The World Cup Pride Match was an exhausting, necessary, beautiful mess

SEATTLE — By the end, exhaustion reigned. It was the only feeling that could win this night. Players from Egypt and Iran turned the Seattle Stadium grass into temporary mattresses. They would have rested on cement if they had to, no doubt. After 90 minutes of brilliant World Cup straining — after an entire day of outside commotion about values and representation and belonging — the pre-event controversy deferred to the men who played the actual game.

Seattle called it the Pride Match. FIFA called it whatever the room wanted to hear. It was a messy maze of humanity, depressing and reassuring at once, awkward and celebratory and welcoming, strangely. Occidental Avenue, which hugs the stadium from the west, transformed into a bypass for global friction.

Pride revelers danced down the plaza, accented with sequins, cloaked in rainbow flags, enjoying their Friday night at the World Cup. Beside them, all around them, dissidents lifted signs and shouted for a free Iran, hoisting their pre-revolutionary lion and sun flag. Behind them, street evangelists made ears vibrate with their megaphones. Three men stretched out a 10-foot banner that read, “FIFA: No LGBT Agenda. Let Football, be Football.” Content creators wearing America First and MAGA hats filmed from the edges. Lurking was a man donning a “Stand With Charlie” cap and a tactical vest. A block and a half away, there was a pro-Palestinian demonstration.

So many causes, so much resistance, such an urgent need to be accepted and amplified. Thousands descended upon this hub south of downtown carrying a flag or a grievance or a love. They had little in common besides the stadium.

That used to be enough.

FIFA still wants it to be enough. The institution clings to the oldest myth in sports: neutrality. It is a beautiful idea. It is a lucrative one, too, this adherence to a form of societal agnosticism in which the only thing that matters is a scoreboard that displays neither an agenda nor an ideology. And it is an elaborate lie.

A sport cannot promote values without creating a moshpit for competing values. The institutions that pretend otherwise have the most difficulty managing the problems they unleash. They crave the moral credibility but shun the accountability of taking an easily politicized position.

The Egypt-Iran match, a 1-1 draw that was exhilarating from the opening minutes to the closing seconds, was not the most-anticipated tinderbox of the group stage because Seattle wanted to antagonize two countries that criminalize homosexuality by featuring them at the peak of its celebration of the LGBTQ+ community. FIFA is at fault for scheduling this particular game even though it knew of Seattle’s plans, but, hey, mistakes happen. What’s less excusable: the governing body has spent years engaging in moral laundering, arbitrarily deciding which hosts’ politics are enforced and which get suppressed in the name of partnership.

Equal cannot be neutral. FIFA took a side in Seattle. It just won’t admit that. Behind the scenes, Egypt and Iran pushed for FIFA to strip Pride branding from this match. FIFA declined, arguing jurisdiction more than expressing conviction. It was Seattle’s decision, but the organization permitted rainbow flags inside the stadium while declining to own what that truly meant. In Qatar three-and-a-half years ago, the organization told visitors to respect the culture of a host with a suspect human rights record. Now it’s wearing a completely different coat. FIFA is always checking the weather.

That’s not leadership as much as it is management. That’s the problem with reaching for neutrality.

Of course, we all live contradictory lives. Some are just more human about it.

All the time, Bookda Gheisar asks more of herself. She serves as the senior director in the office of equity, diversity and inclusion for the Port of Seattle. She is a queer Iranian-American. For decades, she has grappled with the dichotomy.

“Though that contradiction might be new for so many of us, the challenge of that contradiction has been a struggle of my own personal life for 40 years,” she said. “I’m certainly not alone in that. I’m not the only Iranian-American that identifies as queer. Certainly, many people in Iran qualify as queer and many other immigrants identify as queer. And to defy the understanding of that is to defy intersectionality.”

To defy the understanding of that is to defy intersectionality. That is what FIFA does every time it reaches for neutrality. That is what every institution does when it mistakes the absence of a position for fairness.

It was Seattle’s decision, but FIFA permitted rainbow flags inside the stadium while declining to own what that truly meant. (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)

An openly gay man named Sam walked the streets outside the stadium wearing a tasseled face mask and sporting an “Iranian with Pride” shirt. He fidgeted with a rainbow wig as he spoke, politely declining to give his last name to protect family still living in Iran. At 23, Sam came to the United States.

“I needed to be a part of history,” Sam said. “This is special, being able to come together for this and be exactly who I am without any fear.”

Sam lives in San Francisco, the same city where a handful of pitchers for the Giants protested wearing special hats during the baseball team’s Pride Night celebration two weeks ago. Three of them wrote the Bible verse “Genesis 9:12-16” on their caps, sparking yet another sports battle in America’s endless culture war.

What’s striking, not to mention distressing, is the connective tissue linking Egypt and Iran to conservative Christians in the Bay Area and the men toting the long banner on Occidental Avenue. They don’t have much in common. So much separates them: language, geography, theology. But in their own styles, they pushed back against the same symbol.

They are not the same because an athlete who dismisses a cap is not akin to a government that hands down a sentence. But they stop at the same intersection: discomfort with inclusion. Yet FIFA and Major League Baseball must dance around them. When sports organizations reach for moral authority, they don’t rise above human messiness. They show hat they aren’t thinking about people at all, only how to position themselves.

Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat who represents Washington’s second congressional district, made it clear before the match that Seattle wouldn’t budge.

“I don’t care what they think,” he said. “This was selected as the Pride Match before the teams were selected. And it will be the Pride Match.”

Seattle celebrated without apology. It was most visible outside the stadium. Inside, the match muted any absurd concern that Pride would be a distraction. The game was fantastic. The ending was wild. Iran had a goal disallowed in stoppage time. Then it hit the crossbar. Egypt held on, barely. Egypt booked its place in the last 32; Iran is very likely to advance too.

The branding created the occasion. The people made it matter, all of them, despite their complicated lives. Seattle wanted to host something special. It stayed true to its intentions. It didn’t pretend to be neutral, not about human decency. And then it got out of the way so that messy magic could happen.

Shoja Khalilzadeh scores a late goal that was ruled offside following a VAR review, as the exhilarating Egypt-Iran match ended in a 1-1 draw (Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images)

About an hour after the stressful finish, a group of Iranian fans set up a boombox and danced outside the left field gate of the neighboring baseball stadium. My Farsi isn’t good enough to tell you the same, but it sounded nothing like it did six hours earlier, when Selena Gomez was belting out the chorus of “Love You Like A Love Song” in about the same area.

A woman in a red Egypt jersey carried her son past the Iran party. The boy slept on her left shoulder, face paint peeling on his cheek. Even a day like this had a bedtime.

No one left feeling superior.

No one left devastated.

Inclusion can be exhausting that way.