Union Berlin appointed a woman to an important coaching post

The German club Union, one of the football discoveries of last season, which is failing this season, in an attempt to overcome the crisis, made an extraordinary personnel decision. Having fired the experienced coach Urs Fischer, he appointed in his place the club’s youth coach Marco Grote, who will be assisted by Marie-Louise Eta. She will be the first woman in history to hold a truly important coaching position in football at an elite level.

The date November 25th was called a “historic day” for German football by all German publications (such as Bild). And the reason to give her such an unexpected label was given by the events that happened in the Berlin Union club.

This team was among the discoveries of European football last season. Union, which was not very highly rated, was the leader in the German championship for some time, showed an excellent game, and looked like a dangerous competitor even for the flagship of Bayern. In the end, he couldn’t keep up the pace, but still his fourth place, which allowed him to qualify for the Champions League, became a sensation.

However, Union’s current season is failing miserably so far. In the Champions League, in four rounds, he scored only a point and has already lost his chance to break into the playoffs, and in the national championship the team suffers a real disaster.

Having won two victories at the start, Union then lost nine matches in a row, collapsing to the bottom of the standings.

After the ninth defeat – from Bayer with a score of 0:4 – the club management decided to fire Swiss coach Urs Fischer.

But instead of finding some experienced specialist for the vacant post, Union president Dirk Zingler made an extremely extraordinary personnel decision. Marco Grote, who had previously worked with the youth team, was appointed head coach of the team, and Marie-Louise Eta was his assistant. And having found herself on the Union coaching bench on November 25 in his closest German championship match – at home against Augsburg, at least 32-year-old Eta will really go down in history.

It cannot be said that cases where women were involved in coaching in men’s teams are isolated. There are quite a lot of them.

But almost all of them are not very noticeable for two reasons: either the position and area of ​​responsibility are modest (specialist in stretching or, say, skating) and do not involve real management of the team, or the team itself plays in low-status tournaments – like, say, “ Forest Green Rovers from the fourth division of English football, which was entrusted to Hannah Dingley in the summer.

There are extremely few noticeable cases. And in this sense, the one that stands out is that, oddly enough, it is connected with Russia. The famous American basketball player Becky Hammon, who played both in the WNBA and for the domestic clubs CSKA, Nadezhda, Spartak & K, received Russian citizenship in the decade before last. With the Russian team, she won bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and silver at the European Championships in Latvia in 2009. And after finishing her career, Hammon was able to get a job as a coach in the men’s NBA. The famous Gregg Popovich, one of the most respected basketball experts, took her on as his main assistant at the San Antonio Spurs in 2014. In San Antonio, Hammon even managed games, and she worked at the club until 2022.

But representatives of the football elite never decided to give a significant coaching post to a woman. Breakout Marie-Louise Eta was once a superstar in the German women’s top flight under her maiden name Bagehorn and won the Champions League in 2010 with Turbine Potsdam. She ended her career early, at the age of 26, without hiding the fact that she wanted to devote herself to coaching. Moreover, Eta did not seem to be too happy with her activities in women’s football. In any case, sources say that while studying at the academy of the German Football Association (DFB) in order to acquire a license of the highest category and being the only student on the course, Marie-Louise Eta did not hide the fact that she hoped to coach men. It is unlikely, however, that Eta, who successfully graduated from the academy in the spring, thought that her dream would come true so quickly.

Alexey Dospehov