Iran's repressive mullahs misunderstand the point of sport. The Iranian people - for whom football is a second religion, worshipped in a 120,000-seater national stadium - do not. The Government's clumsy treatment of the national football team may yet prove to inflame the rebellion against Iran's rulers every bit as as fiercely as has the clergy's rigged election and the savagery with which they have sought to quell protests.

At least four players in Iran's national football team have reportedly been banned for life from playing for their national side. Their crime? They took to the pitch in Seoul last week for a World Cup qualifier against South Korea wearing wristbands - wristbands - in the emerald green that has become a badge of solidarity with the defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Just as the apparent murder last weekend of the student Neda Soltan lent a human face to the uprising in Iran, the controversy generated by the sportsmen's gesture of defiance has paraded Iran's turmoil to football fans across the world.

By stopping the footballers representing their country, Iran has worsened the prospects of an already faltering national team. Fifa, football's world governing body, banned Iran from international competition in 2006 after claims of improper interference by Tehran's rulers. That ban, later lifted, should now be reimposed until Iran learns to keep politics off the football pitch.

President Ahmadinejad, blamed for the sacking this year of the national football team coach, has become addicted to backroom fixing - from elections to football. A president who runs scared of a green wristband is not fit to run a football team, let alone a country.