Iran’s reality TV boom abroad captures a generation in limbo

In the video, Afsaneh Chatrenoor, a national team forward and four-time top scorer of Iran's women's league, faces Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the cleric who runs the judiciary. She recites her sporting record and asks him to intervene so that she can be formally employed, so that there is something for her when the football ends.

In a normal country, an athlete's livelihood is not the judiciary's business, and no one petitions a security official for a paycheck. The scene works differently in Iran, where basic rights are routed out of ordinary channels and reissued as favors, dependent on the recommendation, the intercession, the mercy of an official.

A woman footballer is first stripped of what makes an athletic career a career: professional contracts, job security, broadcast rights, media coverage, a visible future. Then, for a fraction of what was taken, she must sit before power and ask.

No one expects a footballer to become a dissident against a state that has answered protest with mass executions. But there is a long distance between fighting the system and petitioning it for mercy, and the space between those two points is where the rest of her team now lives.

The one who spoke

Zahra Alizadeh chose a different point on that line. When security forces massacred protesters in January, the forward announced she was leaving the national team in protest. Within hours, her post vanished from Instagram, amid reports of security threats against players and their families and pressure to delete anything that read as dissent.

Alizadeh was no fringe squad member. In the qualifiers that sent Iran to the Women's Asian Cup in Australia, she scored against Bhutan and set up a goal against Singapore. She was never called up again, and within months she walked away from football altogether.

The message to every woman still in the squad was unambiguous: the right to play lasts exactly as long as the silence about the killing does.

The ones who left, and the ones brought back

Weeks later in Australia, the quiet broke. Seven members of the traveling party moved to seek humanitarian protection, a walkout confirmed at the time by Iran International, with US President Donald Trump publicly urging Canberra to take them in.

Five reversed course and flew home. The reversal is not simple to read: it happened in an atmosphere of dread, fear for families in Iran, the watchful presence of federation security officers, and reports of pressure both direct and oblique, with threats attributed to the Revolutionary Guards.

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  Iran pressuring women footballers who defected in Australia to return

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  Iran women’s football team kept under tight security in Kuala Lumpur

Neither staying nor returning, as the circumstances stood, can honestly be called a free choice.

What the government did next completed the picture. The returned players were paraded at Tehran's Valiasr Square, presented as proof of love of homeland and the collapse of what officials called the asylum plot. The crisis became a pageant.

The star nobody recognized

One moment from that pageant deserves to outlive it.

Golnoush Khosravi, herself a national team player and one of the figures in the Australia episode, was handed a microphone and sent into the crowd at a state rally to ask people what they thought of the women's team and the affair she had been part of. The answers were warm.

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People thanked the returned players, said they loved them, said they were proud of them.

Not one of them recognized the national team player holding the microphone.

That is the Islamic Republic's relationship with women's football, compressed into a single scene: a state that buses in crowds to celebrate players it has spent decades making invisible.

Women's matches are almost never broadcast; photography is restricted; the players compete in mandated full cover.

The country's champions can walk any street unrecognized, and when the government finally needed their faces for its own story, it discovered the erasure had worked too well.

In its pageant, the player is not an athlete with an identity, a record and professional rights; she is a prop for a narrative, thanked on camera by people who do not know that the woman interviewing them is on the team.

The invisibility of the women who play has an older twin in the women who watch. Stadiums have been closed to female fans since shortly after the 1979 revolution, a ban that took the life of Sahar Khodayari, the fan who set herself on fire in 2019 facing prison for sneaking into a match, and that has since eased only in small, revocable concessions extracted under FIFA pressure.

The ledger abroad

Meanwhile, the world keeps collecting what Iran discards. Taekwondo fighter Kimia Alizadeh, once the country's only female Olympic medalist, left declaring herself one of millions of oppressed Iranian women and won Olympic bronze for Bulgaria. Chess players Sara Khadem, Mitra Hejazipour and Dorsa Derakhshani now play for Spain, France and the United States. This month, weightlifter Yekta Jamali, who left as a teenage medal prospect, was named best lifter of the German Bundesliga final, according to Persian-language media reports.

And on Wednesday, in Brisbane, Fatemeh Pasandideh, 22, and Atefeh Ramezanisadeh, 34, the two who did not board the plane home, received Australian citizenship at a ceremony attended by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.

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  Iran women’s footballers who sought asylum become Australian citizens

Both now train with Brisbane Roar's women's side, and their passports make them eligible, one day, to play for the country that took them in.

"This citizenship is more than a certificate; it is a symbol of hope, safety and the opportunity to build a new future," Ramezanisadeh wrote. Pasandideh remembered "those who lost their lives or remain in prison."

Four roles, no future

One was erased for a sentence of protest. Some left home without the chance to say goodbye. Some came back and were placed inside a propaganda frame. And one, the best striker in the country, sat before the head of the judiciary and asked for a job.

These are not the same choices, and the women who made them do not bear the same responsibility. But they are all products of one structure, a system that recognizes only a few roles for a woman who plays football: silent, exiled, an instrument on a stage, or a supplicant before power.

What appears in none of these frames is the thing itself: an independent athlete whose success could buy her dignity, security and a future in her own country.

Chatrenoor says she does not regret coming home. Pasandideh is 22, with a passport, a club and a career ahead of her. Same team, same tournament, one flight's difference.

The United States appeared to believe that military force would quickly weaken the Iranian government and compel Tehran to accept an agreement closer to US terms, Paul Saunders, president and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, said in an interview in Washington DC.

“I think the administration probably … overestimated how easy it would be to use force to bring about a successful agreement,” Saunders said.

Washington and Tehran remain divided over efforts to end the conflict, with the Strait of Hormuz at the center of competing military and diplomatic calculations. Recent reports have offered conflicting accounts of whether an agreement to reopen the waterway is imminent.

Strikes complicated diplomacy

“Targeting Iran’s leadership did more than escalate the military campaign,” Saunders said. “It also posed a direct threat to the survival of the Islamic Republic, making it harder for Washington to persuade Tehran to compromise.”

“I think that, from my point of view, it would have been better not to execute the strike on the Iranian leadership,” Saunders said, adding that the decision increased mistrust and left Washington in a weaker position to negotiate after the initial military action.

The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, signed in June, was a 14-point interim framework to end hostilities, restore commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz, remove the US naval blockade and negotiate a final agreement within 60 days.

In July, Iran suspended implementation of its commitments under the MoU, accusing Washington of effectively abandoning its own obligations.

“In order to get a deal, we needed to have a government to negotiate with,” Saunders said. “When that government is really damaged and destabilized … will that new regime be sufficiently powerful that it will be able to make concessions to the United States?”

Trump has described Iran as being under a “third regime,” arguing that successive layers of the country’s leadership were killed in US and Israeli strikes and that the officials now in charge were different and more reasonable than their predecessors.

Iran’s internal response

Saunders said the political effects of the war extended beyond negotiations to Iran’s domestic response. He said it was predictable that Iranian society would rally behind the state when facing an external attack, even if many people remained unhappy with their government.

“Regardless of how angry or frustrated people might be with their own government, the only thing that they actually want less than their own government interfering in their lives … is someone else’s government doing it,” Saunders said.

“The Iranian government is responding to a threat to its survival, while Iranian society is reacting to an external attack. At the same time, the US president and the American public are weighing how much risk and cost the conflict justifies,” he added.

The conflict is important to Washington but not existential for the United States, Saunders said. He added that the administration had shown sensitivity to growing public concern over the costs of continuing the campaign.

Hormuz remains central

The Strait of Hormuz remains central to Iran’s leverage and to efforts to end the conflict. Commercial traffic through the waterway has fallen sharply, while Iran is also bearing substantial economic costs from the disruption.

Saunders said traders had so far expected the strait to reopen, limiting the immediate impact on global oil prices. But he warned that the economic consequences could become far more serious if the disruption persisted and refiners were forced to adapt to reduced supplies.

Last week, hardline lawmaker Mohammad Naghd-Ali told parliament that another member had told him he cries after every parliamentary session because of the current state of women's dress.

Naghd-Ali fiercely criticized President Masoud Pezeshkian's administration for refusing to implement the controversial hijab law approved in 2024, saying the government was allowing what he described as "nudity” and “immorality" to spread.

Although the new legislation was finalized in 2024, its implementation has been suspended following a decision by the Supreme National Security Council, reportedly out of concern that enforcing it could trigger unrest similar to the nationwide protests that erupted after Mahsa Amini's death in 2022.

Existing compulsory-hijab rules, however, remain legally in force.

Hardline activists have likewise blamed Pezeshkian for what they portray as the country's cultural decline.

"If Pezeshkian's incompetent and secular government continues for another two years, even today's level of dress will become something people long for," conservative commentator Hassan Abbasi wrote on social media. "Pezeshkian is standing against God's command on hijab and wants to return Iran's cultural climate to the Pahlavi era."

Social media campaign seeks broader crackdown

Hardline activists have also intensified an online campaign demanding tougher enforcement.

In recent days they have circulated videos showing unveiled women in tight-fitting sleeveless tops serving customers at a well-known restaurant in Tehran—scenes that would have been almost unimaginable in the capital and other cities until only a few years ago. Such activists frequently describe these styles as "nudity" or "body display."

One hardline X user, allegedly tied to a state institution, wrote: "The first step in confronting unveiled women is confronting cafes and establishments that violate social norms." According to the post, enforcement is currently focused mainly outside Tehran but will gradually expand across the capital.

Hardline journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi similarly shared a photograph of an unveiled woman shopping outside Tehran and criticized those arguing that hijab should not be discussed while the country faces broader security challenges.

"They tell us not to talk about hijab in the middle of a war and not even to take pictures. Then when are we allowed to speak?" she wrote.

Yet Sadeghi also acknowledged the state's failure to restore widespread headscarf compliance.

"The battle to force the hijab back onto women is over; you can't force the hijab on their heads," she wrote in another post, while arguing that authorities should at least establish dress regulations to prevent what she called "body display."

Hijab as a political symbol

For many hardliners, compulsory hijab is not only a religious obligation but also a defining political symbol of the Islamic Republic.

"Hijab is the flag of Islam. Muslim society is recognized through hijab," conservative social media activist Alireza Akbari wrote.

Supporters of compulsory veiling frequently cite a ruling by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who described unveiling as forbidden both religiously and politically.

Journalist Mehrdad Khadir argued in an article published by Asr-e Iran that women's dress is no longer among the public's primary concerns.

"The way women and girls dress is not a concern for the majority of people," he wrote. "The face of the city has changed, and it will not return to what it once was."

According to Khadir, the country's real concerns are the threat of war and the collapse in living standards.

"In the current circumstances," he wrote, "it is unlikely—indeed impossible—that the authorities would surrender their judgment to those tears and turn an issue that has effectively been settled back into a national crisis. If there is anything worth crying over, it is the collapse of people's purchasing power."

Resistance through everyday life

Although enforcement has eased in many areas over recent years, critics argue that this should not be mistaken for legal liberalization because compulsory hijab laws remain fully in force even if they are not consistently applied.

The social landscape has nevertheless changed dramatically. Many women who continue to wear the hijab have also moved away from the traditional all-black chador and highly conservative appearance. Styles often described online as “hijab style” combine headscarves with colorful clothing, modern designs and fashion accessories.

Hardliners reject these styles as well, arguing that they contradict hijab's original purpose of discouraging attention and preserving modesty.

Opponents of compulsory veiling, meanwhile, say the increasingly visible presence of unveiled women reflects persistence rather than freedom.

"The type of clothing women wear in public still depends on the neighborhood, how they travel, even the day and time," one X user wrote. "The fact that we now see bolder styles is the result of the relentless struggle of brave women who accept the risks of dressing that way. Nothing has actually been liberated."

Unlike the corruption scandals that have long dominated headlines in Iran, the report by Jahan-e Sanat focuses on thefts measured not in billions of rials but in loaves of bread, packages of cheese and cuts of meat.

It argues that cases involving everyday groceries are increasingly reflecting economic distress rather than simple criminality.

"There are no billions of tomans, no gold, no luxury villas," the newspaper wrote. "Sometimes it is only a can of cheese, a loaf of bread or a few simple food items."

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Days before Jahan-e Sanat published its report, CCTV footage from outside a minimarket at night in the northern city of Babolsar spread widely across Persian-language social media.

The footage appears to show a woman wearing a black chador approaching a display of boxed goods outside the shop. After pausing beside the display and glancing around, she appears to pick up one of the boxes before walking away.

Exactly what prompted the woman's actions remains unknown. But for many Iranians, the clip became less about one apparent shoplifting than about the growing struggle to afford everyday necessities.

"May God never let anyone feel ashamed in front of their family," one user wrote.

"This is what happens when prices keep rising. We live in a country rich in oil and gold, yet the government cannot provide for 87 million people," another commented.

"People simply cannot afford to buy things anymore because prices have become so expensive," another wrote.

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Others pleaded with whoever shared the footage not to expose the woman's identity.

"Who would steal a few groceries unless driven by poverty and hunger? God help them," one commenter wrote.

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"Maybe she had no money to buy food for her children. The shopkeeper should have protected her dignity instead of exposing her," another said.

Some comments contrasted the apparent theft with what they described as large-scale corruption, arguing authorities should focus on powerful figures accused of enriching themselves rather than people taking everyday necessities.

The sympathy expressed online echoed account gathered by Jahan-e Sanat from a supermarket employee who described an apparent increase in customers taking inexpensive food items.

Behind the supermarket shelves

Amirhossein, an employee at a large supermarket chain, told the newspaper he had witnessed several such incidents during the past 10 months.

He recalled seeing a woman place two tubs of cheese into her handbag during a busy period before leaving without paying. In another case, he said, security camera footage later showed a man leaving with butter, cakes and pastries concealed beneath his coat.

Staff also stopped a customer who had eaten packaged cakes inside the store and hidden the empty wrappers before trying to leave, according to the employee.

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Perhaps most surprising, Amirhossein said, was a regular customer who was caught taking a package of meat.

"I think poverty is the main reason," he told Jahan-e Sanat. "You cannot judge everyone the same way, but when someone steals a simple item, they are probably under enormous pressure. Sometimes, if what was taken has little financial value, we don't pursue it because we think the person's circumstances may have brought them to this point."

'A crisis of livelihoods'

Sociologist Mostafa Abroshan said reports of thefts involving bread, dairy products and other essentials should be viewed in the context of Iran's prolonged economic difficulties.

"Thefts of basic goods, especially food and other necessities, reflect disruptions in economic structures and the declining ability of households to meet their basic needs," he told the newspaper.

"This does not justify theft, but it shows that people's behavior must be understood within its social context."

Abroshan said inflation, declining purchasing power and job insecurity had left many households struggling to afford essential goods.

"A society in which stealing bread, milk or rice becomes more common is facing a crisis of livelihoods and social justice more than a security crisis," he said.

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Prolonged economic hardship, he warned, could also erode social trust, leaving retailers more suspicious of customers, increasing security costs and weakening confidence in public institutions.

While enforcing the law remains necessary, Abroshan said that reducing poverty, controlling inflation, creating jobs and strengthening social support would do more to curb petty theft than harsher punishment alone.

Without addressing the economic pressures facing low-income households, he said, the theft of everyday groceries risks becoming an increasingly visible measure of Iran's widening cost-of-living crisis.

A baby does not stop needing clean water because the pumps have shut down. A patient cannot postpone the use of refrigerated medicine or medical equipment. An elderly person living on the 14th floor cannot simply take the stairs when the elevator stops working. Parents cannot suspend cooking, washing or caring for their children until the state restores the water.

During the brutal Iranian summer, when temperatures in parts of the country exceed 40 degrees Celsius and climb above 50 in the south, air conditioning is not merely a comfort. For children, older people and those with medical conditions, it can become a matter of survival.

The authorities can announce a two-hour power cut. A child's fever, a patient's oxygen machine and a family's need for clean water do not follow that schedule.

Iran's water and electricity emergencies are not separate crises. Water distribution depends on electricity to operate pumping stations and move water through municipal networks, especially into apartment buildings and elevated neighbourhoods. When electricity fails, pumps stop working and water pressure falls. One failing system pulls another down with it.

‘No one to turn to’

Reports from across Iran describe daily electricity cuts lasting for hours alongside recurring water shortages. In Boumehen, east of Tehran, residents reportedly received running water on only two days during one week, and even then for only a few hours.

"We have a sick person at home. We no longer know who to turn to," one resident said.

In Pardis, another city east of Tehran, a resident of a 14-storey building said a four-hour power cut left the elevators out of service. "How are we supposed to climb all these stairs?" he asked.

In Ilam, power cuts reportedly lasted as long as four hours while temperatures reached around 46 degrees Celsius. In Khuzestan, one of Iran's principal oil- and electricity-producing provinces, residents complained that outages had resumed as temperatures crossed 50 degrees.

This is one of modern Iran's deepest contradictions. A country with some of the world's largest oil and natural gas reserves cannot guarantee electricity to its own population. Provinces that generate much of Iran's energy cannot rely on power in their own homes.

Factories lose production hours, small businesses lose income, food and medicine spoil, and families organise their days around outage schedules that are not always accurate.

During the summer they lose electricity; during the winter they face gas shortages. The crisis changes with the season, but it never disappears.

‘Energy imbalance’

Officials describe this as an "energy imbalance," a phrase that makes the problem sound technical rather than political. But Iran's energy crisis was not created overnight.

For years, electricity generation failed to keep pace with demand. Transmission networks deteriorated, renewable energy remained marginal and water systems continued to lose enormous quantities through leakage and decay.

In June 2026, Iran's Parliamentary Research Center reportedly projected a peak summer electricity deficit of roughly 13,600 megawatts.

The government's answer was to ask every Iranian to reduce electricity consumption by ten percent. Once again, citizens were instructed to compensate for failures they did not create.

A family can switch off a lamp. It cannot modernize a power station. A parent can shorten a child's shower. She cannot repair a leaking municipal water network. A shopkeeper can turn off an air conditioner, but he cannot recover decades of lost investment or build the electricity capacity the country requires.

Iran does face genuine environmental pressures. Drought, extreme heat and irregular rainfall have reduced water availability across the country. Climate change is making an already dry region hotter and more vulnerable.

But climate alone cannot explain why so much available water is wasted, why groundwater has been extracted beyond natural recovery or why inefficient agricultural practices remained dominant for decades.

Low efficiency

Even experts quoted by Iran's official news agency acknowledge as much.

Hashem Oraee, head of the Iran Energy Associations Union, estimated that nearly 90 percent of Iran's annual water consumption goes to agriculture, where efficiency remains extremely low.

He also said roughly one-third of the water entering urban distribution networks is lost before reaching consumers.

Iran is not simply running out of water. It is losing the water it still has. The current war did not create this crisis. It struck a system that was already fragile, underfunded and unable to meet national demand.

Iranian electricity officials have said more than 2,000 points across the national grid were damaged during the conflict, reducing available generating capacity by around 4,200 megawatts.

Those figures have not been independently verified, but they indicate the scale of the damage the authorities themselves claim to be facing.

Extended hours

In Bandar Abbas, residents described explosions followed by prolonged electricity cuts. One woman who depends on the internet for her income said she had already been struggling with government-imposed internet shutdowns before longer power cuts placed her work at further risk.

"We always had power cuts, but the hours have now extended," she said.

That distinction matters. The war made the outages longer and more dangerous, but it did not introduce Iranians to blackouts. Years of neglect had already done that.

Inside the home, the consequences are immediate. Refrigerators stop cooling food and medicine. Medical devices fail unless families can afford backup power. Elevators become unusable. Water no longer reaches upper floors when electric pumps stop working. Parents struggle to prepare food, wash clothes, sterilize baby bottles or care for elderly relatives and young children.

The word "outage" suggests a temporary interruption after which normal life resumes. But when electricity disappears every day, when water and power fail together, and when no one knows whether the published schedule can be trusted, the interruption becomes normal life.

Water and electricity are not luxuries. They are the foundations on which healthcare, sanitation, education, industry and family life depend.

Iran did not run out of intelligence, resources or human ability. Its people were deprived of functioning systems because those in power failed to build and maintain them.

Now the lights are going out, the taps are running dry, and ordinary Iranians are once again being asked to bear the cost.