Soccer Football – FIFA World Cup – Trophy arrives in Mexico – Felipe Angeles International Airport, Zumpango, Mexico – February 27, 2026 General view of the FIFA World Cup trophy. Photo: REUTERS/Luis Cortes

It remains unclear if Iran’s national soccer team will participate in the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer following Saturday’s surprise attacks by the US and Israel on the Islamic Republic, Iran Football Federation President Mehdi Taj admitted over the weekend.

“What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope,” Taj told the sports portal Varzesh3, according to the Associated Press.

Iran is set to compete in Group G at the World Cup and is scheduled to face New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, both in Los Angeles, before going head-to-head against Egypt on June 26 in Seattle.

The World Cup will be held across the US, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19.

Soccer fans from Iran are already barred from entering the United States for the World Cup as part of a travel ban that the Trump administration announced in June.

FIFA has not commented on Iran’s participation in this summer’s World Cup. Speaking on Saturday at the International Football Association Board’s annual general meeting in Cardiff, Wales, FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom reportedly said: “We had a meeting today and it is premature to comment in detail, but we will monitor developments around all issues around the world.”

The US and Israel launched joint airstrikes against Iran on Saturday that led to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-ranking Iranian officials.

Iran has retaliated with strikes against Israel as well as US military bases and civilian areas across the Middle East, including in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. Israel is also carrying out strikes in Lebanon and the Israel Defense Forces announced that it has eliminated Hussein Makled, the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.

On Sunday, the Qatar football federation announced that it was suspending all competitions, tournaments and matches “until further notice” following the US-Israel strikes on Iran. It added that “new dates for the resumption of competitions will be announced in due course.”

It remains unclear what will happen to the “Finalissima” match between Spain and Argentina, a friendly game that was scheduled to take place March 27 in Doha with potential well-known players including Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal.

The Asian Football Confederation has similarly postponed continental club championship playoffs set to take place in the Middle East this week, and the AFC Champions League Elite games will be rescheduled.

A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville

The strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader over the weekend has split opinion over whether it speeds a regime collapse, keeps the Islamic Republic intact under a new figurehead, or produces a tougher, security-run version of the same system. 

Israeli officials are projecting confidence that the war is not stopping at the killing of Ali Khamenei and several dozen regime leaders under him. “[US President Donald] Trump intends to go all the way with this move,” one senior official told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. “He wants to replace the regime, and he has no intention of taking his foot off the gas.”

US officials familiar with intelligence assessments have voiced a more cautious view, pointing to serious skepticism that even if Iranians took to the streets, the country’s battered opposition would not have the power to topple the regime.

Publicly, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have framed the war as a moment of political opportunity. “I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment and take back your country,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. Netanyahu struck a similar note, saying Israel would create the conditions for “the brave Iranian people to liberate themselves from the chains of tyranny.”

Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that the success of the US-Israeli strikes so far would not guarantee the end of the regime. 

“You cannot topple a regime through aerial strikes alone,” he said during a briefing with reporters on Sunday, adding that “millions of Iranians” were needed to do that. 

But after weeks of suppression during last month’s anti-government protests, he said, the Iranian public is “very much traumatized,” and it is hard to imagine mass demonstrations resuming while “missiles and jets are above their heads.” Even if crowds return, he said, a protest movement is still unlikely to succeed as long as the security forces preserve cohesion and the determination to fight.

“The majority of the Iranian people are not organized, have no leaders,” he said, adding that many potential leaders are “in jails and prisons all over Iran.” The security elite, he argued, has every reason to hold the line because many of its members believe that if the regime collapses it will not only destroy their interests but “might actually kill them as well.”

The Islamic Republic “probably enjoys the support of perhaps between 15 to 20 percent” of the population, Zimmt said, adding that that minority is still large enough in a country of roughly 90 million people to sustain a committed base, fill institutions, and provide manpower for coercion.

Zimmt called Khamenei’s death “the end of an era,” describing him as “the last Iranian revolutionary” and, in recent years, a bottleneck blocking real change. 

The larger question, in Zimmt’s view, is whether Iran now moves toward constitutional change – of the kind seen after the death of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989 – and a different governing model, that might pave the way for some kind of political transition. 

“Perhaps not a regime change as all of us would like to see but perhaps some kind of a change from within the regime,” he said. 

Zimmt said that after the 12-day war with Israel and the US in June, pragmatic voices in Iran argued the regime should adjust strategic objectives and prioritize domestic problems over regional commitments. 

“But at the end of the day, Khamenei made a decision to change almost nothing,” he said.

According to The New York Times, Khamenei made a short list of figures he viewed as acceptable successors in the wake of the June war. It included Ali Asghar Hejazi, his long-serving chief of staff and who Israel said it killed in Saturday’s strike; Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the head of Iran’s judiciary; and Hassan Khomeini, a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The younger Khomeini is seen as more moderate than Khameinei’s own son and potential successor, Mojtaba. 

Zimmt said that while Mojtaba has support in the security establishment, “a hereditary succession would only deepen the [regime’s] crisis of legitimacy,” because the Islamic Republic was founded against dynastic succession.

Alireza Arafi, a senior cleric who was named to Iran’s interim leadership council after Khamenei’s death, is also in the mix. 

But the identity of Iran’s next supreme leader may matter less, Zimmt argued, than who controls power around him.

He singled out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as “a very, very influential player” not just in security and the military sphere but also in politics and the economy. In that environment, Zimmt suggested, the succession could preserve the appearance of continuity with another senior cleric far weaker than Khamenei as the public face while the IRGC and other security circles are the driving force. 

Former Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff, whose work has focused on strategic policy and arms control, cautioned it was too early to know how events would unfold and said Tehran’s next leadership could yet prove “even more fanatical” than the Khamenei-led one but expressed hope the events of the past few days could reshape the region’s long-term trajectory.

“This is an opportunity for Iran, it’s an opportunity for the region, and above all, it’s a major opportunity for Israel,” Issacharoff told The Algemeiner. 

He added that, in the near term, he expects the military campaign to keep targeting the pillars of Iranian state power, including missile and nuclear infrastructure, as well as core internal-security nodes such as IRGC headquarters, the affiliated Basij milita, and the Interior Ministry.

“At the end of it we could see a very different type of relationship with Iran, with the Iranian people,” he said.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte attends a press conference at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Nicholson

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday praised US and Israeli military action against Iran, saying it was degrading Tehran’s ability to get its hands on nuclear and ballistic missile capability, but he said NATO itself would not be involved.

“It’s really important what the US is doing here, together with Israel, because it is taking out, degrading the capacity of Iran to get its hands on nuclear capability, the ballistic missile capability,” he told Germany’s ARD television in Brussels.

“There are absolutely no plans whatever for NATO to get dragged into this or being part of it, other than individual allies doing what they can to enable what the Americans are doing together with Israel,” he added.

Rutte’s comments came on the same day that US President Donald Trump said he ordered the attack on Iran to thwart its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, vowing to pursue the war for as long as necessary.

Trump claimed the threat from Iran had been imminent when he made the decision to order the strikes. The attacks have killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sunk Iranian warships, and hit more than 1,000 targets so far.

“This was our last best chance to strike … and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime,” he said at an event in the White House East Room.

Trump added that the US military campaign in Iran was going ahead of schedule, without providing details. He said the campaign had been projected to last four to five weeks but could go longer.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon played down concerns on Monday that the US attack on Iran risked plunging the United States into a new, open-ended conflict in the Middle East, even as officials declined to offer a timeline and cautioned that they expected more US casualties.

In the first Pentagon briefing since the conflict began, US General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters it would take time to achieve US military objectives in Iran.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listed those objectives in primarily military terms, saying the Pentagon sought to destroy Iran’s navy and expansive missile capabilities that could shield any covert attempts by Tehran to later build a nuclear weapon. Iran denies it wants nuclear weapons.

“To the media outlets and political left screaming ‘ENDLESS WARS’ – stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless,” said Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Army veteran who served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006 and deployed to Afghanistan in 2012.

However, Hegseth noted that Trump would not be pinned down by any timeline.

The US and Israeli attacks have triggered a massive Iranian retaliatory response but many of the most dangerous drones and missiles have been intercepted by US military forces and US allies in the region.

Still, some of the attacks succeeded in inflicting US losses. The US military said a fourth US service member died on Monday as a result of injuries in the Iran operations.

Six US service members were also injured on Monday when Kuwaiti air defenses shot down their three F-15 fighter jets by mistake.

“We expect to take additional losses,” Caine told the briefing, adding the United States would work to minimize US losses but “this is major combat operations.”

Hegseth said there were no US troops on the ground but also declined to rule that possibility out.

“We are not going into the exercise of [saying] what we will or will not do,” Hegseth said. “President Trump ensures that our enemies understand we’ll go as far as we need to go to advance American interests.”

“But we’re not dumb about it. You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay 20 years,” he added.