The Story Of The Doomed LG Cup

GOAL - When Iran announced that on November 11th and 13th it would host a four team tournament with Paraguay, Togo and Romania, the news was greeted with lots of enthusiasm. After all this was to be an LG-sponsored tournament and Iranian Football Federation had been heavily criticized for not having a cohesive friendly preparation plan.
However, over the last week, the tournament began to unravel.

First, for a few days, Iran and South Korea’s political relationship went sour and put the whole LG sponsorship in doubt.

Second, Romania announced that it would not participate in the competition. The official reasoning was that the team is tired however newspapers and sports media inside Romania reported the political pressure from the government onto the Romanian football federation to skip the tournament was the real reason for not showing up. Interestingly, Romania quickly managed to get passed the tiredness of her national team and searched for another opponent on the same dates of the trip to Iran.

Third, it was announced that Macedonia would participate with a youth team or a B-C level team.

Fourth, it was announced that Paraguay would send a B team.

Finally, as Iranian sports media and football officials were trying to figure out the mess that have been created over the past seven days, the news came that Iran no longer desired LG to be the sponsor of the tournament (despite the written contract with this Korean company) due to the tense relationship between the two governments. The solution was that an unnamed sponsor would take over.

While absorbing and making sense of this chaos requires patience and a clear mind, it is now reported in the Iran’s media that Togo has possibly pulled out of the tournament.

At this point, in the best case scenario, Paraguay’s B team, Macedonia’s C team, Iran national team and an iffy Togo would participate in a tournament that has lost its sponsor.

The more likely scenario is that this tournament will get postponed indefinitely.

Kaveh Mahjoob