Pakistan's Women's Football Team Is Being Sidelined By Its Own Government
Three weeks after making history at the FIFA Series, the national squad was denied clearance to compete at the SAFF Championship. No alternative has been offered.
On April 9, at the Stade Alassane Ouattara in Abidjan, Zahmena Malik scored a goal. It was Pakistan’s first goal in any match organized directly by FIFA. She is a midfielder. She had trained in Lahore, flown to West Africa with a squad that had not played together in nine months, and put the ball in the net in front of nobody she knew, in a country she had never been to, at a tournament her federation president had personally lobbied FIFA’s own president to include her in. She was 21 years old. The team bus, by multiple accounts, was loud on the way back.
Three weeks later, Pakistan’s government decided the team would not go to Goa.
No one announced this. There was no press conference, no official statement from the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Coordination, no sporting authority that stood in public and explained what calculation had been made and whose interests it served. The Pakistan Football Federation told Al Jazeera on April 22 that it had not been issued a No Objection Certificate by the relevant authorities. The SAFF Women’s Championship draw was published the same day. Pakistan’s name was not in it. Six teams were listed: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives. In Goa from May 25 to June 7, the regional women’s championship will be played without the team that, three weeks earlier, was loud on a bus in Ivory Coast.
What Happened in Ivory Coast
Pakistan beat the Turks and Caicos Islands 8-0 on April 9. The margin set a new national record, surpassing the previous best of 7-0. Nadia Khan scored and in doing so became Pakistan’s all-time leading goal scorer. Aqsa Mushtaq scored twice. Layla Banaras scored twice. Zahmena Malik scored Pakistan’s first goal in a FIFA-organized match. Isra Khan scored. Mariam Mahmood scored. The bus was whistling.
Four days later, Mauritania had one real attack. They scored. Pakistan had six or seven clear chances. None went in. The bus was quiet.
On April 16, Pakistan lost 2-0 to hosts Ivory Coast, playing the final 25 minutes with ten players. They finished third in their group. They came home.
Aqsa Mushtaq is 27, born in England, plays her club football abroad. She spoke to Dawn after the tournament. “The Mauritania loss hurt a lot more than the Ivory Coast one,” she said. “Because they were an unranked team and we had a good chance to beat them; and also because we created many chances and it was really hard to deal with the loss.” She rejected the idea that what went wrong against Mauritania was tactical or mental. “It’s sometimes just not your day. We just move on, we improve as a team, try to improve our finishing in training. Hopefully next time we can prove that we actually are good in front of goal because we have a lot of talent.”
Then she said the thing she and every other player in the squad have been saying, in interviews and press conferences and post-match comments, every time a microphone is put in front of them. “One thing I want to change about Pakistan women’s football right now is the amount of games and windows we have. It’s been a whole year since we last played Indonesia. It’s so important to play in every FIFA window if we can, every couple of months. Other teams have many FIFA windows to improve their abilities. We only have ten days together.”
Nadia Khan made the same argument from a different angle. Local players, who do not have clubs abroad and do not train in professional environments between international camps, depend entirely on the national setup for their development. “To build football abilities, we have to continuously be playing, not just by ourselves but as a team, so that we can link together and know how each of us plays.”
The Nine Months Before Abidjan
The FIFA Series in Ivory Coast was Pakistan’s first appearance in any FIFA-organized senior women’s event. It happened because PFF President Mohsen Gilani requested a spot directly from FIFA President Gianni Infantino when they met on the sidelines of the Club World Cup the previous year. Infantino said yes. The federation announced the squad in April. The Pakistan Sports Board issued the NOC. The team flew to West Africa.
That last sentence deserves the attention it rarely gets: for the Ivory Coast trip, the NOC was issued. The Pakistan Sports Board, which administers the NOC system, cleared the team to travel to a country with which Pakistan has no diplomatic tension and no history of conflict. This is what a functioning NOC process looks like. Fourteen days of preparation in Lahore, a departure for Abidjan, and a federation that had enough time to fulfill the procedural requirements.
The nine months before that departure looked different. The team had last played in the AFC Women’s Asian Cup qualifiers in July 2025, where they went to Indonesia, won two of three matches, and came home with a record that justified real optimism. After those qualifiers, FIFA held three international windows before the Series: windows in which other national teams called up players, arranged friendlies, and built the match sharpness that accumulates only through regular competition. Pakistan missed all three. No fixtures were arranged. No alternatives were found. The squad that made history in Abidjan had spent nine months without playing together.
Jordan offered to host Pakistan for international women’s friendlies in June 2025. The offer was declined. Reporting in Nukta on April 24 confirmed the offer was not taken up, without providing a reason. The Pakistan Football Federation’s financial difficulties, stemming from ongoing regulatory issues with FIFA and AFC as well as limited corporate support, meant it could not organize independent fixtures. The government, which controls the budget that could fund alternative competitions, did not provide one.
Head coach Adeel Rizki said after Ivory Coast what he had said before it: to build on this, the team needs to play regularly, consistently, and often. The players said the same. The federation said the same. Nobody in any official government capacity has disputed this position or offered a different one.
The NOC and How It Works
The No Objection Certificate is the instrument by which the Pakistan Sports Board, which reports to the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Coordination, controls whether Pakistani athletes cross an international border to compete. Federations are required to apply a minimum of six weeks before departure and submit a full documentation package including player profiles and official clearance. Approval is not guaranteed. The PSB makes a decision, and the decision carries no public standard by which it can be reviewed.
For travel to India, the additional layer is a political one. The government of Pakistan applies a broader policy of not sending sporting delegations to Indian-hosted events when relations are strained. Pakistan’s senior men’s hockey team withdrew from the 2025 Asia Cup in Rajgir. The junior men’s hockey team withdrew from the Junior Hockey World Cup in Tamil Nadu. Pakistan’s cricket team played its ICC matches in Sri Lanka rather than India during the 2026 T20 World Cup. These decisions follow the same logic as the SAFF denial: the host is India, relations are fractured, therefore the athletes stay home.
There is a version of this argument that holds. Countries withdraw from each other’s hosted events during periods of genuine hostility, and Pakistan and India are in such a period, marked by the Pahalgam attack, by cross-border military posturing, and by the broader suspension of most formal contact between the two governments. The argument’s weakness is not with the logic itself. It is with what comes after the decision, and in this case what comes after is nothing.
If the government bars the women’s team from a regional championship held in India, the government accepts a corresponding obligation to provide alternative competition. The NOC system, as it operates, does not create that obligation. It creates only a veto. Pakistan withdrew from SAFF, and SAFF moved on without them. The six remaining teams will play in Goa from May 25. When Pakistan’s squad next assembles for an international window, it will have been barred from its only regional competitive tournament with no confirmed alternative, no home fixtures scheduled, and no domestic league to return to in the meantime.
What the Domestic Calendar Looks Like
Pakistan last played a home women’s international fixture in 2014. Twelve years ago, in Islamabad, at the Jinnah Sports Stadium, the national team hosted the SAFF Women’s Championship. That is the last time the Shaheens have played in front of their own supporters. No government administration since then, across multiple civilian governments and the ongoing influence of the military establishment over national affairs, has arranged a single home international for the women’s team.
Domestic club competition for women, which is the infrastructure that produces and maintains talent between international cycles, has not run consistently. The federation has attempted to revive it; the attempts have produced activity in some years and nothing in others. Age-group national teams for girls, the pipeline through which a sustainable national program builds itself, last competed in 2018. Some of the players on the current senior squad, now in their mid-twenties, were identified during those 2018 programs. There are no programs feeding the next generation behind them.
The PFF advertised the women’s national team head coach position. It then decided to retain the existing coach, Adeel Rizki, without conducting the search it had announced. Rizki is a capable and committed coach; the question is not about him. The question is about what it says about the federation’s planning capacity that it opened a vacancy and then quietly closed it without conclusion. Pakistan runs its national women’s football team, as Ali Ahsan wrote in Nukta on April 24, on a dhakka-start basis: deactivated between tournaments, reactivated when a competition forces it back to life.
The Structural Question Nobody Is Asking the Government
Pakistan’s foreign policy of declining to participate in India-hosted sporting events is applied across codes, across genders, across age groups. It is a coherent policy in the sense that it is consistent. What it is not is cost-free, and the government has never been asked, in a formal public forum, to account for those costs in women’s sport specifically.
The argument that the policy serves national interest is made most credibly in cricket, where a parallel ICC structure exists to absorb the disruption and where the commercial and media infrastructure around the men’s game provides insulation. Applied to women’s football, it takes something different in shape. Women’s football in Pakistan has no television deals, no major corporate sponsors, no ICC-equivalent body to broker workarounds. The SAFF Women’s Championship is not an inconvenient scheduling problem to be rerouted through a neutral venue. It is, for most of the players on the squad, the only competitive regional tournament that exists for them.
Aqsa Mushtaq said after Ivory Coast: “Other teams have many FIFA windows to improve their abilities. We only have ten days together.” She was talking about fixtures. The same arithmetic applies to tournaments. Other teams in South Asia will be in Goa in May, playing matches, making mistakes, correcting them, building competitive instinct through repetition. Pakistan’s squad will be at home, waiting for the next time a tournament or a friendly or an invited appearance compels the federation to gather them again.
Captain Maria Khan, before the Ivory Coast tournament, said: “We don’t see diaspora versus local. We see Pakistani players ready to represent their country. We are one team.” That was true in Abidjan. The team that beat Turks and Caicos 8-0 and went quiet after the Mauritania loss was a real unit, with genuine cohesion and the kind of competitive hunger that only comes from players who have waited a long time for chances.
The government has not been required to answer whether what it is doing with that unit is adequate. It has not been asked who authorized the decision not to issue the NOC, on what grounds it was made, or what concrete alternative has been arranged for the summer window now vacated by the SAFF withdrawal. It has not been asked why Jordan’s offer of friendlies in June was declined. It has not been asked whether the six-week processing rule, which structurally prevents participation in most short-notice Asian fixtures, will be revised.
Zahmena Malik scored Pakistan’s first-ever FIFA Series goal in Abidjan on April 9. She was back in Pakistan by April 17. By April 22, the government had decided she would not be going to Goa.