Goal Programme - IR Iran Football Federation - 2004

Iran rank among Asia's most prominent football nations. Their most recent successes include gold medals at the Asian Games Football Tournament in 1998 and 2002. They are supreme masters of the game of futsal, having won successive confederation championships between 1999 and 2002. It was therefore no surprise to see Iran as the only Asian team keeping abreast with the world's best at the FIFA Futsal World Championship in Guatemala in 2000. Several players switched to European clubs after the 1998 FIFA World Cup? - most of them to Germany. Ali Daei (Arminia Bielefeld, Bayern Munich and Hertha BSC), Mahdi Mahdavikia (VfL Bochum and Hamburger SV), Karim Bagheri (Arminia Bielefeld, then Charlton Athletic in England), Vahid Hashemian (VfL Bochum) and Khodaded Azizi (1. FC Cologne, then San José in the USA) have all helped to spread the reputation of Iranian football around the world.

The first Goal project - the national football academy in Tehran - is already fully operational and producing good results. It will serve as a model for other projects planned for other regions of Iran over the next few years. A second Goal project, involving the purchase of association headquarters in Tehran, was approved by the Goal Bureau on 17 February 2004. The building, which will be able to accommodate future growth in the association, will provide the forward-thinking administration with premium working conditions and will help the association with its work, which was previously taken care of by decentralised regional associations. The new headquarters were officially opened on 25 June 2004 by FIFA Executive Committee member and Goal Bureau chairman Mohamed Bin Hammam.