Germany's Green Party called for Iran to be expelled from next summer's World Football tournament. FIFA immediately rejected the call on the basis that politics can not mix with football. The call followed the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.

FIFA's Andreas Herren rejected the call by saying to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, "As far as FIFA is concerned, the issue doesn't come up. We strictly separate politics from sport. We always tell politicians to keep out. This is concerned with comments from a politician that the international community must respond to. Iran has qualified for the finals and the Iranian Football Federation has not done anything wrong."

"A country with that sort of president, who drags his country into isolation, has no business at the World Cup," Angelika Beer, a German Green MP in the European Parliament, said in an interview with a German radio station.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters earlier this week that, "It is a childish attitude to follow Zionist propaganda aimed at depriving the Iranian football team of its place on the pretext that Iran mixed up sports with politics."

Iran coach Branko Ivankovic reminded reporters that "a time to make friends" is the official World Cup motto. "The best thing about sport is that it is completely apart from politics. FIFA's official position has always been to ban any mixing of sports and politics."

The last nation to be banned from participating on international tournaments was Serbia, due to the embargo imposed by United Nations. Serbia was expelled from the European Cup in 1992 and was not allowed to participate in the qualifiers of the 1994 World Cup.

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