An AFC Asian Champions League match between Saudi Arabian and Iranian teams was canceled on Monday night amid a dustup over a statue of slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander general Qasem Soleimani, a club source said.
The match between Sepahan and Al-Ittihad in Isfahan, Iran, “has been canceled due to unanticipated and unforeseen circumstances,” the league said in a statement, without elaborating.
However, an official with the Saudi Arabian side Al-Ittihad said that a dispute arose after club administrators objected to a bust of Soleimani, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2020.
Photo: AFP
“The club administrators found a bust of Qasem Soleimani in the walkway to the pitch. It’s a pure football game and [the bust’s] presence is totally irrelevant,” the official said. “We asked them to remove it before going to the pregame warm-up and they didn’t remove it. The team went back to the lockers.”
The official said the two sides then met with AFC representatives to determine if the match would be rescheduled. Soleimani commanded the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and remains a revered figure in Iran following his assassination.
Sepahan general manager Mohammed Reza Saket told Iranian state television that his side would “immediately complain to the AFC” about the incident.
“The request of the Ittihad team was outside of sports customs and against the usual principles,” he said.
The dispute comes one month after Saudi Arabia and Iran announced a “groundbreaking” deal to resume home-and-away soccer matches between club sides after seven years of competing in neutral venues.
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