As you cheer the Iranian women supporting their football team, remember one of us died before Fifa would listen

This week, thousands of Iranian women lawfully attended a football game for the first time since 1981. The gates of the stadium where the national team was playing Cambodia were crowded with women wearing red white and green jester hats; since the patriotic headgear clearly covered all of their hair, the authorities could not argue that the women were flouting the Islamic Republic’s “modesty” rule.

Women in Iran have been protesting against the enforced hijab law for some time now by taking them off in public spaces and waving them on sticks. A powerful image, yes, but not as fun as a sea of caps with bells on. Far from looking ridiculous, the women carried off the novelty hats with the innate elegance and poise typical of my Iranian sisters. (This is a trait I sadly did not inherit; instead I got the regressive “bufoonish, spits food out when she talks’’ gene, leaving me to admire and envy my Persian sisters.)

Fifa has been lobbied for years to force Iran to allow women to attend matches. The federation shrugged. After all, it was only a few girls watching a bit of football, right? You can’t expect anyone from Fifa to bother themselves with such trifles – or rather to understand the utter frustration and inhumanity of being unable to watch the game you love, to cheer on your team, to share their joy and pain in the flesh, just because you are female.

If the newly formed Islamic Republic had banned black people from its stadiums in 1981 instead of women, I imagine Fifa would have laid down the law then and there. But while racism is taboo, Fifa seemed for decades to have no quarrel with sexism.

It took the most devastating act of protest to make the federation wake up and threaten to ban the Iranian team unless women were allowed into its stadiums. It took a woman killing herself in protest.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sahar Khodayari disguised herself as a man to watch her team, Esteghlal, at the Azadi Stadium (“Azadi”, ironically enough, means “freedom”). She was caught, jailed, and at her trial last month told she faced six months in prison. Outside the court, she poured petrol on herself and set it alight; she died from her injuries a week later.

Sahar became known as “blue girl” after the colours of her team, and at the match, chants of “blue girl” rose defiantly from the women’s section, which was guarded by 150 police officers.

I’m trying to keep it light in this column, I really am. But dammit, a woman set herself on fire to make people understand how ghastly and sordid her treatment the treatment of her and of all women in Iran really is.

It took a woman setting fire to herself and dying to make a bunch of (mostly) men from a Swiss-based organisation to understand that women must have equal rights to men.

Sorry for shouting, but it really is maddening.

I only mention it’s a Swiss-based organisation because in the west, we consider ourselves so much more civilised than everybody else. It’s easy to write off the rules the Iranian government make as the work of a bunch of fanatics who’ve imported their moral values from the dark ages; frankly, you’d be right. But what was Fifa’s excuse for taking so long to act? What was the excuse of the “progressive” westerners?

In the end, this was still a pretty small concession. The 4,600 seats allocated to women took up less than six per cent of a stadium that seats 78,000 people. This was not for lack of demand; The first 3,500 allocated sold out in an hour, and then the rest were opened up.

When it comes to compassion for women, the Iranian government has proved again and again to be a solid brick wall – and when we in the west don’t act where we can, we are complicit. It wasn’t Sahar’s action itself that forced the Islamic Republic to allocate a few thousand tickets to women; it was Fifa’s eventual intervention. Why so late? After all the lobbying, why so tragically late?

Today is the Day of The Girl. My football-loving six-year-old daughter goes to training in her big brother’s old football shirt. She knows who “Greta” is, and she’s excited about the young girl who’s trying to save the planet. And she doesn’t know about her through me; I’m too busy picking their clothes up off the floor and hiding biscuits to talk to them much about politics. She knows about her through school and through Newsround.

My daughter can go to football matches. But she has the same fight on her hands that all girls do regardless of what country they are raised in. Like Greta, if ever she tries to stick her head above the parapet, she’ll be criticised for her looks as well as her sensibilities.

This happens to us women from when we are very young girls, before we can process the fact that the obstacles put in our way aren’t inevitable; they’re the work of those who feel threatened by women who want to be heard, want to move forward, or just want to go to a bloody football match.