Iran’s footballers will be welcome at this year’s World Cup, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday, distancing the United States government from a proposal that Italy could take their place in the tournament.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Rubio denied that Washington had asked the Iranian team not to come to the World Cup, but warned that the US may yet bar entry to members of the Iranian delegation it judged to have ties to Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is regarded as a terrorist organisation by Washington and several other governments.

No one “from the US has told them they can’t come”, Rubio said of Iran’s World Cup participation.

“The problem with Iran, it would be not their athletes, it would be some of the other people [they] would want to bring with them, some of whom have ties to the IRGC. We may not be able to let them in, but not the athletes themselves,” Rubio added.

Rubio was responding to a reported proposal from Italy-born US special envoy Paolo Zampolli, who told the Financial Times he had floated the idea of Italy taking Iran’s World Cup place to US President Donald Trump and football’s world governing body, Fifa.

The proposal was dismissed out of hand by the Italian government and sports officials earlier on Thursday.