Iranian football club Naft Tehran CEO Mansour Ghanbarzadeh said that a deal to lift int'l sanctions on Iran will transform football in the Islamic Republic, "opening the door to foreign investment," int'l transfers and the release of World Cup prize money, according to Patrick Johnston of REUTERS. An agreement between Iran and six "major world powers" this week unblocked more than $100B of Iranian assets frozen abroad. Ghanbarzadeh said that "some of that money belonged to the Iranian Football Federation." He said, "Everybody claims that sport should be away from politics but in reality football in Iran was under sanction. We have not received anything in the past two years from FIFA. One figure was about $10 million subsidy for qualifying for the World Cup. The only reason for that was the banking sanction." The prize money set by FIFA for last year's World Cup in Brazil was $8M, plus $1.5M in preparation costs, for teams that "reached the finals, as Iran did, but failed to go beyond the group stage." Ghanbarzadeh said that "more millions were owed" from the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign. Ghanbarzadeh pointed to Iranians' appetite for the sport, "with domestic teams often attracting more than 100,000 fans for matches, as an obvious draw for investors." While Naft's annual budget of "less than $4.5 million" might not improve "straight away, it would benefit from a more open market." Ghanbarzadeh: "One of the
problems was getting sponsors from overseas, hiring foreign players. Many
companies were not allowed to grant us any sponsorship or be a
sponsor" (REUTERS, 7/16).
