Iran U23

Gold at the 2002 Asian Games in Busan remains the high point for Team Melli Omid, and it came with a squad older than the competition's usual age band — Ali Daei and Yahya Golmohammadi featured as over-age additions alongside a generation still working its way toward the senior side. Four years later in Doha the same tournament yielded bronze. Between those two results sits the 2015 WAFF U-23 Championship, won outright; the same competition returned a runners-up finish in 2023.

The side carries no separate founding date of its own — it exists as an age-limited layer of Iranian football overseen by the Iran Football Federation — but its first match on record was played on 3 December 1977, a 2–1 win over Kuwait under Heshmat Mohajerani. The under-23 format only became the fixed standard once the Asian Games adopted it in 2002 and the AFC followed with its own U-23 championship from 2013; at that tournament the furthest Iran has gone is the quarter-finals, in 2016.

Japan is treated as the sharpest test in Asia, South Korea and Iraq fill out the regional fixtures, and matches against Saudi Arabia carry weight beyond the pitch. Omidreza Ravankhah has run the side since 2025, working with a pool that keeps turning over by design: Mohammad Amin Hazbavi, Saman Fallah and Amirali Sadeghi have all stepped up to the senior national team in recent seasons, the usual route through for a squad built to graduate its best players rather than keep them.

Home games are played at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran, in the white and red the national sides have carried for decades. Renovation ahead of 2016 converted it to an all-seater and brought capacity down from roughly 100,000 to 78,116.