Football (known as soccer in America, because most Americans don’t know what football is) doesn’t play a great role in Taiwan. It’s so unknown there that the “Chinese Taipei Football Association”, i. e. Taiwan’s football association, doesn’t even run an English-language website, even though its history, originally under the name of The Republic of China Football Association, dates back to 1924. It entered the Féderation Internationale de Football Association (better known as FIFA) in 1954, and helped to establish the Asian Football Federation with other Asian countries.
Taipei Stadium, Deaflympics 2009 (中文维基百科, click on picture for source)
In the process of countries from Japan to the US switching diplomatic recognition to China, Taiwan’s football association “obtained” FIFA permission to change its name to Chinese Taipei Football Association (CTFA), and it returned into the Asian Football Federation in 1989 (一九八Ο年獲國際足總同意更名為中華台北足球協會，一九八九年重返亞洲足聯會籍) – no mention of the political backgrounds on the CTFA’s website. “Chinese Taipei” is the usually name under which Taiwan is tolerated, as a participant in international sports events, given Chinese diplomatic pressure on international organizations to keep Taiwan’s profile low.
As soon as in 1976, Taiwan faced Chinese pressure in the international sports arena. Holger Obermann, who had been imported by the Taiwanese football association as a national coach in 1975, remembers how the country’s Olympic team was booted out of the 1976 Olympics qualifiers. China had successfully lodged a protest at the International Olympic Committee in Montreal.
Taiwan remains as far away from a world soccer qualification, as Germany is from a global baseball championship, Obermann mused in 2009.
But while the Olympic team’s situation may be bleak, it isn’t necessarily hopeless. At the first leg against Jordan last month, in the qualifying process for the Olympic Games in London in 2012, Taiwan’s Olympic soccer team lost against their Jordanian hosts, by 0 – 1. It could have been much worse:
Jordan dominated the majority of the match at the King Abdullah International Stadium but could only muster an 83rd minute Khalil Baniateyah effort to show for their efforts while Chinese Taipei coach Chang Sheng Ping will be pleased to have left Amman having conceded just one goal,
the Asian Football Federation wrote on its website. Prior to the qualifying game, the Taiwanese team had faced difficulties as their training venue in Jordan wasn’t in good shape, and they had only one opportunity to walk across the actual playing field once, familiarizing themselves with the location, the CTFA website wrote on February 23. Jordanian Football Association secretary-general Khalil Al Salem (阿薩蘭) reportedly apologized for the problems at the training field, which had been caused by irregation problems, due to lacking water.
Some of the better-known players are Zhang Han (張涵, striker), Chen Yu-lin (陳俞霖, left-back defender), and Chen Yi-wei (陳毅維, a midfielder, or defender). Chang Sheng-ping (張生平) is the Taiwanese Olympic team’s head coach. The CTFA website has a page with the complete 2011 Olympic team.
The team’s history – it participates both in the Asian Games and in the Olympic Games, internationally – isn’t even known to Wikipedia (English) in every detail. It apparently has a history of not having qualified for Olympic Games since 1964, but was actually an Asian Games champion both in 1954 and in 1958.*)
Klaus, a German reporter in Taiwan, is determined to show up at the second leg of the Olympic team’s qualifying game against Jordan, at the Taipei Stadium, on Wednesday, March 9 at 7 p.m. (about opposite of IKEA’s furniture shopping center, where Nanjing Road and Dunhua Road join each other – 台北田徑場, 南京東路 and 敦化北路, apparently). He asks every foreigner in Taiwan (or at least in Taipei) to join him, to vocally support the Taiwanese team, and to turn the game into Taiwan’s finest ninety minutes to date.
FIFA does a bit more than the CTFA to make Taiwanese football known internationally. They provide some – even if not always realtime – information on a webpage dedicated to “Chinese Taipei”.
But defeating Jordan on Wednesday could make the real difference.
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Update/Note
*) [March 9, 2011] There’s a footnote to those victorious occasions in history, as pointed out in this comment: the star players on those teams were actually Hong Kong residents, hired by the Republic of China, Taiwan. The Taiwanese started to build their own team – consisting of members of mainland refugee families and old Taiwanese families – in the 1970s, according to one of the coaches of the times, Holger Obermann.
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