Documentary women’s football-women’s football European

Giulia Gwinn says an interesting sentence in the otherwise thread women’s football documentary “ShootingStars-Germany’s new football generation”, which has been seen in the ARD media library since June 28. At the very end, she already chatted about her two cruciate ligament tears and her book presentation, and a teammate from FC Bayern for the Athmo pictures latte Macchiato taped from the portafilter machine in a Munich café, then she says: “I do this (what is meant, including press appointments), because I had no female role models at the time.” And that is true. ” Those who were interested in the sport in front of the big women’s football boom for the EM 2022 had something from Marta (Brazilian striker), Hope Solo (US goalkeeper and scandal noodle) or maybe Megan Rapinoe (US top footballer), but then you actually have to have a pretty nerd special interest for the niche sport women’s foot have. Women were not role models, because they were hardly noticed and if so, they were not idols because the glamor factor was missing. Women playing football were not cool even for playing football. As sad as it sounds: role models for girls like Giulia Gwinn, who played in the 90s or early 2000s football, the old men from the “Sportschau”, “Bravo Sport” or “Sport Bild” were.

It’s different in the meantime. The German internationals, who will play their first game at the European Championship against Poland next Friday, have between 400,000 (Lena Oberdorf) and 644,000 followers (Giulia Gwinn), advertising contracts and if it goes really well for them, also a book publisher. The majority of the players in the 1st women’s soccer bundesliga still earn between 2000 and 4,000 euros per month, which is a joke compared to their male counterparts, but at least – and that is pretty safe – none of them will receive a coffee service for the victory of the European Championship.

Training from 9 p.m. At least you could finish the household.

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They are there, the women who would have approved as role models. They are now called Birgit Bormann, Petra Landers or Anne Trabant-Haarbach, are now all over 60 and at their active time they have to make their jerseys from wool sweaters themselves, because their club for the fun department “women” really had no money left.

The documentary “Girls cannot play football” of the extremely routine documentary filmmaker Torsten Körner (“Schwarze Adler”, 2021, “Die Unterschaffen”, 2024) describes the more than rocky path of these pioneers of German women’s football from illegal training (the DFB had banned women’s football in 1955 on the grounds that “the” Body’s fancy and decency “violate) up to the win of the European Championship 1989. The contrast to the” shooting stars “documentary, which was clearly shot as advertising films for the current European Championship in Switzerland, could not be blatant.

What Bormann, Landers and a number of others tell appear like Grandma’s stories from the war. There was no decent league operations for a long time, because there was not even a team bus available that would have driven the women from Wattenscheid to Bergisch Gladbach. Instead, they stood at the regional train station and waited for the train that sometimes failed or was too late. Training times for women were released after the last young youth team was finished on Tuesday evening, means: training from 9 p.m. At least you could finish the household.

And similar to the Dokufilm “The Miracle of Taipei” (2019), the women of brutal sexism tell (“Hot dance in hot panties” was the headline for the first official international match of the DFB women against Switzerland 1982) and their unconditional will to play football against all resistance. You can tell the women how much football was a liberation for them. The DFB had only forbidden the game for one reason: one had to prevent the laundry from being at home and the children starve.

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A career like that of Giulia Gwinn would not have been possible at the time. Even after the second serious injury, she comes back, today is the team captain of the national team. And that because women’s football has extremely professional. Own physiotherapists, rehabilitation concepts, advanced training, of which Landers and Trabant-Haarbach could not even dream of. A cruciate ligament tear was often synonymous with the end of the career.

Torsten Körner has done extreme hard work in the archives again with “Girls cannot play football” and shows scenes from the “Sportschau” programs at the time, which are immediately scandals today. At that time it was normal for women to be filmed in the women’s changing rooms (of course not for men). In the interview passages among the spectators of a women’s game (they were exclusively men), one is the best thing you can see on the other’s face: “I am only here to have a bit of a laugh.”

These times are over, the proof of image films such as the “ShootingStars” documentary, in which the players are no longer concerned with fighting recognition. As a spectator, you will rather be afraid of how the best way to protect women’s football from being dismissed.

“Girls cannot play football”: Germany 2025. Director: Torsten Körner. 90 minutes. To see on July 4, 11:15 p.m. in the ARD and from July 3 in the ARD media library.
»Shooting stars-Germany’s new football generation« available in the ARD media library.