This season, The Athletic follows Union Berlin, a Bundesliga club from the former East Germany playing regional-level football less than 20 years ago, on their inaugural trip to the Champions League for our Iron In The Blood series.
DEEP
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As Union Berlin’s players drifted down the tunnel and the stands in Braga’s Municipal Stadium emptied to the tune of one last song over the PA system, Marie-Louise Eta stood alone on the edge of the pitch for a moment, lost in his thoughts.
The Union just picked up a second consecutive Champions League point on the road — that’s the good news.
The bad news is that the Union recklessly squandered the lead against a team that played with 10 men for more than an hour, leaving the Bundesliga club’s hopes of finishing third in Group C and qualify for the knockout stage of the Europa League, with one thread left.
Furthermore, the Union’s winless run extended to 16 matches in all competitions and the team’s mental frailty was painfully exposed after Braga equalised. For a period, Braga seemed to have an extra player.
Eta thought a lot about that matter.
But there was another storyline that Eta tried to embrace: the 32-year-old had created history by becoming the first woman to be part of a coaching team in a men’s Champions League match.
Promoted to the role of interim assistant coach just over a fortnight after the Union and their long-serving manager Urs Fischer agreed to part ways, Eta has been a trailblazer for a small but growing number of women working in men’s games.
Her presence in the dugout with Nenad Bjelica, the Union’s new coach, felt like a personal victory for a woman who has been obsessed with football since she was a small child, and an important moment for the sport.
“It is not a conscious decision (to appoint) by the woman. That almost ruined this decision,” said Dirk Zingler, president of the Union. “He’s a fully qualified soccer coach and that’s exactly what I see in him, female or male.”
Eta’s promotion to work with the Union’s first-team squad was a no-brainer for Zingler. Marco Grote, the club’s under-19 coach, was asked to take charge of the first team on an interim basis following Fischer’s exit after five years at the helm, and Eta was Grote’s assistant.
Logic dictated that Eta, who has held a UEFA Pro License since April and has coached youth teams at Werder Bremen and within the German Football Federation since retiring from playing at the age of 26, would stand in for Grote.
Eta was a history-maker for Union Berlin on Wednesday (Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
Except it soon became clear that not everyone outside the Union saw it that way.
I feel like when Kicker magazine ran the story about Eta’s new role on their Facebook page, they turned off the comments.
Old-school opinions (that’s a polite way of putting it sometimes) still make a lot of noise in football, especially on social media, where some people felt it should be the best man for the role of interim assistant coach at Union, rather than the best man.
Maik Barthel, the chief executive of the Eurosportsmanagement agency and a former agent of Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski, is among those who hold that view.
In a post on social media that led one of his top clients to end his relationship with him, Barthel accused Union Berlin of making German football “look ridiculous” by awarding Eta, who won of the Champions League with Turbine Potsdam in his playing days, a role in the first team.
Responding on Twitter to the Union’s announcement about Eta, Barthel posted: “An assistant coach needs to be in the locker room Union? Please don’t make German football ridiculous. Enough that the team hierarchy is completely destroyed in migrations.
It turns out that Barthel doesn’t have what his own players feel, let alone the views of Zingler and Union Berlin.
Although Barthel later deleted the message due to the backlash and posted another — “I have to rephrase this. Making a co-coach an issue will not help the Union restore the destroyed hierarchy of the team” — the damage was done.
Kevin Schade, the 22-year-old Germany international and Brentford forward, has terminated his contract with Barthel with immediate effect.
“I broke up with my agent because I really didn’t share his attitude and vision,” Schade said. “I stand for openness, equality and diversity. And that’s what I want to feel represented.”
Barthel apologized and said I never “intended to make Ms Eta the focus of my message or discredit her”. However, he said in an interview with Kicker that he believed the Union were trying to “generate good press and distract attention from their own mistakes”. In other words, promoting Eta is a kind of publicity stunt.
This week, Barthel happened to lose another client — Maximilian Beier, the talented Hoffenheim forward and Germany Under-21 international. Beier didn’t talk about his reasons for changing agents but people will join the dots.
No wonder the Union has been inundated with interview requests for Eta over the past two weeks. It’s also not surprising that Eta has no desire to say anything at the moment, telling club officials that assistant coaches don’t usually talk to the media.
Instead, Eta quietly went about his work on the training pitch and on match days — overseeing ball-related work in the warm-up against Braga and giving tactical advice to Kevin Volland during the break in game in the first half — while leaving others to answer questions on his behalf.
Eta takes Union Berlin’s warm-up (Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
“Working with Marie-Louise Eta is on equal footing,” Grote said ahead of Saturday’s Bundesliga match against Augsburg, when Volland scored an 88th-minute equalizer to lift the Union from the bottom of the table and finish a run of nine consecutive league losses. “There is no big difference. We split it completely.”
When asked about the importance of gender, Grote replied: “In the coaching booth, it’s about the person. A little taller, maybe a bigger belly or what T-shirt they’re wearing, long hair, short hair — I don’t give a damn.”
That game in Augsburg was a milestone for Eta and the Bundesliga.
“The day has come for us to see a woman on the men’s football field,” said Julia Simic, the TV pundit and former Germany international. “He certainly has the expertise to fill this role.”
Although Grote returned to his under-19 position following Bjelica’s appointment on Sunday, the Union announced that Eta will continue to work with the first team until assistant coach Sebastian Bonig, who has been given period of extended leave for personal reasons.
Women held senior positions in men’s teams, though generally operating at a lower professional, or semi-professional level.
When my colleague Oliver Kay wrote about League Two Forest Green Rovers’ decision to promote Hannah Dingley as interim head coach last summer, he listed a number of similar examples going back decades , including the case of Imke Wubbenhorst.
In 2018, BV Cloppenburg, then struggling in Germany’s fifth tier, appointed Wubbenhorst as their head coach. He used to play for the club’s women’s team where, coincidentally, Eta was one of his teammates.
In that sense, Wubbenhorst has a view not only of Eta as a person (“very calm”) and a player (“very smart”) but also of the world he walks in — a place that can pose some strange questions at times.
At Cloppenburg, Wubbenhorst was once asked if the players were forced to cover up when he entered the dressing room. She replied sarcastically: “No way. I am a professional. I pick the team by the size of the dick.”
Speaking recently, in an interview with Deutsche Welle last week, Wubbenhorst was candid about the challenges women like Eta face in the men’s game.
He described how players are “not impressed with your career from the start” when you are a female coach, talked about football being a “man’s game” in Europe, and said significant change will take time .
“When you’re the first person to do something, it’s hard because the media is looking at every word you say… but when you’re the second or third, it’s easier,” Wubbenhorst explained. “Clubs’ management have to see that it works. So they (then) will decide more often to choose a woman for this position.
Eta’s own path has not been straightforward. “I noticed that some people treated me differently than before, and that was not always comfortable,” he told UEFA last month in an interview, which took place before his promotion to the Union, about his coaching journey.
“But I always try not to think about that and focus on the important things. I’ve always tried not to put the focus on the fact that I’m a woman. It’s not about women or men, or whether a man is good for a women’s team, it’s always about diversity.
Marie-Louise Eta with interim head coach Marco Grote (Boris Streubel/Getty Images)
According to Grote, Eta was quickly welcomed by the Union’s under-19 players when he arrived in the summer, and the word is that he is no different from the club’s first-team squad.
Perhaps the more relevant question, given some of the wider reaction, is whether Germany is ready to embrace a female coach operating at this level.
“Germany is really ready,” said Stephan Uersfeld, a reporter for ntv.de. “You have to put aside everything you see on social media. We’ve had female coaches in the minor leagues — they haven’t been successful. But she (Eta) has acquired all the skills, she has completed all the courses that male coaches do.
“If you talk to the people at the club, they are convinced that he can do it. And this is a club like Union Berlin, which is the complete opposite of what is mostly reported in the international media – it is a conservative club. So if they say she’s ready, you have to trust them. And why shouldn’t you trust a woman with this job?
“The culture is changing. You see it on TV — we have female experts everywhere now. Football opens up. There are two final obstacles — the women who coach the men’s game and the homosexual players who remain silent. Those are the last hurdles to fall to see the arrival of football in the 21st century.
(Photos: Getty Images; graphic: Sam Richardson)
