"We are going to have the national team. That's the greatest thing ever that could have happened to the team." Fatima Yousufi said that. She left Afghanistan with one backpack — her words — "to be safe and to continue to be alive." Now she's a goalkeeper preparing for international football in Auckland.
When the Taliban retook Afghanistan in 2021, they shut down all women's sport overnight. Players went into hiding. The evacuation that followed was frantic and fragmented. Thirteen players eventually settled in Australia, where they spent five years training in limbo — no official status, no federation recognition, no national anthem. Just the belief that it would eventually mean something.
In April, FIFA granted the Afghan women's team eligibility for international competition. That's the turning point everything else hinges on.
What recognition actually means
The Afghanistan football federation still doesn't acknowledge the women's team. That tension isn't going away anytime soon. But FIFA's ruling cuts around it — giving the players a legitimate international identity even while their own country's governing body pretends they don't exist.
This week, 23 members of the Afghan Women United program are in a training camp in Auckland, with matches against the Cook Islands scheduled. Seven months ago they beat Libya in the "Unite" tournament — the team's first competitive win since their last official match in 2018. Three years without hearing their own anthem. Then suddenly, they did.
"After three years we heard our anthem," said midfielder Mona Amini. "That was amazing for me."
Players scattered, purpose shared
The squad is spread across Australia, Europe, and the United States. Coach Pauline Hamill runs talent identification camps just to pull the group together for fixtures. This is not a team with conventional infrastructure. What they have instead is a specific kind of motivation that no coaching manual covers.
"We couldn't play freely in Afghanistan," Amini said. "Going out from home was tough because there was the risk of the Taliban seeing us and finding that we were playing soccer."
Yousufi framed it clearly: even before 2021, playing football as a woman in Afghanistan meant navigating family pressure, social hostility, and the constant background threat of violence. They took those risks anyway. The Taliban just raised the stakes further.
"The only thing humans want is freedom, and the Taliban took our freedom," Amini said.
The players are open about what drives them now — being visible for the women and girls still inside Afghanistan who have no such outlet. That's not a talking point. For this squad, it's the actual reason they're in a training camp in New Zealand rather than anywhere else doing anything else.
The Afghanistan women haven't played an official competitive match since 2018. They're building toward one from scratch, across three continents, without the support of their own federation. They beat Libya. They're in Auckland. FIFA has them on the books.
That's where things stand.
