National football team of Iran 🇮🇷 qualified for FIFA World Cup for the second consecutive time. Never happened before Russia 2018 🏆.

Team Melli is the nickname of the squad among Iranian fans: literally meaning “National Team”, this expression is used to call all national selections for all sports. So we have Team Melli for wrestling, football, futsal, volleyball, basketball, etc… 🤼‍♂️ ⚽️ ⛹️‍♀️

Carlos Queiroz on Team Melli

Asked about his opinion on whether the current Team Melli is better than the 2014 squad, head coach Carlos Queiroz said that now:

1. we have more solutions;
2. we are better prepared;
3. we have more experience;
4. especially in this moment we have more players in Europe;

The Portuguese coach – who led Iran to play 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2015 AFC Asian Cup – added that in order to pass the group stage the squad need «to put in place the best preparation especially for local-based players». 🏋️

Your opinion on Team Melli

All fans love Team Melli, but they know that this time there is a big possibility that somebody of our favourite players will remain at home. Queiroz himself admitted that it will be not easy to select the squad for Russia 2018.

In Italy 🇮🇹 they say that there are 60 millions head coaches – the same number of the population – because Italian people use to criticize the National football team. Sometimes it seems to be the same for Iran, just read media reports or forum discussions or social media posts: you can read not only by people living in Iran, but also by fans from all over the world, sometimes even with no connection with the Middle Eastern country. 🌎 🌍 🌏

We are not Carlos Queiroz, but – waiting for the FIFA World Cup – we can post on social our Team Melli XI (line up): Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc with the hashtag #MyTeamMelli. And if you speak Persian you can use #تیم_ملی_من 😉