Iran will play their 2026 World Cup group stage games inside the United States. FIFA president Gianni Infantino confirmed it Thursday at the 76th FIFA Congress in Vancouver — geopolitics be damned, football goes on.
"Football unites the world," Infantino said, leaning into the kind of sweeping idealism FIFA does best when the situation gets complicated. And this one is genuinely complicated. Iran and the United States are not at war in the conventional sense, but the diplomatic relationship is about as frosty as it gets, and playing three internationally scrutinized matches on American soil is not a logistical footnote.
Iran's path through Group G
Ranked 21st in the world, Iran are in Group G alongside Belgium, Egypt, and New Zealand. All three games are scheduled for US venues, with the opener against New Zealand in Los Angeles on June 15. Belgium will be the real test — Iran can realistically target the New Zealand match for points, and how they set up that game will tell you a lot about where their odds sit heading into the knockout picture.
The Congress itself underlined how fraught things already are. Iran was the only one of FIFA's 211 member nations absent from the meeting. Their football federation chief, Mehdi Taj, made it as far as Toronto before Canadian authorities revoked his temporary resident visa — citing his ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a listed terrorist entity in Canada. He never made it to Vancouver.
So Iran arrives at a World Cup without its federation head having been able to attend the pre-tournament Congress, playing all its matches in a country with which it has no diplomatic relations, in a group where advancing requires results. The football itself almost becomes the straightforward part.
The 48-team tournament runs June 11 through July 19, spread across 16 host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico — 104 games in total. Iran's first is six weeks away.
