Iranian women will be able to enter a football stadium on Thursday for the first time in decades, after Fifa threatened to suspend the Islamic republic over its controversial male-only policy.<\/p>\n
Iran has barred female spectators from football and other stadiums for around 40 years, with clerics arguing they must be shielded from the masculine atmosphere and sight of semi-clad men.<\/p>\n
World football\u2019s governing body last month ordered Iran to allow women access to stadiums without restrictions and in numbers determined by demand for tickets.<\/p>\n
Women were quick to get their hands on tickets to attend Iran’s 2022 World Cup qualifier against Cambodia at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The first batch sold out in under an hour, and additional seats were also snapped up in short order, state media said.<\/p>\n
A sports ministry official said the 100,000-capacity stadium \u2014 whose name means “Freedom” in Farsi \u2014 was ready to host even more women.<\/p>\n
One of the 3,500 women to have secured a ticket was Raha Poorbakhsh, a football journalist.<\/p>\n
The directive came after a fan dubbed “Blue Girl”\u00a0 died\u00a0 after setting herself on fire in fear of being jailed for dressing up as a boy in order to attend a match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Iranian women will be able to enter a football stadium on Thursday for the first time in decades, after Fifa threatened to suspend the Islamic republic over its controversial male-only policy. Iran has barred female spectators from football and other stadiums for around 40 years, with clerics arguing they must be shielded from the masculine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1460,31,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east","category-news","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10573,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572\/revisions\/10573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}