Tatjana Haenni has been a lot of things in her footballer life. 23-time national player for Switzerland, coach at SV Seebach, president of FC Zurich Women, official at the Swiss Football Association (SFV), Uefa and Fifa, sporting director of the women’s professional league in the USA – and now, from January 1st, CEO at RB Leipzig. As the first woman at a club in the Bundesliga.
The 59-year-old Swiss woman is used to being the first or at least one of the first. She seeks and enjoys this – even the tough resistance she encounters as a pioneer. For example, when she joined the European football association Uefa in the mid-1990s as department secretary for women’s football and fair play. “It was unbearable,” she said in an interview a few months ago. “There were officials who had zero knowledge of women’s football, zero interest, but they felt they had to tell me what to do and prevented a lot of things.” After four years she quit. This summer she said in a conversation with ZEIT: “I have nothing against men, not even in women’s football – they can be sponsors and supporters – as long as they know what they’re doing and actually want to help.”
Under her compatriot Sepp Blatter, Haenni was the most important women’s football manager at Fifa for 18 years. Gianni Infantino didn’t know what to do with her, so she professionalized the women’s department at the Swiss association SFV. She then moved to the USA and became director of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Last summer she surprisingly announced: That’s it! She quit her prestigious job in the NWSL.
Although nowhere else is so much money invested in women’s soccer – new teams have to pay $100 million to buy into the American league – the very best players in the world often prefer to stay in Europe. “The quality of football is suffering from the lack of relegation pressure,” Haenni told ZEIT – and the league lacks a functioning foundation. “I would have liked to change that quickly and set up a youth department and a talent development program. But the league managers wanted to think about it calmly first, and that’s moving too slowly for me.”
As a soccer player, she played in various positions, preferably in goal, “because you had to do the least amount of work,” i.e. running. In terms of his career, Haenni went on the offensive. When the Swiss Football Association elected former HSV and Schalke sports director Peter Knäbel as its new president this summer, she said: “Let’s let him work for two years and see what he does. Then I’ll think about it.” Should mean running for office yourself. And she spoke to ZEIT as the head of a possible German professional women’s league: “If a Swiss woman comes into consideration for the position, I would be very interested.”
Why Haenni is a good fit for RB Leipzig
Haenni’s message was clear: there is still a lot to do in women’s football. For her, the euphoria that reigned over the Women’s European Championship in Switzerland last summer was just “the beginning of women’s football as a business case.”
The clubs in the women’s Bundesliga have now founded a new league association without Haenni. On the same day that Haenni’s surprising move to men’s football was announced. In other words, the sport that she once said was more boring than women’s football and whose excesses bothered her. Villas, luxury cars, bling-bling jewelry and playing Playstation, that’s not her world. It’s probably no coincidence that she ended up at RB Leipzig. As the successor to Oliver Mintzlaff. Since he moved to Red Bull GmbH three years ago, the CEO position at RB Leipzig has been vacant.
In Leipzig, freed from a glorious or eternally unsuccessful football history, embedded in a global corporate structure, your idea of football can be implemented more easily than in a traditional club where the elders always know better – if only they were allowed to do it.
“We hope that this will provide us with new input and fresh impulses so that we are prepared for the future and can continue to meet the increasing demands,” Oliver Mintzlaff is quoted as saying in the club’s statement. Inputs, impulses, image and brand – Haenni also likes to talk about this a lot. Their ideal football is family friendly, with younger, more diverse, more educated and wealthier fans. “This is interesting for sponsors.”
For her, as she is Swiss through and through, sport is first and foremost a business.
