Football – too little drama in the Bundesliga of women

Of course, Nia Künzer is present at all important events of German football. At the ceremony for the 125th anniversary of the German Football Association (DFB) in Leipzig, the sports director of the DFB was just as much part of the illustrious crowd as at the New Year’s reception of the German Football League. There, Oliver Mintzlaff also looked for a conversation with the 2003 world champion because the Red Bull boss explicitly sees a lot of development potential for women-also for RB Leipzig.

So far, the shower club has invested less than two million euros in its Bundesliga team, which is currently in sixth place in the table. It goes without saying that Leipzig does not want to remain gray mediocre in women, but strives for more attention, more spectators and better conditions. Mintzlaff sees it as an obligation not only to align Red Bull’s football cosmos in the medium term.

For the time being, no own league society

When the women’s Bundesliga finally wakes up from hibernation this weekend, a lot has happened behind the scenes: what it looks like, clubs and association first want to advance the further development together. There was consensus after Jan-Christian Dreesen, CEO of FC Bayern, was also published at the last meeting between DFB and clubs before Christmas. Even the master does not want his footballers’ deficit operations in the long run. For this purpose, a test mandate paid by the clubs had gone to the English agency Portas, and the league might even be released from the DFB in its own company. According to reports, however, this will not happen for the time being.

“If we privatize the women’s Bundesliga, that would be the completely wrong way,” said Karsten Ritter-Lang, President of Turbine Potsdam, on the »1. Women’s Football Meet Up «in Frankfurt am Main. Jasmina Čović, the founder of a advisory agency for football professionals, had organized the exchange, in which DFB representatives also openly talked about the topic. The DFB growth plan with the portas concept “has to go one above the other and say goodbye to a common path in which all stakeholders can find themselves,” said Kay Dammholz, director of media rights at DFB-Marketing GmbH.

Further still enormous investment needs

The fact that no master plan has been decided to this day is also due to the fact that the league is very heterogeneous. When introducing a minimum content, training clubs such as the SGS Essen or the promoted Jena and Potsdam would be overwhelmed. With a minimum capacity of the stadiums for more than 5000 spectators, the campus of FC Bayern and the Leipzig venue on Cottaweg would be clearly too small. There is also an enormous investment requirement, which is estimated at at least 70 million euros by 2031. Therefore, there were also preliminary examinations whether an investor could start.

Nadine Angerer, who has now worked as a goalkeeper trainer for the European Championship host, recommended that Germany could learn from the United States, where she had worked for Portland Thorns from 2015 to 2023. There have “five or six clubs constantly more than 20,000 spectators,” there are only professional players, as well as “20, 22 people work full -time”. The National Women’s Soccer League will bring a new television contract the equivalent of 225 million euros for the next four years. The former German national goalkeeper thinks that the US players market themselves much more courageously: “Stars like Alex Morgan love to play with the media.”

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In Germany, 5.17 million euros in media proceeds are currently flowing per season, which are distributed equally between all twelve clubs. Nobody can complain about visibility. With DAZN and Magenta, two Pay TV partners transmit each game. In addition there are the Monday games at Sport1 and highlight games at ARD and ZDF. But the broadcasters only satisfy the odds. “In the long term, the league can only grow if it becomes profitable,” said Haruka Gruber, head of marketing of the streaming platform. In his view, there would be much more at the moment if the women would open up more for negative topics: “Disappointment and tears are told too little.”

Less oasis of wellbeing, more dark sides

Speculations such as about the discount at the 1st FC Köln, where Britta Carlson has now taken over the former assistant of the DFB women, noises such as when changing from Lena Oberdorf from VfL Wolfsburg to FC Bayern, the trouble of the former national goalkeeper Merle Frohms about the deposition Before the Olympics were part of it. Gruber’s advice: also illuminate the dark sides. In this regard, he still observes “a great reluctance”. The national team in particular would like to be perceived as an oasis of wellbeing – although there was a lot of zoff, for example, at the 2023 World Cup in Australia.

Gruber criticized that the product would be “circumcised”. In the United States, also in England, players are different, “as far as proximity, activity and social media are concerned”. In this country, Giulia Gwinn from FC Bayern and Frankfurt’s Laura Freiegel are considered trendsetter in this regard, who, however, put the soft content in the foreground. And by no means everyone wants more spectacles. Instead, Turbine President Ritter-Lang would rather emphasize that in the Bundesliga of women “the more honest, more family-friendly football” would be offered, because: “We don’t fly Bengalos.”