The World Cup can be considered as a global convergence of nations, and a movement towards world peace, which gives hope and joy to the nations dealing with difficulties. Iran is also one of the safest places that ships of joy and peace can anchor in during storms.

The World Cup is an opportunity to bring football into art and culture field and look at this event through the eyes of artists. Meanwhile, caricature is an international language that is highly accepted among people with the benefit of humor, and people with any race and language understands it

So, we decided on holding a cartoon competition with the theme of “World Cup”. This competition was designed in the spring of 2022, and the call for it was published at the beginning of the summer on the Irancartoon website and other websites of countries in Asia, Europe, Far East and Latin America. In the caricature section 508 works were submitted and 1228 works in the cartoon section were received. Totally, 579 artists from 72 countries have sent 1,736 works to the secretariat of the international “the World Cup” cartoon and caricature contest.

In the cartoon section with the free theme, artists mostly selected “peace and friendship” as the subject of their works. The theme in caricature section was “The faces of the Soccer football players or the Technical staff of the teams have qualified for the Qatar World Cup 2022”.

It should be mentioned that Iran is the only team that its presence in the World Cup competition 2022 has been accompanied by a cultural event, and held a competition at the international level to the full.

Professors Bahman Abdi, Sajjad Rafei and Mohammad Reza Dostmohammadi were the national jury member of this festival. Luis Ordonez from Argentina and Angel Boligan from Mexico were also foreign members of the jury board. Abbas Ghazizahedi was also elected as the executive secretary of this event.

Selecting the finalist took place in several stages. At first stage, the Iranian jury members selected 850 works among the all received artworks; In the next step, the final works were selected by national and international jury members, and thus the winners of this competition were determined.

There were three winners in each category, who awarded $2,000, $1,500, and $1,000 in cash, a trophy, and an honorable mention respectively. In addition, five people were appreciated in each section, and 25 people were selected for final in each section.

Also, master Javad Alizadeh received a special award for a lifetime effort in the field of football cartoons.

It is also worth considering that Iran is the only country that has planned and tried to represent the World Cup theme in the field of art. The number of participants confirm it. Iran is in the first rank of the contests in the case of the number of artists (176) participated in this festival; Turkey is in second rank with 33 artists, and Brazil is in third rank with 31 artists.

It is worth mentioning that the presence of numerous Argentine, Colombian and Cuban artists from Latin America was impressive. Also from Europe, the presence of artists from Uzbekistan, Serbia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Italy was very noteworthy.

poster: by Michael Kountouris from Greece

Poster design: by Masoud Najabati