The Turkmenistan national football team will start today in the 2027 Asian Cup qualifying tournament with a match against the Chinese Taipei team. The game will be held in Kaohsiung, the second largest city and largest port on the island of Taiwan in the Republic of China with a population of about 2.77 million people. The venue will be the National Stadium with a capacity of 55,000 people. This sports facility in the shape of a semi-spiral resembling a dragon is the first stadium in the world to be powered by solar energy.

Following the draw, the national teams of Turkmenistan and Chinese Taipei ended up in Group «D», where they will play in two rounds with the teams of Thailand and Sri Lanka in the fight for the only ticket to the final tournament of the 2027 Asian Cup.

The upcoming match between the football players of Chinese Taipei and Turkmenistan at the national team level will be the sixth in the history of their meetings. The previous five ended in victory for the Turkmen team: 5:0 on the 27th of April, 2001 in Tashkent and 1:0 on the 7th of May, 2001 in Amman in the 2002 World Cup qualifying tournament; 2:0 on the 23rd of March, 2011 in Kuala Lumpur in the 2012 AFC Challenge Cup qualifying tournament; 3:1 on the 26th of March, 2017 at the Taipei Municipal Stadium and 2:1 on the 14th of November, 2017 in Balkanabat in the 2019 Asian Cup qualifying tournament.

The 2027 Asian Cup qualifying match between the national teams of Turkmenistan and Chinese Taipei will be officiated by a team of referees from Qatar headed by referee Abdulhadi Al Asmar Al Ruail. He will be assisted by his compatriots Khaled Ayad Khalaf and Juma Mohammed Al Burshaid. The reserve referee is Baraa Aisha from Palestine.

The Turkmenistan national team prepared for the opening match of the 2027 Asian Cup qualification in the strictest confidence, without disclosing information about the team's composition. Let's hope that this will help Mergen Orazov's team to make a victorious start in the continental competition of the four-year period.

The winners of six qualifying groups will advance to the final tournament of the 2027 Asian Cup, which will be held in Saudi Arabia for the first time.

Earlier, 18 teams have already secured the right to participate in the final stage of the 2027 Asian Cup. These are the participants of the 3rd round of the 2026 World Cup qualification: Australia, Bahrain, Indonesia, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, China, DPRK, Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Japan and Saudi Arabia (as the organiser).

Turkmen football players have participated in the final stages of the Asian Cup twice. The first time was in 2004, when the tournament was held in China, and the second time was in 2019 in the United Arab Emirates. In the previous draw, the Turkmenistan national team took 3rd place in the qualifying group «E» and did not qualify for the final tournament of the Asian Cup, which took place in 2023 in Qatar.

The Asian Cup is held every four years. Its first draw took place in 1956. Since 2007, the tournament has been held in odd years. The current champion of Asia is Qatar, which won the continental trophy twice in 2019 and 2023.