The image Tehrangeles presented as Iran opened its seventh World Cup — a huge, adoring crowd wrapped in the flag, wearing the jersey, cheering on Team Melli in the most Iranian city outside Iran — masks a most complicated and, in the wake of unfathomable tragedy, increasingly fractured reality.

Things are not as they might have seemed inside SoFi Stadium, and on the carefully managed broadcast feed, as more than 70,000 watched Iran rally twice from deficits for a 2-2 Group G draw in Monday evening’s often pulsating if disappointing faceoff with New Zealand.

Inside the diaspora here in Los Angeles and environs, a community pegged at 700,000 but perhaps larger, the prevailing thought is that this Iran national team — one with a vigorous opportunity to reach the knockout stage for the first time — is nothing more than a tool of a gruesome regime that debases the culture and its citizenry, the public face of the brutally iron-fisted Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) that dominates every aspect of Iranian life. It is not the team of the people.

It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of Tehrangeles’ feelings about Team Melli playing World Cup games barely 10 miles from the Westwood avenues at the cultural center of L.A.’s Iranian community. Some are vociferously protesting the team’s presence, some are actively rooting for the opposition, many balance conflicting emotions concerning the Islamic Republic and the team they grew up idolizing, and a lot more are ignoring it all.

And many, as we saw inside SoFi, are putting politics aside and supporting the home side. On the inside, the estimate has at least two-thirds and as much as 85 percent of the community opposed to some extent to the national team.

“It’s not black and white,” said Roozbeh Farahanipour, a Westwood restaurateur, CEO of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and a 1999 student-uprising leader who escaped to the United States after he was condemned to death in Iran. “Technically, each of [the players, coaches and team staff], every single one of them, they have a personal life and personal perspective. When they are the jash [collaborator] of the regime, they become part of the regime.

“To me, they become a messenger of the IRGC, cultural messenger of the IRGC.”

How perception of the national team’s role has evolved, from a group that unites the people to one that solely serves the Islamic Republic, is a matter of perspective. The narratives conflict.

One suggests the turning point followed the September 2022 killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody of Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police, for allegedly wearing an “improper hijab” that failed to fully cover her hair while in public. Her death spawned the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) movement. Protests expanded across the country, lasting deep into 2023, and crackdowns by the IRGC — and the Basij, its massive, savage support force — led to hundreds dead and tens of thousands imprisoned.

Among those voicing their disgust with the violence and their solidarity with the people were star strikers Mehdi Taremi, who possesses IRGC connections, and Sardar Azmoun, who lashed out at the regime following Amini’s death (“Shame on you for killing so easily”) and said he would “sacrifice” his place with Team Melli “for one hair on the heads of Iranian women.” It cost neither of them their spots in Qatar, where the team refused to sing the national anthem when it met England, 66 days after Amini’s death, in its World Cup opener.

That changed everything. Players were immediately called into a meeting with Revolutionary Guard officers and told — according to a CNN report citing a World Cup security source — that should they fail to again sing the anthem or engage in political protest, their families would face prison, torture and loss of assets. Players and staff, closely monitored, quickly fell into line. Those most supportive of or sympathetic to the regime, led by veterans widely considered Islamic hardliners, became enforcers. Dissent was dead.

Team Melli was now “Team Mullah.”

January’s massacres, in which an estimated 43,000 people were killed by government forces — a number reported by the Toronto-headquartered International Centre for Human Rights in Iran and approached by leaked IRGC and interior ministry documents — massively deepened the wound. (President Masoud Pezeshkian’s unprecedented public apology undercut official claims of a few thousand deaths.)

Another narrative, embraced by those most rabidly opposed: It’s been this way all along, since the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979. You can see it in the flags.

‘This is Land of the Free’

The image of the lion and the sun, an ancient astrological sign for Leo, has represented Iran since the 15th century Safavid Dynasty, designed to reflect Iranian values and self-identity. It was the centerpiece of the green, white and red tricolor flag — the lion holding a shamshir, a curved Iranian sword, added to the motif in the early 1800s — that was adopted in 1907 and in service until the revolution. It’s the flag that unites the diaspora, that anchors it to the Iran it left behind. It’s the flag FIFA, at Iran’s insistence, banned as a political tool from World Cup stadiums four years ago.

It’s a lightning rod in this year’s protests, a defining feature in every gathering, a symbol to be smuggled into stadiums and brandished — with an accompanying extended middle finger for the anthem — in proud defiance of the authorities. Iran’s sports minister threatened that the team would stop its matches if the flag was unfurled inside venues, and, after a Los Angeles judge denied an injunction to overturn FIFA’s edict on free-speech grounds, SoFi security confiscated some of the flags before Monday’s game while allowing inside the image on T-shirts.

Plenty of them made it inside the bowl.

Banning the flag has “inflamed” the situation, made “the people more angry,” Farahanipour said. “Why should you ban the flag? This is not Qatar. This is not a Third World country. This is ‘Land of the Free.’ First Amendment of our Constitution is freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

“If anybody wants to carry the rainbow flag inside the stadium, do they have the guts to ban the rainbow flag? If anybody wants to take the MAGA flag inside the stadium, how they want to react? … If they want to ban the McDonald flag? If someone wants to go there and cheer for the burger of the McDonald, who the hell is the FIFA to talk about [what goes on] outside of the green field. Green field is in hand of the FIFA.”

Iran’s post-revolutionary flag maintained the tricolor but replaces the lion and the sun with a stylized “tulip” emblem that visually spells out “Allah.” “Allahu Akbar” is written 22 times in Kufic script along the edges of the green and red bands. Its meaning is clear.

“They displayed a very giant flag of Islamic Republic [for the national anthems],” Farahanipour said.“Which they had a right to do that, because that’s their team. Iranian team is not there. The Islamic Republic play. They’re singing the national anthem [glorifying the blood of martyrs in service to the theocracy] because their team is there.”

The diaspora’s team? It’s gone, most believe, but it’s a large community, and there are many opinions. The opposition here largely falls among three distinct factions. There might space for nuance within each, but those against the regime — not everyone in Tehrangeles is, all readily acknowledge — tend to …

• See soccer as non-political. “Let’s go out and cheer on our team.” The tulip flag, no problem, but that’s not a statement on the situation in Iran and “how we feel about that.” We’re here because “we love Team Melli.”

• Hate the regime, hate the flag … but Team Melli is “our team,” regardless of its connection to the regime. They represent Iran — as a culture, as a people, as a tradition, as home — “and we are behind them.” But “god damn the Islamic Republic!”

• Hate the regime, all it stands for, and all who represent it. Fuck the flag, fuck the anthem, fuck Team Melli, fuck the players — “they are evil terrorists; we hope they lose.” The only thing that matters is overthrowing the dictatorship.

“I would say 85 percent are on the same page to hate the team,” said Mathew Bahri, a real estate broker and USSF-licensed youth coach who has hosted Farsi-language radio station KIRN’s sports talk show since the turn of the century. “And 15 percent still say it’s football, ‘we shouldn’t talk, we shouldn’t put them on a pedestal that these are the thugs. We don’t believe that. They’re footballers.’ ”