"In the name of God the most merciful," Mr Hamid-Reza Assefi, Iran's ambassador to Paris began his statement. The Iranian football team had contacted him to say how unhappy and offended they were. Would Iran pull out of the World Cup? "We hope it won't go that far," the ambassador replied. The "offence" was the broadcast by the private French television station, M6, of Not Without My Daughter, the story of Betty Mahmoody (shown on RTE last night), an American woman imprisoned by her Iranian husband's family in Tehran. "The choice of this broadcast offends an entire people with a centuries-old culture," Khodadad Azizi, one of the team's star players told journalists. The players suspected "Zionist manipulation".
With millions of Iranians eagerly awaiting the Iran-US match on Sunday, Iran is unlikely to pull out, but the incident has shown what powerful tensions lie under the surface of football bonhomie.
These are the sensitivities which the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) hopes to exploit with its alternative to the World Cup - eight debates on human rights abuses in countries with teams in the championship.
Before Tunisia played England on Monday, the FIDH discussed freedom of expression - or more specifically, the lack thereof in Tunisia - at a Marseilles meeting. Mr Khemais Chamari, the exiled former Tunisian league leader who served eight months in a Tunisian prison, identified 20 Tunisian policemen in the audience.
Mr Claude Katz, the Paris lawyer who heads the FIDH, says the Tunisian government severely represses all political opposition and human rights groups under the pretext of fighting Islamic fundamentalism. Before fleeing Tunisia, Mr Chamari was imprisoned on vague charges of "complicity with foreign countries" and "endangering state security". His successor at the Tunisian league, Mr Khemais Ksila, is still in prison. "Any criticism of the government is interpreted as an expression of support for the fundamentalists," Mr Katz says.
In the run-up to tonight's France-Saudi Arabia match, French and Arab intellectuals were invited by the FIDH to discuss human rights and women's rights. "After the war with Iraq in 1991 we thought there would be an evolution towards more democracy and women's rights in Saudi Arabia, but it never happened," Mr Katz says. "In the name of the Koran, Saudi women are deprived of even the most basic freedoms that men enjoy."
To mark Sunday's US-Iran match, the FIDH will discuss the death penalty - practised in both countries. The federation is against the death penalty no matter who carries it out - "a barbaric punishment at the end of the 20th century", Mr Katz calls it.
Colombia, which will play Tunisia on June 22nd, has one of the worst human rights records in South America, and the debate in Montpellier will focus on miscarriage of justice and impunity.
Twenty-five thousand people are murdered every year in Columbia, probably the highest murder rate in the world. "Some of these killings are common crimes, and some are related to drug trafficking," Mr Katz says. "But they are often done by paramilitary groups who claim to be fighting guerrillas. The military itself is often implicated in assassinations."
World Cup organisers rejected a demand by members of the German parliament that Yugoslavia be excluded from the competition because of Belgrade's repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
The FIDH did not support the German initiative, because "you can't hold football players responsible for their governments' actions," Mr Katz says. His group will, however, take advantage of the matches played by Yugoslavia to denounce what he calls a repeat of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing of Bosnia.
But isn't the FIDH a kill-joy, mixing politics with football?
Mr Katz laughs. "Human rights organisations are always kill-joys," he says. "That's our role - and we're happy to fulfil it."