No Safe Choice: What Happened to Iran’s Women’s Team in Australia

Co-published with Egab.

In a training ground in Brisbane, one woman appeared in a video with her new teammates, laughing and wearing Western football attire at her new club, in a country she had chosen over the only home she had ever known.

In Tehran, another woman crossed back through the Turkish border after a journey that took her from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur, Oman, and Turkey. She returned wearing Iran’s conservative football uniform—hair, arms, and legs covered—back to the place the first had decided she could no longer stay, knowing what awaited her.

From the outside, it is tempting to ask a simple question: who was braver?

But that question misses the point.

Fatemeh Pasandideh had always been, by her mother's account, different. More independent. More restless. Before the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, she had told her mother she no longer felt she could play freely in Iran, that she wanted to be somewhere that supported women in sport.

In Iran, women’s football operates inside a web of restrictions that has defined the sport since the Islamic Republic's founding. Female players cannot compete in front of male spectators. They train and travel under constant institutional supervision.

On this trip to Australia, three delegation members, a football federation board member, a team manager, and a physiotherapist, and other female handlers were alleged to have monitored the squad throughout, confiscating phones and reporting on players' social media activity to officials back in Tehran.

When the squad stood silent during the national anthem ahead of their opener against South Korea on March 2, two days after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian state television did not hesitate. A presenter branded the women “wartime traitors,” demanding they be dealt with “severely.” Under the Islamic Republic's penal code, charges of corruption or treason can carry lengthy prison sentences, or death.

For Fatemeh, the Humanitarian visa offered to her in Australia was a door. She walked through it.

Her mother Zahra, 55, learned the news the way most Iranian families did, through the news, in the middle of a war.

“When I found out, I felt a mix of joy and fear,” she said. “On one hand, it was a chance for her to live with more freedom, to follow her dreams in sport without restrictions. On the other hand, my heart was full of worry; she would be completely alone, far from her family.”

Then came a different kind of phone call. Iranian security services summoned Zahra and asked her to stay in contact with them, to report on her daughter’s situation, and to convince her to come back. She did not say whether she tried.

What she described instead were the daily calls, sometimes several a day, in which she and Fatemeh spoke about training, about team meetings, about loneliness. “Sometimes she would shout from frustration. Sometimes she would cry silently. Sometimes she would feel homesick, for her friends, her family, for everything her heart knew.”

Leaving, it turns out, is not a single act. It is something a person has to keep choosing, day after day, against the pull of everything familiar.

Fatemeh is now training with Brisbane Roar. She has not commented publicly on her decision since then.

Zahra Ghanbari had been the team captain. She also filed for asylum. She also withdrew.

Her story is quieter, easier to misread. From a distance, it can look like surrender, like choosing the harder life when an escape existed. But returning to Iran required its own kind of courage. In her country, women are jailed and killed for a much less significant decision than the one she took before backing up. They can be killed for removing a scarf, acting freely in public or expressing their opinion in a protest.

“From the first moment, I felt that every move, every word was being watched carefully,” she said. “I knew that any wrong step could affect not just me, but the reputation of the entire team.”

She had watched her teammates begin to consider asylum, aware that she carried a particular weight as captain. The question that kept returning to her was simple and impossible: go back, or stay and ask for protection? There was no version of the choice that did not cost something.

On the flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur after withdrawing her claim, she tracked the news, the reactions of the Iranian-Australian diaspora, the coverage back home. She thought about her family. She thought about the team. “We had to think about the homeland, the team, our families and the fans, while maintaining our dignity as players.”

She has not said precisely what drove her toward asylum in the first place, though observers widely believe the state broadcaster's treason accusations were the breaking point. She declined to speak to that on the record, and would not address whether threats were made against her or her family, a silence that says something, even if it cannot be quoted.

The journey back was its own ordeal. When she landed in Tehran, officials and cameras were waiting. The football federation offered formal support, public affirmations of national values, language about representing Iran positively. Her family, who had been frightened, felt relief when they saw her. The anxiety did not disappear.

On March 19, those who returned were met in Valiasr Square by several thousand people holding Iranian flags. Giant AI-generated images of the women were projected on screens, showing them pledging loyalty to the flag against a backdrop of national landmarks. "My Choice. My Homeland," read a billboard overhead. The national anthem played. This time, everyone sang.

She appeared on national television. She resumed training. There have been no publicly reported repercussions from the authorities.

But the fear has not lifted.

“After what happened, my life changed noticeably,” Ghanbari said. “I became more cautious in making decisions, aware that every step reflects not just my own character but the image of the national team and Iran on the international stage.”

Ghanbari chose not to comment on reports that her decision to return was mainly because her family members had disappeared.

She described the whole experience as a test, not of her skill as a player, but of her capacity to absorb psychological pressure, family responsibility, and national expectation simultaneously.

Courage is not always loud. It does not always look like escape, or defiance, or a one-way ticket. Sometimes courage is staying. Sometimes it is returning. Sometimes it is building a life from nothing in Brisbane. And sometimes it is continuing a dangerous life as a woman in Tehran, knowing that every step carries risk.

Fatemeh’s mother put it simply, from a modest home in Tehran where she now waits for her daughter’s calls. “We know the road ahead of her is not easy,” Zahra said. “But it is a step toward a better life.”

She watches from Tehran. She prays. She waits, for news that does not come through state television, for a voice on the other end of a phone, for the knowledge that her daughter, far away, is still okay.

Back home, the women who returned are waiting too, for something harder to name. Maybe freedom. Or something closer to the ordinary life they had before a tournament in Australia made their silence, and then their choices, briefly visible to the world.

Courage resists a single definition. It is shaped instead by the quiet, complex decisions women are forced to make. In the end, their stories ask a more difficult question than who was braver: why were these the only choices available to them at all?