When the 2007 World Cup was allocated to PR China, the country which had staged the fi rst offi cial competition for female players in 1991, the president of the international governing body of football, Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter, remarked that women’s football was ‘returning to its roots’.1 The Asian philosophy of revisiting, of continually ‘dusting the mirror’, informed this investigation into the international status of women’s football
