Football: The biggest void in German football

It is a new ranking that FC St. Pauli is currently reading as a contrast to the real Bundesliga table. The newcomer, who still has no points, is at least in first place when it comes to filling management positions with women. The elected part of the club management of the Bundesliga promoted team consists of seven women and five men. In 2021, the Kiezklub was the first German professional club with a female quota of 30 percent for the supervisory board and executive committee – and did accordingly well in the first annual report on diversity in German professional football, which was prepared by the “Football Can Do More” (FKM) initiative.

A lot of things are in the green at Millerntor in this regard, otherwise the study shows most Bundesliga clubs the red card. The survey, carried out in collaboration with the Allbright Foundation, in which all 36 licensed clubs took part apart from Bayer Leverkusen, Holstein Kiel, Darmstadt 98 and SV Wehen Wiesbaden, comes to an “overall sobering picture”. Most of them are far from having equal representation or at least 30 percent women. The vast majority (28 clubs) do not have a woman in management, as the survey of 636 positions in professional football revealed.

Only four clubs have women in management, and a total of just half a dozen work in top management. The proportion of women on the supervisory boards is only just in the double-digit percentage range (26 out of 220 people on the supervisory boards). “There is still no conviction to rely on women in leadership positions,” says Katja Kraus, who co-founded the “Football Can Do More” initiative two years ago. The former national goalkeeper, who is the first woman to work on the board at Hamburger SV as chairwoman of the advisory board, is convinced that no change will occur without public pressure.

The DFB’s “Women in Football Summit” last Wednesday showed that this is now getting bigger. There, CSU Bundestag member Dorothee Bär criticized that she had not thought “that we would find a field that is even more backward than politics.” From her work on FC Bayern’s administrative advisory board, she can report that breaking up the male-dominated football structures is “even more strenuous” than in everyday politics.

At her side, Bianca Rech also got a lot of frustration off her chest. The former national player is now widely recognized as director of women’s football at FC Bayern. But “I had to run into a lot of walls before something collapsed,” she said. That took a lot of energy, “but now the white men within the club have also gotten it.” Honorary President Uli Hoeneß took a long time to recognize the added value of the women’s department. Rech would like to see women join forces as often as men: “We can only drill through the concrete walls together.”

The lack of diversity is fatal – and no longer up to date. It has long been proven that diverse teams are better able to accommodate different perspectives because they discuss more controversially than a group of men. Ultimately, the quality of decisions is improved. “In order to keep football viable and competitive, the competence and perspective of women is very, very important,” asserts Celia Sasic, DFB Vice President for Diversity.

The fact that well-known players are increasingly interested in continuing to work in football could be a bargaining chip for the future. At the beginning of the year, the DFB appointed world champion Nia Künzer as sports director for the women’s division. In the largest sports association, a third of the employees are female, almost 20 percent of the managers are women – the goal is 30 percent women in full-time and voluntary positions by 2027, as set out in the internal strategy. After all, five women have now made it to the DFB presidium.

»It still happens that people are irritated by meeting a female president or supervisory board member in football. This shows that it takes time to change the firmly anchored images in people’s minds. The diversity in our committees sends a different picture – internally and externally,” points out Sandra Schwedler, who has led the St. Pauli supervisory board for almost ten years. The decisive impetus for equal composition of the committees came from the general meeting. She is now even proposing to establish appropriate diversity criteria in the licensing regulations of the federal leagues.

At Eintracht Braunschweig, various circumstances came together for Nicole Kumpis to be elected president in March 2022. Their motto: »You don’t need any training in football to hold a position there. You can do that as a social worker too.” Her father used to “push her into the blue-yellow curve.” After she later headed the Eintracht Foundation but hit a dead end there professionally, she said: “I would like to come back and take on responsibility.” A few months later, she became the only president of a licensing association to date.

Otherwise, FC Schalke 04 with its finance director Christina Rühl-Hamers also stands out. But the royal blue supervisory board also only consists of eleven men. The gender, age structure and educational background of the managers are often similar: the typical football manager’s name is Michael, he is 50 years old and a business economist from West Germany, the study shows. There is currently no overarching strategy to promote women in the clubs. Even if no positive trend can be seen, there are at least positive examples. Especially with the so-called direct reports, people who report directly to the top management level. Here, FC Bayern has filled six of 18 positions with a woman. Clubs like 1. FC Cologne and VfB Stuttgart have also recognized the urgency of the issue – and are opening doors that were previously tightly closed.

Last season, Union Berlin even had the courage to appoint Marie-Luise Eta as interim coach, who, together with Marco Grote, was supposed to save the Bundesliga club from relegation. The football teacher talked about the exciting days at the Alte Försterei at the DFB event: When she greeted her players in the dressing room for the first time, she had a lot of respect: “And then Robin Gosens or Leo Bonucci are sitting there. And you think: ‘Yeah, okay.’” The respect disappeared the very next day. She now says: “As a woman, you can be active in the coaching bench in the Bundesliga.” You just have to let women do it.

In many clubs it is not really clear where the topic of diversity actually lies. Because it’s considered a drag? In other industries or in the public sector there are quotas or targets that only SV Werder has committed to. The people of Bremen want to have every fourth management position filled by a woman by 2026. A year and a half ago, Anne-Kathrin Laufmann joined the four-person management team as Managing Director of Sports and Sustainability. She started as an intern. Nowadays, the mother of two helps determine the course on the Weser. “I was scared at first,” she admitted frankly. At first she was often silent during the meetings, but at some point she worked up the courage to speak up. She thinks that’s good for the Green-Whites: “We bring in more empathy, a more social and human perspective.”

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