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A sports documentary that highlights Taiwan’s little-known role in helping German women’s soccer to greater recognition hit the screens in Germany in early 2020. Das Wunder von Taipeh (The Miracle of Taipei) tells the story of a women’s soccer team from the then West Germany who participated in the unofficial women’s soccer world cup in Taipei in 1981, taking home the trophy against all odds. This miracle of Taipei forced dismissive German soccer officials to take note of female footballers’ potential.

In 1981, when Taiwan was still under martial law rule, the government hosted an unofficial women’s soccer world cup to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Republic of China. The Chinese Taipei Football Association sent an invitation to the German Football Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund, DFB) for a German national team to join the international event which went by the name Women’s World Invitational Tournament.

However, in Germany soccer is a very male-dominated sport. Up to 1970 girls were even prohibited from playing soccer at all. In 1981 West Germany did not have a women’s national team and the DFB had no intention at all to put one together for the tournament in Taiwan. Therefore, the association sent a reply to the Chinese Taipei Football Association, turning down the invitation on the grounds that Germany did not have a women’s national team.

Given Germany’s dominating status in international soccer, the football officials in Taiwan feared the world tournament would hardly live up to its name without German participation. Not ready to give up, they sent another letter asking whether an outstanding women’s team from a local soccer club could be sent to represent Germany in the tournament instead, as Taiwan would not insist on a national team.

That’s how the invitation was forwarded to the local soccer club of Bergisch Gladbach, a small town near Cologne in western Germany which even today has a population of just 110,000 people. The women’s team of the local soccer club SV Bergisch-Gladbach 09 had just won the main national women’s football cup, the DFB-Pokal. On top of that, they had clinched four national titles between 1977 and 1981, making them the strongest club at the time. The invitation from Taiwan arrived just at the right time, offering an opportunity for the female footballers to demonstrate their skills and talent on the international stage.

Keeping Women Off the Soccer Field

Before they could participate in the tournament, the players had to overcome various obstacles and challenges. First of all, the soccer world’s ingrained gender stereotypes and prejudices against female players.

The male-dominated football officialdom felt that women should stay off the soccer field. The DFB had even issued a statement saying that “Soccer should be left to men, women belong into the kitchen or they should participate in track-and-field events.”

Until 1970, Germany banned female soccer teams. There were, however, not few girls and women who fell in love with soccer and “illegally” participated, or trained and competed with informal teams of soccer enthusiasts, known in German as pub teams (Thekenmannschaft).

Anne Trabant, who served as team captain at the time, recalls that “the DFB blocked everything.” Another team member said girls who wanted to play soccer back then had best dress like boys and join the boys’ games.

In an interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Trabant said that she trained with her father as coach from childhood on, always playing in a boys’ team. She was a good player and outdid many of her male peers in terms of ball control and soccer skills already at age nine. However, since the DFB did not allow girls to play soccer competitively, she was never able to actually play in an official game. “That made me very sad,” she told the weekly.

Later on, when she was 14, Trabant switched to other sports. She returned to the soccer field only in the early 1970s, when the DFB finally lifted its ban on women’s soccer, becoming the best among the female footballers of her generation.

Even then, the soccer establishment still discriminated against the female players. As Trabant recalls, the male teams had the first pick when it came to scheduling training sessions whereas the female teams were forced to settle for the remaining time slots.

Back then, derogatory jokes about women’s soccer were common and soccer fans customarily ridiculed female players. With the soccer field widely regarded as a male domain, the idea of a German women’s team representing the nation on the international stage did not go down well with the soccer community. And then there was a certain DFB chairman who firmly believed that the women’s skills were not up to par.

Another problem was funding. The trip to Taiwan hinged on raising enough money to shoulder the travel expenses for a group of 25 people, including the players, coaches and the medical team. Considering the financial status of German women’s soccer at the time, this seemed a mission impossible.

The DFB, for its part, had vowed to pay not one red cent for the trip, arguing it could not sponsor the tournament because it was an “unofficial event”. (In fact, this decision can also be attributed to the DFB’s gender stereotypes. If a men’s team had represented Germany in an international friendly at the time, would the DFB have completely refused to financially support the trip?).

The team members made the rounds, begging local government and enterprises for financial support. They also raised money through bake sales. Eventually they collected enough donations from the public and the private sectors, from ordinary citizens, friends and family to travel to far-away Taiwan. For many team members this was their first ever trip abroad.

In October 1981, the team was sent off by local dignitaries with a banner reading “Off to Taiwan! We wish you good luck, success and fun!” The group flew to the Far East to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.

An Unacknowledged Miracle

Whether their journey was graced by luck or not, they definitely had fun, because they ended up with a huge success.

According to a report on the invitational tournament in the December 1981 issue of Taiwan Panorama magazine, 14 teams from 13 countries participated in the event, which was the second time that this prestigious global women’s football event was held in Taipei. The article pointed out: “The international governing body of association football FIFA which has not yet organized an official women’s world tournament also sent members to Taiwan to observe the tournament as reference for hosting similar events in the future. This shows how important this tournament is for the soccer world.”

In the tournament, the German team was fighting an uphill battle, facing a string of strong adversaries. On top of that, the women were forced to socialize after exhausting games at dinners and receptions with officials and corporate sponsors, or tour factories.

Nevertheless, the German women eventually clinched victory undefeated in seven games with 25 goals, taking home the trophy in what was the first international title in the history of German women’s football. They had created The Miracle of Taipei, (which, considering that some of the games were staged in the cities of Taichung and Kaohsiung, should have more appropriately be called The Miracle of Taiwan).

Yet, German soccer history rarely mentions the women’s miraculous performance in the unofficial world cup. In November 1981, German weekly magazine Der Spiegel pointed out that in contrast to the huge welcomes that victorious men’s teams typically receive upon return home, “not a single one of the football higher-ups showed up” at the reception when the invincible women returned to Bergisch Gladbach. Many years later, Trabant said in an interview that the official DFB website never listed the team’s victory among the important soccer events in 1981, as if it had never occurred.

The true miracle the women footballers brought about was shattering gender stereotypes and highlighting discrimination of female athletes. Their astounding feat in Taiwan would change the course of German association soccer. In 1982, the DFB finally put together a national women’s team for participation in the European women’s championship. Eight national team players came from SV Bergisch-Gladbach 09. Even today some members of the first national women’s team serve as coaches in German women’s soccer at various levels, still contributing to the development of the sport and working for a fairer, more equitable treatment of female players.

The tournament of 1981 is even more meaningful in that the German women’s team found itself in a similar predicament as Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China. The female footballers fought for recognition on the soil of the Republic of China, a country that the United Nations and most states around the world including Germany do not recognize diplomatically. While Taiwan might be a place that lacks formal recognition, it is still a place where miracles happen.

The German team was not allowed to compete in the national team uniform but had to wear their local club’s kit instead. Having to compete in international events under a different designation than the official country name, not being able to really represent one’s country, is certainly a feeling that the people in Taiwan can only understand too well.

The article in Der Spiegel contrasted German disdain for women’s soccer with the absence of prejudice against female players in Taiwan, saying: “They (the German team) played soccer on an island where the men aren’t better at it than the women: on Taiwan.”

Looking back on the tournament in Taiwan, the German team members sighed with admiration given the Taiwan public’s enthusiasm for women’s soccer, the kind of recognition they longed to get from soccer fans in Germany. During the 12-day tournament more than 300,000 people attended the games at the stadium.

With The Miracle of Taipei, we should not only remember how the German female footballers fought for equal treatment, it was also notable that the Chinese Taipei national team was able to compete as equals in a strong international field, with their peers from other countries.

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Translated by Susanne Ganz

Uploaded by Sharon Tseng