Two Countries Where Being Gay Can Get You Killed Meet In World Cup’s Gayest Game

Only FIFA could pull this off.

In what may be the most spectacularly tone-deaf scheduling decision in the history of organized sport, two of the world’s most enthusiastic persecutors of gay people will square off Friday in the most aggressively rainbow-festooned city in America — on “Pride Weekend.”

Egypt will take on Iran in Seattle on Friday at 8:00 p.m. PT. Try not to laugh.

On one side of the pitch: Iran, where gay sex is punishable by death, flogging is the light sentence, and the former foreign minister once cheerfully explained to a reporter that executing gay people was simply a matter of “moral principles.” The country that compels children into conversion therapy. The country that effectively outs gay people on their military ID cards so their families can murder them — which, in at least one documented case, they did.

On the other side: Egypt, where homosexuality isn’t technically illegal but police troll Grindr to lure gay men into arrests, courts have interpreted “debauchery” law to cover anything involving two men who like each other, and the national football federation sent FIFA an actual letter “categorically rejecting any activities related to supporting homosexuality during the match.”

And the venue? Seattle — a city so enthusiastically pro-gay it designated this specific game a “Pride Match Day” before FIFA even announced who was playing in it. Outside Lumen Field, organizers are preparing “PrideFest,” which will sprawl across five blocks of the city with three stages of free entertainment on Saturday. The city’s “Unity Loop” connects LGBTQ-owned businesses across the waterfront. Keke Palmer is performing somewhere nearby.

Iran, naturally, asked FIFA to ban rainbow flags inside the stadium. FIFA said absolutely not. Iran’s coach showed up to Thursday’s press conference and announced his team would only answer questions about soccer. “I said to you earlier, we are here to play football,” he declared. “For nothing else.”

Egypt’s federation issued a formal letter of disgust. FIFA president Gianni Infantino clarified, somewhat desperately, that there is “no Pride Match” — just a regular FIFA match that happens to be occurring in a city that is currently covered in rainbows.

To summarize: two nations where gay people face imprisonment, torture, forced surgery, flogging, and execution have been deposited, by the grace of God and the FIFA scheduling committee, into the middle of the largest Pride celebration in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle could not have designed a better trolling if it tried.

On the field, Egypt needs a win or a draw to advance. Iran needs a win to have any chance of topping the group.

As for the rainbow flags? They’ll be there.

Every last one of them.