Iran squad trains in Seattle as Kraken joins FIFA
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- Iran's national football team began its 2026 FIFA World Cup preparations on 25 June with an opening training session at the University of Washington in Seattle.
- The squad is preparing for its opening tournament match against New Zealand.
- Seattle is one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which is staged across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The University of Washington campus is serving as Iran's official training base as the team acclimates to the Pacific Northwest ahead of the competition.
Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has been named FIFA's first Official Crypto Exchange Supporter for the 2026 tournament, marking the first time a crypto exchange has held an official sponsorship tier at a FIFA World Cup.
The World Cup final alone typically attracts more than one billion viewers globally, underlining the scale of the platform Kraken has secured.
Neither Iran nor New Zealand currently has an active fan token, reflecting a broader pattern in which national team fan tokens remain considerably rarer than their club-level equivalents.
Clubs including Manchester City, Atlético Madrid, and Tottenham Hotspur have each explored crypto sponsorships or fan token partnerships to varying degrees, while national federations have been slower to follow.
National football federations operate under FIFA and their respective continental governing bodies, adding bureaucratic approval layers that club sides do not face.
For a country such as Iran, existing international sanctions regimes make any cryptocurrency partnership considerably more complex to execute.
During the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, fan tokens for participating nations were virtually absent, and the 2026 edition appears to be following the same pattern.
Fan token platform Socios.com partnered with dozens of football clubs during the previous cycle, though national team adoption remained minimal.