Last month alone, two prominent Iranian soccer players found themselves summoned to the Ethics Committee of the Iranian soccer federation. Masoud Shojaei was called in for discussing corruption in Iranian soccer in an interview with a foreign media outlet. One week later, on Dec. 10, Mehdi Rahmati, the goalkeeper and current captain of the Esteghlal Football Club, was summoned for taking a picture with a woman who was not wearing a headscarf during a team camp in Armenia.

In June, the Ethics Committee suspended Sosha Makani, a goalkeeper with Tehran’s well-established Persepolis club, from domestic competitions for six months for having worn “inappropriate clothing.” Other players have also been summoned and in some cases faced suspensions over matters such as attending mixed gender parties, plucking their eyebrows, eating in public during the fasting month of Ramadan, getting tattoos and posting private photos online.

The measures taken by the Ethics Committee are not uncommon in Iran, and they have become a source of controversy on social media and in the country’s soccer community. Critics say the Ethics Committee’s interference in players’ personal lives is inappropriate and in violation of a FIFA statute.

Officials in the Ethics Committee think otherwise. They say the FIFA statute needs to be domesticized. In an interview with the semi-official ISNA news agency on March 6, 2016, the Ethics Committee’s current head, Judge Morteza Turak, discussed whether players should be penalized for having tattoos or their hair styled in certain ways. Turak said, “Some topics may not fit within the framework and principles of FIFA, but they fit within our Sharia [Islamic law] principles. In these cases, our Sharia principles will govern the rules. This is what domestication means, and FIFA has accepted the concept of domestication.”