The international women’s soccer match between Taiwan and New Zealand at the Kaohsiung Nanzih Football Stadium, scheduled for Tuesday last week, was canceled at the last minute amid safety concerns over poor field conditions raised by the visiting team.
The Football Ferns, as New Zealand’s women’s soccer team are known, had arrived in Taiwan one week earlier to prepare and soon raised their concerns. Efforts were made to improve the field, but the replacement patches of grass could not grow fast enough. The Football Ferns canceled the closed-door training match and then days later, the main event against Team Taiwan.
The safety concerns were valid. Female athletes have a two to three times higher risk of a dreaded knee injury — the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear — compared with their male counterparts. The reasons are multi-faceted: biomechanics, access to resources and hormones. The injury is devastating and season-ending, as rehabilitation takes about a year.
Unfortunately, a sport such as soccer that requires the knee to twist and turn puts players at high risk of tearing this important ligament, which provides stability to the knee joint. Long-term, ACL tears can result in painful osteoarthritis which can then lead to knee replacement surgery, often at younger ages for athletes compared with the general population.
Following this international embarrassment, would the Football Ferns ever come here again?
Decades ago, in 1987, they did. In fact, Taiwan has a long history in women’s soccer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when live sporting events were rare elsewhere, the Taipei Times covered the Taiwan Mulan Football League, a semi-professional women’s soccer league established in 2014.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan hosted several international tournaments that were precursors to the FIFA Women’s World Cup, which is now the premier event for women’s soccer.
A German documentary, Das Wunder von Taipeh, told the story of a team from Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, that traveled to Taiwan to participate in one of those early tournaments in 1981. The team’s undefeated run at that event became the impetus for the German Football Association to establish a women’s national team.
In 2023, the FIFA Women’s World Cup was held in Australia and New Zealand, and was expanded to 32 teams. Team Taiwan had their best shot at participating in the event for the first time since the 1991 debut, due to an extra spot being available for an Asian country, as the cohosts automatically qualified. Team Taiwan missed two opportunities to qualify. Both losses came down to just one penalty kick.
The best hope for Team Taiwan to participate in the FIFA Women’s World Cup again would be in 2031, when the tournament would be expanded to 48 teams. Between now and then, women’s soccer in Taiwan needs to grow on many fronts. More international events are needed, and the appetite exists. Tickets for the Taiwan vs New Zealand match sold out before the cancelation, but first there needs to be more high-quality soccer fields.
Much of the finger-pointing for the grass fiasco has been in the direction of the CTFA. The upcoming launch of the Ministry of Sports is an encouraging sign of the rising value being placed on sports, including women’s soccer. Hopefully, the increased national investment would lead to fewer humiliating moments such as the one that saw a highly-ranked visiting team cancel a match. It could mark the beginning of more opportunities for sports development in Taiwan.
Daphne I. Ling is a soccer fan, associate professor of public health at National Cheng Kung University and principal investigator of “The Women’s Soccer Health Study: From Head to Toe.”
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