Sport policy in Iran

Abstract

This paper reviews the sport policy in Iran, focusing specifically on the national governments' administrative system for implementing sport policy, the intersection of sport policy with the structure of government in Iran and the prominence of sport within wider areas of government policies. The trend over the past 30 years has clearly been for the Iranian government and politicians to become more closely involved in sport and to seek to exploit sport in pursuit of a broad range of domestic and international policy objectives. However, politicians have found it far less easy to establish a stable set of administrative arrangements for sport within the machinery of government. There have been two key problems: first, establishing a viable relationship with the sport governing bodies and second, the identification of a suitable departmental location for sport. It is only in the past 10 years that the Iranian government has begun to develop links with the governing bodies for soccer and the Olympic sports.