Cork's Frank O’Farrell has a special place in Iranian sporting history
Cork's Frank O'Farrell.
From the Netherlands at the World Cup to Bayern Munich lifting their first European Cup, 1974 was a transformative year for football.
Something seemed to happen every week, regardless of country or club. In England, Bob Paisley replaced Bill Shankly at Liverpool, while Brian Clough was burned at Leeds United.
Johan Cruyff finished his first season at the Camp Nou by leading Barcelona to their first league title since 1960, and by doing so a relationship was created that would underline the next half-century of top-level football.
There were also singular events that still reverberate today, including Denis Law scoring on the day that saw Manchester United relegated and East Germany having a brief moment in the sun by defeating their near rivals at the World Cup.
Magdeburg also became the only club from behind the Berlin Wall to win a continental trophy, and they did so by defeating AC Milan in the European Cup Winners Cup final at De Kuip.
How he got to Persia, from went from the grind of English football, was fairly simple. It involved the coach accepting a job offer after rebuilding his reputation at Cardiff City following his high-profile sacking as Manchester United manager.
O’Farrell went to Wales in November 1973 with the club languishing at the bottom of the table after a run of results that saw just two league victories in 12 attempts.
The Turner’s Cross native immediately got to work and steadied the ship by masterminding memorable victories over Swindon Town, Sunderland, and Fulham, which helped move the team up to 15th place by the start of January.
Things went south during the turn of winter into spring, and that was when O’Farrell received a phone call from Iran after the country missed out on appointing Clough, who was a few months removed from his ill-fated 44-day spell in charge of Leeds.
"About a month before the end of the season, I had a phone call from one of the Iran officials, and he interviewed me up in London, he said what he wanted to talk to me about, and he offered me the job - which had been turned down by Brian Clough,” O’Farrell said in a 2009 interview.
"He'd been offered it first - he went out there. And then when I was offered I had a word with him [Clough], he said 'it looks quite promising, I just didn't fancy it.
“So he said, 'go out and have a look, and I think you might be surprised by what you see'.”
The problem was, Iran was hosting the 1974 edition of the Asia Games and the tournament’s success was to be defined by how their football team got on, meaning all the pressure was on O’Farrell to deliver.
"The success of the games really depended on how successful the soccer team would be," he added. "This was all explained to me before I went out and it appealed to me. They gave me a two-year contract.
In a strange, almost bizarre away, O’Farrell found himself and retribution in Iran. The country got exactly what they were looking for with the coach, who kicked off his tenure by guiding the national team to a seven-game winning run.
The accumulation of everything was the victory over Israel, with Ali Parvin scoring a 71st-minute winner in front of a crowd exceeding 110,000 spectators at the Aryamehr Stadium in Tehran.
The victory was a moment in the sun for O’Farrell as he quickly returned to England to manage Torquay United, while Iran went on reach the quarter-finals of the 1976 Olympic Games and qualify for their first-ever FIFA World Cup in 1978.
The country did not forget their former coach as they became mainstays at major international tournaments, they rubber-stamped this by making O’Farrell a ‘guest of honour’ at a special event held in Tehran in 2006.
O'Farrell passed away in 2022 at the age of 94 and through all of this, and the record still stands today in 2025, the coach remains the only person from the Republic of Ireland to win a senior international trophy.
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