FOOTBALL IN IRAN

From the moment you can stand on your feet and you are able to understand some of the hand gestures your father is making, Football becomes part of your life. There is not a household in any neighborhoods with young boys that don't have a ball to play football. Football is a religion in Iran, just like many other countries around the world.
Iranian People are so passionate about football that if they were anything close to that for anything else in  their lives, I bet you they had gone to the moon before the Russians, or had developed the Atomic Bomb before the Americans or would have been trying to conquer the world like the Germans.

In Brazil, kids in the street play football with anything round. In Iran, kids have the privilege to have the plastic ball, the problem is this ball is so thin and light that with smallest impact would either burst or get flat. So kids developed an innovative way to protect their ball and make it last longer. As you see below, to do that, they have to buy 2 balls, sacrifice 1 to protect the main ball. You see, even kids with no formal education are smart enough to come up with such smart idea!!!

Since football was introduced to the world, it has been a big part of Iranian's lives. Playing sports is one of the best ways to keep the children away from crime, drugs and other harmful activities. But if you travel to Iran, playing sports has other benefits as well. One could easily recognize that playing sports like football will keep most young Iranian people away from politics. When we play a football game, or even if we only watch a game with bunch of friends, we tend to talk about it for hours, or maybe days. That's many hours or days away from politicians.

As I said earlier, football is a religion in Iran. We love it, we play it any chance we get, and we talk about it all the time. The only thing we don't do about it is doing it the way most successful countries like England, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, etc... do it.

You think we lack the talent? Wrong. You think we lack the desire? Wrong. You think we are lazy? RIGHT...

We are smart, maybe one of the smartest people in the world. We are also lazy and arrogant, maybe one of the laziest and most arrogant people in world. Sometimes we are too smart for our own good. The problems is, as soon as we acheive the first step of any project or plan we have in our mind, we quickly get deluded. We think to ourselves that this is too easy, we don't have to put much effort in it, we can do it without even breaking a sweat. One other major problem we have is TEAM WORK. You know how when you are applying to any jobs in the U.S. the first question they ask you is whether you are a team player? That's the most important problem with Iranians in any major Team activity. It can be related to sports, it can be school, or any projects.

We are great individually. Examples are so many to list here but a few can show my point. Strongest man in the world, Sydney Olympics. Always mentioned in wrestling, always mentioned in Taekwondo or Judo.
But when it comes to team work, forget about it.

To be continued...