The women's football team of Turkmenistan will for the first time take part in the qualifying tournament for the Olympic Games, which will be held in 2024 in Paris.
As the correspondent of «GA» was informed in the Football Federation of Turkmenistan, the rivals of our women's team in the qualifying Olympic tournament will be determined by the results of the draw, which will be held on January 12 at the headquarters of the Asian Football Confederation in Kuala Lumpur.
The Women's Asian Qualifier for Paris 2024 will feature a record 31 teams. 26 of them in the first round of qualification will be divided into 7 groups. There will be four teams in five groups and three teams in two. The team of Turkmenistan before the draw was in the third seeded pot along with the teams of Palestine, Singapore, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Tajikistan and East Timor, with whom they will definitely not play in the qualification.
The Women's Olympic Football Tournament of the first qualifying round in Asia will be held in a centralized format in one round from 3 to 11 April 2023.
The Turkmen football players will be prepared for this important start of the year as the head coach of the national and youth (U-20) teams Kamil Mingazov, with whom the Football Federation of Turkmenistan extended the contract in 2023. This 54-year-old talented specialist has been working with the women's national team of Turkmenistan since 2016 and is very productive. In 2017, our women's team made its debut in the futsal tournament of the 5th Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games in Ashgabat, and the very next year, in the selection of the Asian Futsal Championship in Bangkok.
Under Kamil Mingazov, the national team of Turkmenistan has also made some progress on the football field - it played in the first-ever championship of the Central Asian Football Association (CAFA) in Dushanbe, taking points from the teams of Tajikistan (1:1) and Kyrgyzstan (0:0). Thanks to these results, the women's team of Turkmenistan in August 2022 for the first time got into the rating of the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), finishing 2022 in 137th place among 187 teams.
By the way, after the Tajik tournament, interest in Turkmen football players abroad has noticeably increased. In October 2022, for the first time, our compatriot, defender Maya Musatskaya, was invited to the foreign football club «Dudullu Spor» of the Turkish Women's Premier League.
In addition to her, midfielders Malika Mammadova and Arzu Turk continued their careers in Turkey. In 2022, Malika, as part of «Besiktas», won the Istanbul Cup among U-15 teams, and Arzu continues to play as part of the U-18 youth team of «Genclerbirligi» (Ankara). At present, the goalkeeper of the women's national team of Turkmenistan Aysha Amanberdiyeva is on viewing in one of the clubs of the United Arab Emirates.
The coming year 2023 promises to be very eventful for the Turkmen football players. In addition to participating in the qualification for the 2024 Olympic Games, our women's teams will have to play in the qualifying tournaments for the Asian Championship among girls U-20 and U-17, which will be held respectively in March in Bangladesh and in April in Singapore. In this regard, the Football Federation of Turkmenistan in the first days of the New Year organized the first training camp for the women's youth team of the country in the Olympic village of Ashgabat, to which about 40 football players from the capital and all velayats were invited to watch. The training camp will last until January 14.
