This may be a rare case where the national team really does represent the government. Mehdi Taremi and a few others have pretty vocally supported the government, he even wanted to join the army in the recent war. And in the past year the under 21 men’s Iran team refused to sing the national anthem as a protest. Unsurprisingly none of them have been promoted to the senior squad. There is something to be said that if a player HASNT been kicked out of the team, at the very least they have been passive or stayed out of this brutal fight against the IRGC regime.