June 10, 2026

Football in Taiwan: From Missionaries to Mulan – S6-E14

As we head into the 2026 World Cup, we take a look at Taiwan’s surprisingly rich football heritage. Although a minor sport today, there have been periods of intense popularity and success. The soccer story starts more than a century ago with British Presbyterian missionary Edward Band, who introduced the sport to students in Tainan. We follow the growth of football during the Japanese colonial era, the White Terror crackdown, and then the unusual “Hong Kong Legs” era when the ROC national team used “football mercenaries.” The country’s greatest international success, however, came with the Mulan women’s football team.

Show Notes

Image via Wiki Commons. (Colorized by Chat GPT, see original below)

Wiki: Football in Taiwan

British Presbyterian missionary Edward Band introduced the sport to students in Tainan, circa 1939.

Sources

For this episode, Eryk and John draw on their soccer skills and experience (they’ve both played… badly). Thankfully, they were able to draw on the excellent research of Lin Hsinkai (林欣楷); his master’s thesis, “Who Is Playing Football? The History of Taiwanese Football at the Intersection of State and Society, 1910s–1970s,” and his book 我們的足球夢：臺灣足球百年風雲 (Our Football Dream: A Century of Taiwanese Football Memories). Book cover is seen below.