In March, the New York Times reported that Zampolli had reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, informing him that the mother of his child was in the country illegally as the two were locked in a custody dispute. She was ultimately deported.<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment. Its World Cup task force, housed under the Department of Homeland Security, said it had no comment. FIFA also would not comment.<\/p>\n
The Iranian embassy in Rome denounced Zampolli\u2019s remarks in a comment on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cFootball belongs to the people, not to politicians,\u201d the embassy said. \u201cItaly earned its soccer prowess on the field, not thanks to political manoeuvres. The attempt to exclude Iran from the World Cup shows only the \u2018moral bankruptcy\u2019 of the United States, which fears even the presence of 11 young Iranians on the field of play.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s status at the World Cup, which starts in June, has been a source of debate and concern since the US and Israel launched military attacks on the country in February.<\/p>\n
Trump in March discouraged Iran from participating in the tournament, citing safety concerns.<\/p>\n
FIFA has consistently said Iran will stick to the World Cup schedule decided last December, and refused to negotiate any suggestion of moving the team\u2019s games to co-host Mexico.<\/p>\n
An Iranian government spokesperson said Wednesday that the men\u2019s national team is preparing for \u201cproud and successful participation\u201d in its World Cup games in the US.<\/p>\n
Iran earned one of eight guaranteed World Cup places allocated to the Asian Football Confederation. Should Iran pull out, in theory the replacement should be the United Arab Emirates, the highest-ranked Asian team that didn’t qualify.<\/p>\n
One possible element of uncertainty is the language of the World Cup tournament rules.<\/p>\n
FIFA wrote that it can decide to replace a withdrawn team \u201cwith another association,\u201d though without specifying the replacement must come from the same continental confederation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March, the New York Times reported that Zampolli had reached out to a top official at Immigration…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408384,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-408383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}