The general manager of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk called on FIFA to exclude Iran from the World Cup in Qatar and replace it with his country\u2019s national team, while Kyiv accused the Iranian authorities of handing over Russian drones that are helping to invade the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Iranian leaders are happy to see their national team at the World Cup, Ukrainians will be killed by Iranian planes and Iranian missiles,\u201d Sergey Balkin said in a statement posted on social media.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, Kyiv accused Tehran of supplying Russia with the Shahed 136 suicide bombers, which it uses to attack energy infrastructure, which Iran and Russia have repeatedly denied.<\/p>\n
Balkin condemned what his country was going through, saying that \u201ceach of these aircraft was manufactured and delivered by the Iranian authorities, and the Iranian military and trainers directly managed the launch of the aircraft\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cShakhtar asks FIFA and the entire international community to immediately ban the Iranian national team from playing in the World Cup after the country was directly involved in terrorist attacks against Ukrainians,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Balkin said FIFA must replace Iran with a Ukrainian team that \u201cproved they deserve to be in the World Cup\u201d and \u201cplayed with their heart\u201d, he said, during the European playoffs in June. Follow the international soccer wedding qualifiers.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian team, led by Oleksandr Zinchenko and Andrykh Yarmolenko, defeated Scotland 3-1 in Glasgow, before losing 1-0 to Wales in the play-off final and failing to secure a ticket to Qatar.<\/p>\n
The World Cup regulations allow FIFA to replace one national team with another, particularly in the event of a withdrawal by a participating country, but do not specify the criteria used to designate a replacement team.<\/p>\n
Balkin concluded by saying that replacing Iran with Ukraine for political reasons \u201cwould be a historic and mathematically justified decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: EuroNews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The general manager of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk called on FIFA to exclude Iran from the World Cup in Qatar and replace it with his country\u2019s national team, while Kyiv accused the Iranian authorities of handing over Russian drones that are helping to invade the country. \u201cWhile Iranian leaders are happy to see their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":65390,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65391,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65389\/revisions\/65391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}