In the annals of bizarre World Cup broadcast errors, Turkish state broadcaster TRT’s handling of Monday’s Iran-New Zealand match is going to be hard to top.
Iran and New Zealand were playing to a 2-2 draw in Los Angeles when TRT commentator Murat Ekrem Çimen started the broadcast with the two teams completely mixed up in his head. For the entire opening four minutes, Çimen described New Zealand’s attacks as Iran’s and Iran’s as New Zealand’s, never once catching himself. It wasn’t until the cameras showed Iranian forward Mehdi Taremi from behind, his name printed clearly across his shoulders, that Çimen seemed to realize something was off.
#Dilim #SONDAKİKA
İran-Yeni Zelanda maçında TRT spikeri:— Yaklaşık 4 dakika boyunca İran’ı Yeni Zelanda, Yeni Zelanda’yı ise İran olarak anlattı.
— Birçok futbolcunun ismini karıştırdı. pic.twitter.com/QRndAntBbt— Cumhuriyetin sesi gazetesi (@sesicumhuriyet) June 16, 2026
How a broadcaster with nearly three decades of experience, per the Associated Press, manages to confuse two teams for four straight minutes without anyone in his ear correcting him sooner is anyone’s guess. Çimen has called matches for TRT since 2008 and previously served as the network’s sports chief.
In response, TRT has pulled Çimen from the rest of its World Cup broadcast team pending an investigation, and released a statement calling the error “unacceptable” for someone at his level of experience. He won’t be back on the air for the remainder of the tournament.
This World Cup has already produced its share of broadcast headaches across dozens of countries and language feeds, including Fox’s Darren Fletcher getting immediately humbled after questioning whether Japan’s players were tall enough to compete on headers, only for Japan to score the equalizer off a header roughly a minute later. Fletcher stayed on the call and laughed it off. Çimen evidently did not get that same grace, and four minutes of mistaken identity is a considerably harder thing to laugh off than one bad prediction, anyway.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.