It usually only really pops when Svenja Huth and her women from Wolfsburg play. The team is unbeaten in the league, the championship seems decided.
Photo: imago/Hübner
Tommy Stroot has been on the brakes for a while. Before the women’s Bundesliga resumes, the coach of the women’s soccer team at VfL Wolfsburg is repeatedly asked whether a season with 22 wins is possible for the first time. Stroot doesn’t do that. “Basically, it seems totally unrealistic to be able to go an entire season without losing points. At some point there will be setbacks,” asserts the 34-year-old.
His success-hungry ensemble around national team captain Alexandra Popp, EM heroes like Merle Frohms, Kathrin Hendrich, Lena Oberdorf and Svenja Huth won all 26 games in league and cup in 2022. The dominance of the defending champion and league leader with five points ahead of FC Bayern and seven ahead of Eintracht Frankfurt is so overwhelming that Frankfurt’s board spokesman Axel Hellmann, who is also interim head of the German Football League, said that the superiority of Wolfsburg was “not good for that Sports product women’s football«. The important doer from the Main metropolis explained: “If you really want to develop women’s football into an exciting competition, then the result openness of the championship is what has to happen. And the biggest flaw would be if it ended up being an image of the men’s Bundesliga in ten years.”
The remark didn’t sit well with the Autostadt in general and Stroot in particular. “At some point there will be a discussion that German women’s football is no longer good enough in international comparison. We shouldn’t save more at the top and set the bar differently, but push it from below,” explained the VfL coach. In the last ten years, Wolfsburg have been German champions seven times and Bayern three times. In the cup, the »wolves« even snagged the trophy eight times in a row. For Stroot, the “decisive factor is that the league evolves.” For him, TSG Hoffenheim and SC Freiburg, who visit Wolfsburg on the last day of the first half of the season this Saturday, are not that far away either.
In a test match, VfL suffered a defeat with the 2:3 against Frankfurt. And FC Bayern still has hopes. “It’s going to be a long season for everyone, and the championship title hasn’t been awarded yet,” emphasized sports director Bianca Rech. The Munich team around English European champion Georgia Stanway completed two winter training camps in Qatar and Mexico. »All in all, for us it’s always about further development and getting better at what we do every day. It’s been a good few weeks for us,” said coach Alexander Straus. However, the team lost their only endurance test 1-0 against Tigres Feminil – in front of 35,000 spectators. The FCB soccer players will start off at the back of the field at Turbine Potsdam on Sunday. A traditional club that threatens to disappear from the league.
Gone are the days when all-women clubs were competitive nationally and internationally. Wolfsburg and Bayern are again in the quarter-finals of the Champions League, while Frankfurt already stumbled in qualifying, although Eintracht also have German internationals with Laura Freigang, Sjoeke Nüsken, Sophia Kleinherne and Nicole Anyomi. Wolfsburg and Bavaria offer the best prospects in terms of sport and business.
Next, Chantal Hagel from Hoffenheim will move to Wolfsburg on a free transfer next summer. The top clubs are upgrading their squads to cope with the increased workload, and they also have to pay higher and higher salaries in order to stay on par with FC Chelsea, FC Barcelona, Olympique Lyon or Paris St. Germain. In the two top clubs, the players find professional conditions that do not (yet) exist at all locations. But it is also a fact: the women’s departments are still a subsidy business for license clubs. Therefore, the hype triggered by the DFB women with the EM in England is important to improve marketing. A new TV contract from the coming season also promises improvement here and will then bring in just over five million euros per season, which will be distributed equally among the twelve Bundesliga clubs.
Clubs and associations played some clever one-twos with highlight games, more than 20,000 spectators came to Frankfurt, Wolfsburg and Bremen each, but the popularity has also increased significantly: 183,477 visitors on the first ten match days, on average 3058, are already a best value. For comparison: In the previous record season 2013/2014 there were a total of 173,438 fans after 22 rounds. In the pre-season, 107,071 fans came to the stadiums, just over 800 on average. So the response has almost tripled.
According to a DFB study, commercial growth could therefore be enormous in the next ten years: According to this, in 2031 there would at best be a league with 16 licensed clubs, playing in front of an average of 7500 spectators and turning over 130 million euros in one season. And then there should also be 500,000 active players, currently there are 186,000. National coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg is delighted with the effect of her vice European champions: “The best thing is that this European Championship has a lasting effect – more spectators in the women’s Bundesliga and Women’s Champions League, the great scenery at our international match in Dresden and above all the numerous new registrations of girls and boys in amateur clubs.«
In the meantime, many licensing clubs have recognized that the professional promotion of men and women is a social duty. Even if there are still clubs that are on the brakes here too.
