Iran twice came from behind to draw 2-2 with New Zealand at Los Angeles Stadium on Monday 15 June, Ramin Rezaeian and Mohammad Mohebbi cancelling out an Elijah Just brace before a crowd that was overwhelmingly Iranian 1. The result left every team in Group G level on a point.
Hours before kickoff, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge upheld FIFA's ban on the pre-revolution lion-and-sun flag inside World Cup venues, rejecting an emergency injunction in Kermanian v. FIFA, filed on 10 June by the Institute for Voices of Liberty 2. Thousands of the flags then entered the stadium and FIFA made no attempt to enforce the ruling; the governing body did not respond to a request for comment on the failure 3. FIFA controls accreditation and the schedule but delegates venue search and crowd policing to local operators, who had no instruction and no incentive to confiscate flags from a paying, friendly crowd. A ban won in a California court still depends on stadium staff to apply it.
A small pro-Pahlavi protest gathered outside, chanting at Donald Trump to "finish the job", but stayed contained 4. Captain Mehdi Taremi named the cost: "This kind of tension, it undermines that joy and it undermines peace" 5. Iran's supporters had already lost their official 8% ticket allocation for all three group matches under United States sanctions , and 14 federation officials remained barred from American soil . The diaspora filled the seats regardless.
