People always tell me that Taiwan will never have a chance to play in the World Cup in this lifetime. I would tell them that we have been playing the World Cup every four years, and that the qualifying rounds for the World Cup are also the World Cup.
The first round of the 2026 FIFA World Cup Asia qualifying tournament has just ended and Taiwan
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After winning their second consecutive home and away matches, 4-0, 3-0, and holding off Timor-Leste by a combined score of 7-0.
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Second round of the tournament.
FIFA World Cup teams are selected through a series of challenges. Except for the host country, all the other teams need to go through the "qualification round" before they can qualify for the FIFA World Cup (in-conference tournament). However, many people in Taiwan don't know that there is a so-called qualifying round for the World Cup, and they don't know that Taiwan actually participates in it. But it doesn't matter, let me introduce how the World Cup Qualifying Tournament works.
Let's go with Taiwan (or you can say China)
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The 2026 World Cup in North America will see an expanded field of 48 teams competing in the intra-conference tournament, with Asia, or the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), being allocated a seat. Of these, Asia, or the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), has been allocated the following seats
teams, meaning that at least one of the 48 teams competing in the 2026 World Cup will be
One team is from Asia, while the remaining +1 team depends on its fortunes in the cross-continental play-offs.There are five rounds of matches in total in the WC 2026 Asian Qualifying Tournament, which will see eight teams selected from the 47 AFC national teams.
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World Cup intra-conference tournament, and 1 team traveling to the cross-continental playoffs.
Round 1: The bottom 20 teams in the AFC standings will play the first round of the tournament. 20 teams will be divided into 10 combinations and will play a home-and-away second round, with the 10 winners
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The second round of the tournament. (Taiwan is playing from here)
Round 2: 36 teams will be drawn in order of bracket and divided into 9 groups for the home and away second round matches, each group will have 4 teams. The top two teams from each group
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third round of the tournament while qualifying for the 2027 Asian Cup soccer tournament. (Taiwan is currently playing this)
Round three:
Six teams will be selected at this stage
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World Cup 2026
. From the second round
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The 18 teams in the tournament will be divided into three groups of six teams each for a home-and-away double-header. The top two teams from each group will play directly
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For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, teams ranked 3 and 4 in their group advance to the fourth round of the tournament.
Round four:
Two teams will be selected at this stage
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World Cup 2026
. From the third round
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The 6 teams will be divided into 2 groups of 3 teams each. The 3 teams in each group will play each other once at a neutral venue, and the top team in the group will go straight to the
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In the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the second-ranked team in the group advances to the fifth round of the tournament.
Round 5: 2 fourth round
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The teams play a home-and-away second leg, with the winners heading to a cross-continental playoff for the world's last two spots in the 2026 World Cup.
The World Cup Asian Qualifying Tournament will take a total of three years from the first round to the end of the fifth round, which is a long time and a long road that is both difficult and exhilarating, sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears. So this time, how far can our Taiwan representatives go?
Over the past 30 years, Taiwan's performance in WC qualifying has been dismal to say the least.In the 1994 WC qualifying tournament in the United States, the Chinese
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The first round of single-elimination matches (in fact, the AFC has only included single-elimination matches in the first round since the 2006 WC qualifying round) aside, the group stage of the WC qualifying round shows that in the 30 years between 1993 and 2023, Taiwan played a total of 38 matches in the group stage, with 1 win, 1 draw, and 36 defeats, with their last win dating back to March 18, 1997 when Taiwan beat Bangladesh 3-1, with current TFC head coach Chen Guiren scoring a goal. On March 18, 1997, Taiwan beat Bangladesh 3-1, with current TCC head coach Chen Guiren scoring a goal in that match. 9 days later, on March 27, the match was a 0-0 draw with Malaysia, and in the following matches, China
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They have not won a single World Cup qualifying match since. (except first round single elimination)
In the second round of the qualifying round, Taiwan representatives were placed in Group D, with Oman, Kyrgyzstan and Malaysia in the same group, how about these teams? Here is a brief introduction to each of them. (*World Rankings updated on 2023/9/21)
Oman (73rd): also known as THE REDS, one of the strongest teams in the Arabian Peninsula, won the Arabian Gulf Cup twice, and this year's Gulf Cup was the runner-up. 5 degrees.
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The Asian Cup intra-conference tournament, the first ever Asian Cup knockout round in 2019. They finished just one point behind Australia in the last qualifying round of the 2022 Kadar World Cup, narrowly missing out on breaking into the 4th round of the tournament for a cross-continental play-off berth.
