In a major development, the Iran football players refused to sing their national anthem in protest against violence by country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In a video doing the rounds on social media, the Iranian players can be seen staying silent when their country's national anthem was played.
The protest comes after Mahsa Zhina Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, was arrested by Iranian police for not wearing a hijab, her brother was told she'd be detained for a few hours and released.
Three days later she was dead.
Iran's notorious morality police', whose job it is to make sure women wear veils in public, have been accused of beating Amini, 22, so badly she went into a coma within hours of her arrest and had to be taken to hospital, where she died.
Amini's death sparked the largest protests seen in Iran since the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hundreds were killed as thousands marched through the streets telling Iran's supreme leader and the regime itself 'to get lost'.
