The Iranian national football team defeated Iraq to book a berth for the 2022 World Cup in front of a sparsely populated stadium and just enough women to satisfy FIFA supervisors.

With Asian qualifiers now into its final stages Iran faced Iraq at Tehran’s Azadi stadium on Thursday and won thanks to a close-range solo by Mehdi Taremi to become the first country to earn its place at the year-end tournament in Qatar.

The Islamic Republic, which has barred female spectators from stadiums for years claiming it would violate religious rules of decency, was forced by world soccer body FIFA to allow women to attend a match in 2019.

A month after the FIFA warning in September that year, Iranian women were allowed to watch a World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Cambodia.

Despite the FIFA order to allow women into stadiums without restriction and in numbers determined by demand for tickets, Iran announced 2,000 of the 10,000 tickets for the match against Iraq were exclusively reserved for women and they had to sit in segregated areas.

The number of women allowed to buy tickets was less than the match against Cambodia and there were many women who gathered outside the gates, purportedly because many of the promised seats were given to women cherry-picked by the authorities.

There were also reports that a dozen female reporters and journalists were not allowed into the stadium.