Fifa recognition for Afghan women’s team is about ‘showing we exist’, says captain Fatima Haidari

Fatima Haidari was sat at home in Italy when she received a video call from Fifa chief Gianni Infantino . On the screen alongside the captain of the Afghan women’s football team, spread across time zones and continents, were the faces of her teammates, women exiled from their home country for playing the sport they loved. It was Infantino who made the surprise announcement, informing the players that Fifa would be formally recognising them as a national team in exile, eligible to play in international competitions.

Almost five years after many fled Afghanistan following the armed takeover by the Taliban, Haidari tells The Independent that the news was met with an outpouring of emotion. “When he told us, we were all crying from afar,” says Haidari, the 24-year-old skipper of the newly formed Afghan Women United. Fifa announced the move on the 29 April, saying it would amend its regulations to allow the formation of the new national team despite the objections of the Taliban regime in Kabul.

For Haidari, who as a teen trained in secret in conservative Herat even during the rule of the previous Nato-backed Afghan government, this was a moment of vindication more than a decade in the making. “It’s not just news,” she says. “We’ve made history.

” It was 2013, long before the Taliban swept back to power in Afghanistan, when as a 12-year-old Haidari asked her father for permission to play football. “I saw two or three girls and I saw the ball they were playing with their feet. It was the first time for me to see that, because in Afghanistan you are not used to it.