Mehdi Taremi: From Iranian military to Champions League final with Inter

Times

2 days ago

For one tiny fragment of time, the possibility of doing something extraordinary appears. How many opportunities do you get, in your entire career, to execute something indelible, to make the world stop and gasp? As Nanu's high, outswinging cross comes over from the right, Mehdi Taremi weighs the angles, the timing, the obstacles in front of him, and chooses to go for it. Then he launches himself into an act which is equal parts biomechanical genius and blind faith.
His incredible overhead kick against the eventual champions Chelsea in the 2021 quarter-final remains the last Champions League goal to finish in the Puskas Award top three. Arguably, no one has since scored a better goal at a higher level of football.
But what strikes you most, watching the video back, is the dissonance of the reaction. There is no explosion of incredulous joy. The stands are empty. No one is going out of their mind with the sheer 'Ohmygoddidyoujustseethat' of it. Taremi doesn't allow himself so much as a fist pump or a high five; he simply jogs backwards towards his own half with no expression on his face besides a faint grimace of exhaustion. There is a certain humility here: the humility of the unobserved.
Most of the 40-odd footballers whose journeys will converge in the 2025 Champions League final have scarcely known life without eyes on them. Achraf Hakimi was scouted by Real Madrid when he was eight. Gianluigi Donnarumma and Warren Zaïre-Emery have been spoken of as generational prospects since they were 15 years old. Yann Bisseck made his Bundesliga debut before his 17th birthday.
That it takes belief to reach the highest level of the sport has always been true. But in this age, it is also almost impossible to reach the top without gathering a retinue of believers — the social-media hype-men, the friendly journalists, the agents, the coaches, the scouts, going back to that first moment of discovery.
What happens, though, if no one sees you? What if you're from one of the few places on earth the watchers don't go? Taremi was born in Bushehr, a port city on the Persian Gulf coast of Iran. He learnt to play football there on a bare, dusty pitch with a gnarled old juniper tree growing in the middle. The tree was protected and could not be cut down, Taremi told the Iranian football journalist Adel Ferdosipour in an interview three years ago, as they visited his home town, so he learnt to dribble round it, to play wall-passes with it, to find the beauty in the obstacle. Who was the first person who told you you were a talented footballer, Ferdosipour asks him? Taremi purses his lips, ums and ahs, thinks for a bit. 'I found it out myself,' he says.
You might have noticed Taremi, wearing the No99 shirt, in the epic semi-final second leg against Barcelona, for his bustling hold-up play after he came on as a substitute. He supplied the assist for Davide Frattesi's winning goal. At the end, as the Barcelona players splintered into postures of individual desolation and the Inter players ran into each other's arms and the cameras followed their exuberant celebrations, quietly, in a corner of the pitch that no one was looking at, Taremi went over to Raphinha, lying face-down in the turf, peeled him up off the floor and gave him a consoling tap on the shoulder.
In truth, Taremi hasn't had a great season. In 43 appearances, he's only managed three goals. He has no chance of dislodging Marcus Thuram and Lautaro Martínez from Simone Inzaghi's starting XI, and he's not likely to play a significant role in Munich. He might not even get on the field. So why write about him? Because sometimes the unlikeliness is the whole point. Because sometimes the glory is in the journey.
His mother told him that his dream wouldn't lead him anywhere, that he was 'chasing after the wind'. When she left him in the care of his aunt one day, Mehdi's football was placed on a shelf too high for him to reach. He still has the scar on the back of his head from when he climbed to try to reach it, and fell to the floor. His father, who had been a footballer himself, was more encouraging, and when he was 18, Taremi joined his hometown club. Still, at an age when Martínez and Nicolò Barella and Alessandro Bastoni had already made their international debuts, Taremi was serving out his military conscription in a garrison.
Eventually, he joined Persepolis, one of Iran's biggest clubs, where he found someone who believed in him: their manager, Ali Daei, the former Iran striker, once the all-time top scorer in men's international football. In his first three seasons, Taremi scored 50 goals. But he knew that in order to reach the top of the sport, he needed to leave his homeland. A move was arranged to the Turkish club Caykur Rizespor, but at the last minute Taremi, along with his team-mate Ramin Rezaeian, decided it just didn't feel right, and backed out of the transfer. For reneging on the agreement, Fifa banned the two players for four months each. In the interview with Ferdosipour for his Football360 channel, Taremi recalled that he and Rezaeian cried in each other's arms when the news came through.
After one more season at Persepolis, he ended up at Al-Gharafa in the Qatari league. By now he was established in the national team, and it was this that would give him his big opportunity. The Iran manager was the Portuguese coach, Carlos Queiroz, who recommended him to Carlos Carvalhal, then the manager of Rio Ave, a small club in the Primeira Liga. It's important not to overlook this: though his story is in some ways a fairytale, Taremi had to work his connections to get himself noticed. Taking a leap of faith — and an enormous pay cut from his Qatari salary — he moved to Portugal.
One 20-goal season at Rio Ave was enough to persuade Porto to sign him. He was 28 when he played in the Champions League for the first time, against Manchester City in 2020. When he moved to Inter, after four stellar seasons at Porto, last summer, he sounded like a man who had come to the end of a long odyssey. 'This is the happiest moment of my life,' he told the club website. 'It has been a very beautiful journey for me.' Little did he know that there was a Champions League final in his future.
But that's the thing about Taremi's journey: the next link in the chain was never clear. He didn't plot his move to Rio Ave with Porto in his sights, and he couldn't count on interest from Serie A when he moved to Porto. He just flung himself at each opportunity, living entirely in that moment and trusting that his talent would find its own path.
And now he has reached the biggest game in football. Elite club football can sometimes seem like a hermetically sealed world of privilege, where the participants are identified from a young age and groomed for greatness in academies. But it matters that you can still get from as far outside that world as you can imagine to the pinnacle of the sport. And even if Taremi doesn't play, his presence, his having got there, still feels like a kind of triumph.
Champions League final