This season, The Athletic follows Union Berlin, a Bundesliga club from the former East Germany that played football at regional level less than 20 years ago, on their maiden journey to the Champions League for our Iron In The Blood series.
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As the Union Berlin players advanced through the tunnel and the stands of the Braga Municipal Stadium emptied to the sound of one last song over the public address system, Marie-Louise Eta stood alone on the side of the field for a moment, lost in her thoughts. thoughts.
Union had just scored a second consecutive Champions League point away from home: that was the good news.
The bad news was that Union carelessly squandered a lead against a team that had played with 10 men for more than an hour, leaving the Bundesliga club’s hopes of finishing third in Group C and qualifying for the last 16 on hold. of the Europa League. a thread.
On top of that, Unión’s winless streak had extended to 16 games in all competitions and the team’s mental fragility was painfully exposed after Braga equalized. For a while, it seemed like Braga had an extra player.
Eta had a lot to think about.
But Eta had another story to try to absorb: the 32-year-old had just made history by becoming the first woman to be part of a coaching team in a men’s Champions League match.
Promoted to the role of interim assistant coach just over a fortnight ago after Union and their long-time coach Urs Fischer agreed to part ways, Eta has become a trailblazer for the small but growing number of women working in the men’s game.
Her presence on the bench alongside Nenad Bjelica, Union’s new coach, was a personal triumph for a woman obsessed with soccer since she was little, and a historic moment for this sport.
“It is not a conscious decision (to name) a woman. This almost discredits this decision,” said Dirk Zingler, president of the union. “She is a fully qualified football coach and that is exactly how I see her, whether female or male.”
Promoting Eta to work with the Union first team was easy in Zingler’s eyes. Marco Grote, the club’s under-19 coach, had been asked to take charge of the first team on a temporary basis following Fischer’s departure after five years at the helm, and Eta was his assistant.
Logic dictated that Eta, who has held a UEFA Pro License since April and has coached youth teams at Werder Bremen and within the German Football Association since retiring from football at the age of 26, would make a move to the front with Grote.
Eta made history for Unión Berlin on Wednesday (Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
Except it soon became clear that not everyone outside of Union saw it that way.
It was telling that when Kicker magazine posted the story about Eta’s new role on their Facebook page, they disabled comments.
Old school opinions (sometimes that’s a polite way of saying it) still make a lot of noise in football, especially on social media, where some people considered that he should be the best man for the interim assistant coach position in the Union. instead of the best person.
Maik Barthel, executive director of the Eurosportsmanagement agency and former representative of Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski, was among those who held that view.
In a social media post that led one of his biggest clients to end their relationship with him, Barthel accused Union Berlin of making German football “look ridiculous” by giving Eta, who won the Champions League with Turbine Potsdam in her time as a player, a role in the first team.
Responding on Twitter to Unión’s announcement about Eta, Barthel posted: “Does there have to be an assistant coach in the Unión locker room? Please don’t make a fool of German football. “It was enough that the team hierarchy was completely destroyed with the transfers.”
It turned out that Barthel was out of touch with what his own players felt, much less the opinions of Zingler and Union Berlin.
Although Barthel later deleted the message due to backlash and posted another: “I have to rephrase that. Making a co-coach a problem will not help the Union put the destroyed team hierarchy in order”: the damage had already been done.
Kevin Schade, the 22-year-old German international and Brentford striker, has terminated his contract with Barthel with immediate effect.
“I parted ways with my agent because I don’t share his attitude and views at all,” Schade said. “I defend openness, equality and diversity. And that’s how I want to feel represented.”
Barthel has since apologized and said it was never “my goal to make Ms. Eta the center of my message or to discredit her.” However, he went on to say in an interview with Kicker that he believed Union was trying to “generate good press and distract from their own mistakes.” In other words, promoting ETA was a kind of publicity stunt.
This week it emerged that Barthel had lost another client: Maximilian Beier, the talented Hoffenheim striker and German under-21 international. Beier hasn’t talked about his reasons for changing agents, but people will connect the dots.
It is not surprising that Unión has been inundated with interview requests for ETA over the last fortnight. It is also not surprising that Eta has no desire to say anything at this time, making it clear to club officials that assistant coaches would not normally speak to the media.
Instead, Eta has quietly gone about his work on the training pitch and on match days: he supervised ball-related work in the warm-up against Braga and gave tactical advice to Kevin Volland during a break in play in the first part, while letting others answer questions on your behalf.
Eta takes the Union Berlin warm-up (Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
“The collaboration with Marie-Louise Eta is on an equal footing,” Grote said before Saturday’s Bundesliga match against Augsburg, when Volland scored an 88th-minute equalizer to lift Union off the bottom of the table and end to a streak of nine consecutive defeats in the league. . “There are no big differences. “We split it completely.”
When asked about the importance of gender, Grote responded: “In the training booth, it’s all about human adaptation. If someone is a little taller, maybe has a bigger belly or what shirt he wears, long or short hair, I don’t give a damn.”
That Augsburg match marked a milestone for ETA and the Bundesliga.
“The day has finally come to see a woman in the men’s field of football,” said Julia Simic, television commentator and former German international. “She definitely has the experience to play this role.”
Although Grote returned to his under-19 role following Bjelica’s appointment on Sunday, the Union announced that Eta will continue to work with the first team until assistant coach Sebastian Bonig, who has been granted an extended period of leave for personal reasons , return to your position.
Women have held management positions on men’s teams before, although they generally operated at a lower professional or semi-professional level.
When my colleague Oliver Kay wrote about League Two Forest Green Rovers’ decision to promote Hannah Dingley as interim head coach last summer, he listed several similar examples dating back to the last two decades, including the case of Imke Wubbenhorst.
In 2018, BV Cloppenburg, then struggling in Germany’s fifth division, appointed Wubbenhorst as their head coach. He had previously played in the club’s women’s team where, coincidentally, Eta was one of his teammates.
In that sense, Wubbenhorst has a vision not only of Eta as a person (“very calm”) and player (“very intelligent”) but also of the world she is entering, a place that can raise some strange questions at the same time. times.
In Cloppenburg Wubbenhorst was once asked if the players were forced to cover up when she entered the locker room. She sarcastically replied, “Of course not. I’m professional. I choose the equipment according to the size of the penis.”
More recently, in an interview with Deutsche Welle last week, Wubbenhorst was candid about the challenges women like Eta face in men’s football.
She described how players “are not impressed with your career from the beginning” when you are a coach, talked about soccer being “a man’s game” in Europe and said that significant change will take time.
“When you’re the first person to do something, it’s hard because the media watches every word you say… but when you’re the second or third, it’s going to be a lot easier,” Wubbenhorst explained. “The management of the clubs has to ensure that it works. So (then) they will decide more often to elect a woman for this position.”
Eta’s path has not been easy. “I realized that some people treated me differently than before, and that’s not always comfortable,” she told UEFA last month in an interview, which took place before her promotion to Union, about her coaching career. .
“But I’ve always tried not to think about it and focus on the important things. I have always tried not to focus on the fact that I am a woman. “It’s not about women or men, or whether a man is good for a women’s team, it’s always about diversity.”
Marie-Louise Eta with interim coach Marco Grote (Boris Streubel/Getty Images)
According to Grote, Eta was quickly accepted by Union’s under-19 players when she arrived in the summer, and is said to have been no different with the club’s first team.
Perhaps the most relevant question, given the broader reaction, is whether Germany is ready to embrace a coach who operates at this level.
“Germany is certainly ready,” says ntv.de journalist Stephan Uersfeld. “You have to put aside everything you see on social networks. We’ve had female coaches in the little leagues before and they weren’t successful. But she (Eta) has all the skills, she has done all the courses that male coaches do.
“If you talk to the people at the club, they are convinced that she can do it. And it is a club like Unión Berlin, which is the complete opposite of what has been reported mainly in the international media: it is a fairly conservative club. So if they say it’s ready, you have to trust them. And why shouldn’t you trust a woman with this job?
“The culture is changing. You see it on television: now we have female experts everywhere. Football is opening up. There are two final barriers: women coaching in men’s soccer and gay players who still remain silent. “Those are the last barriers that we must break down for football to reach the 21st century.”
(Photos: Getty Images; graphic: Sam Richardson)
