to learn German, complete paperwork for his refugee status, keep up with family abroad, and also, importantly, to watch soccer videos.

I think it was the day after I visited them at the apartment that they invited me to play soccer. This was during Ramadan, a Muslim holiday that requires the faithful to spend the daylight hours fasting and praying. When the sun was down, I joined them for a game at a local park where I proceeded to get my ass beat by people who lived and breathed the game. They eventually picked up on the fact that I spent my AYSO days sitting cross-legged in the field picking dandelions while the ball rolled past me, and they took mercy on me.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that game. Obviously because of the ongoing war with Iran, but also because of the upcoming FIFA World Cup. I have to imagine these guys, being soccer fanatics, were paying close attention to the last World Cup tournament held in Qatar in 2022. In response to brutal suppression of anti-government protests in Iran, among other controversies, there were attempts to have the Iranian national team banned from the World Cup. Some of the opposition actually came from the players themselves. Before their opening game against England, players on the national team refused to sing the Iranian national anthem in protest of their government. There’s also evidence that Qatari security cooperated with the Iranian government to stifle protests among spectators.

Similar things are happening now. Prior to a match in Australia last week, players on the Iranian women’s national team refused to sing the Iranian national anthem. Five of them have been granted political asylum in Australia after Iranian government officials called them traitors to the country.

I wonder how the Iranian men I interviewed feel watching these events unfold. Are they be excited to see people from their own country and communities playing the game they love on the world stage? Can the game be separated at all from the brutality of the regime? Things will be even more complicated this year as the 2026 World Cup, set to begin in June, is being hosted by three countries – Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It’s not clear if the Iranian national team will participate. The Iranian minister for sport supports boycotting the games. Donald Trump, who has partnered with Israel in overseeing a bombing campaign that’s killed at least 1000 civilians in Iran, says the team should not participate “for their own life and safety.”

It’s not lost on me that I only spoke to those guys because they were fleeing a violent, authoritarian regime in Iran. Destruction of that regime is one of the several, oftentimes conflicting rationales we’ve been given by the US and Israel as justification for launching the war. What would come after the downfall is anyone’s guess. When asked who he envisions as a new leader for Iran, Donald Trump said “most of the people we had in mind are dead.” They had been killed in the bombings. He added, “Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

Ironically, we’re actively creating the conditions for another wave of refugees if the bombing continues at this scale and intensity. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees currently estimates that 3.2 million people in Iran have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. Many of them are people leaving the heavily-bombed city of Tehran for more rural areas. You wonder what might become of these displaced people if, hypothetically, they don’t have access to water because the US has bombed desalination plants (we have), or they’re contending with more domestic radicalism because the US bombed a school full of children (we have), or they face new violence because US spy agencies have given support to armed paramilitaries in the hinterlands (we have). Hypothetically, if any of these things happened, some of those 3.2 million people might want to leave the country.

One of the people I interviewed talked about crossing the Iranian border into Turkey. He was traveling with a group when they were stopped by the police. Reading the transcript, I never asked if the police were Iranian or Turkish, and he never specified. Some people in his group panicked and started to run. The police opened fire on them and shot his friend. He stopped to help, but the bullets kept coming and he had to leave his friend behind to escape. When I talked with him, he had been trying to get any information on what had happened to his friend, but had heard nothing.

He called me one of the last nights I was in Austria to ask if I would come over to their dormitory. When I got there, everyone was in the unused restaurant on the first floor. It was quiet and somber. People were crying. He told me that one of the younger refugees had gotten a call that day to let him know his dad in Afghanistan had died. It had probably happened a while ago, but his family had no way to reach him and he still had no direct contact with them. We all sat quietly with him. He didn’t talk too much, but seemed comforted that we were all there with him. The guy who called me later said, and I wrote this down, that it was important in their culture to mourn together with your family. Because they couldn’t be together, he said that “we are his family now.”

Since then, I’ve lost touch with most of the folks I interviewed, but I think often and fondly about that family cobbled together in the restaurant. It wasn’t a family built on national identities or language, that can be smashed together through brute force by religious clerics and war hawks chanting death death death to everyone not comfortably swaddled in our flag. That family came together through impossible odds from disparate corners of the world, through war and death, gunfire at the borders, plucked from capsized boats in the Aegean Sea, brought together by their shared experiences and their shared joys, like a soccer match after dark.