Georgia Women

Anano Tsikaridze's move to AS Roma is the kind of transfer that used to be unthinkable for a Georgian footballer, and it says something about how far the women's game here has come since players trained without much notice from anyone. Nini Bukhrikidze, Elene Chikovani and Anastasia Buchukuri found similar routes into the German league, proof that the pipeline out of Tbilisi now runs somewhere.

It did not start that way. The team began playing regularly in 2006, and the early record reads like a warning against optimism: last place and no points in UEFA Euro 2009 qualifying, then a 0-15 defeat to Denmark in 2011 World Cup qualifiers that stands as the heaviest loss in the side's history. A first competitive win took until May 2009, a 3-1 victory over Macedonia. The biggest win, 7-0 against Andorra, came in April 2015 — a six-year gap between those two results that says more about the team's development than either scoreline alone.

The foundations built underneath the national side explain the shift better than any single match. A domestic women's league started in 2016, a cup followed in 2019, and the number of registered female players rose from 120 to 1,700 between 2015 and 2021. Kristina Shadoba remains the player most associated with the team's earlier years, one of the few from that period to have her own page in Georgian football writing.

Georgia still play in the white, black and red laid down for the national teams, still lack a settled home ground of their own — training instead at the Technical Center Baza while the men's side holds the Boris Paichadze Dinamo Arena — and still chase a first qualification for a major tournament through the ongoing UEFA Women's Euro and World Cup qualifying cycles.